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New York Times versus Angry Birds

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Gruber's got a nice take on the recently announced pay wall for the New York Times, which is basically $35 a month for web, phone, and tablet access. To be fair, the paywall is very easy to circumvent, and they do allow 20 articles a month for free, tho.

I find myself thinking of this in conjunction with the news that Angry Birds has had over 2.5 million paid downloads. I like the NY Times, and have used it as a source for Wikipedia fairly often. But I would never pay $35 a month for online access, and I think they are missing a good opportunity by setting the price this high. Of course, I have no knowledge of their balance sheets, and I'm just guessing about what would work for them, but it seems to me that they'd do better to send a monthly price for online access for more like $2-10 a month. I'd bite for $2 for sure, even with ads, just for the basic news articles. I'm just not interested in most of what they are publishing, but it's a good source for news.

What is interesting to me is the notion that if they set the price low enough, the New York Times might be able to pick up enough readers internationallly to become a multinational newspaper. We need something like that, with all the churnalism out there.

Categories: Rants