New York Times announces their iOS pay wall: I won’t be paying

There’s paying for content, and then there’s paying for content the New York Times way. The New York Times has been very vocal with their opinions about free online news publishers, so it probably won’t come as much of a surprise to most that they plan on implementing a pay wall for their content. The NYT will be flipping the switch on a pay wall starting March 28th.

The company will be launching their paid-for-content system using Apple’s subscription model, but the prices are a little bit of an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has graduated from middle school, and can tell the difference between a fair deal, and being taken advantage of by a greedy corporation.

The New York Times gang plans on releasing three models for their pay wall:

  • $15.00 per month for full web access and smartphone support.
  • $20.00 a month for full web access and iPad support
  • $35.00 per month for full web, iPad, and iPhone access.

Notice the trend? If you’re interested in getting news from the New York Times, you’re going to be paying based on how many devices a person uses. That’s going to end well, isn’t it?  It seems like the key defining criteria for The New York Times is screen resolution when it comes to mobile platforms. If Microsoft ever gets around to launching the Surface, we may all be in serious financial trouble.

We can relate—kinda

We get why the New York Times is trying to redefine the medium again. Writing news for free on the internet is trying, and very difficult to finance when no one is willing to pay, but charging consumers a premium because they own more than one mobile device is outright greedy.

But they’re out of touch

Most people read news on a variety of devices throughout the day. Some even like to sync their news across multiple devices so that they can catch up where they left off previously, no matter what device they have in their hands. The NYT knows that, but they’re so out of touch with reality that they’ve forgotten the gold rule of business: their service is only as valuable as people perceive it to be. Right now, the perceived value of news is quickly approaching zero.  The NYT may be leading the charge towards changing that, but they’re going to have a hard time persuading people to pay an extra $15.00 so that they can get news on both their iPhone and iPad, especially if the new NYT application is anything like News Corps’ The Daily.

Article Via Electronista

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.