Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall
From the post:
In a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper, visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.
The original article: Jonathan E. Cook and Shahzeen Z. Attari. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. -Not available-, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/cyber.2012.0251
Another data point in the struggle to find a viable model for delivery of online content.
The difficulty with “free” content, followed by discovering you still need to pay expenses for that content, is that consumers, when charged, gain nothing over when the content was free. They are losers in that proposition.
I mention this because topic maps that provide content over the web face the same economic challenges as other online content providers.
A model that I haven’t seen (you may have so sing out) is one that offers the content for free, but the links to other materials, the research adds value to the content, are dead links without subscription. True, someone could track down each and every reference but if you are using the content as part of your job, do you really want to do that?
The full and complete content is simply made available. To anyone who want a copy. After all, the wider the circulation of the content, the more free advertising you are getting for your publication.
Delivery of PDF files with citations, sans links, for non-subscribers is perhaps one line of XSL-FO code. It satisfies the question of “access” and yet leaves publishers a new area to fill with features and value-added content.
Take for example, less than full article level linking. If I wanted to read another thirty pages to find a citation was just boiler-plate, I hardly need a citation network do I? Of course value-added content isn’t found directly under the lamp post, but requires some imagination.