Time Magazine Walls Off Its Web Site: Will You Pay Up?

July 7, 2010 at 3:30 am PT

Want to read the cover story of this week’s Time magazine? Whip out your wallet: You can only get all of Steve Brill’s piece on lobbying and financial reform via Time’s print edition or its new iPad app. Web freeloaders see a snippet, preceded by this note: “The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME.”

That goes for almost every other story in this week’s issue, as well–even the magazine’s letters to the editor section has been cut short. But everything on Time.com that isn’t in the magazine–and there’s whole lot of that stuff–remains free.

Reuters’ Felix Salmon saw fleeting evidence of a Time paywall last month; now NiemanLab has spotted it again. It is possible it’s an experiment, and I’ve asked the magazine for comment. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit is going to stick with the strategy for a while. (UPDATE: Not an experiment, Time Inc. confirms. No more free Time magazine on the the Web. Expect walls to show up on other titles, too.)

After all, they’ve been talking about this for at least a year–recall Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s memo about trying to stuff the digital “genie back in the bottle”. And in theory, the move helps protect the paper’s print edition and its new Apple (AAPL) offshoot: It answers the “why pay $5 when I can read it online for free” question.

But here’s the thing. Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They’re supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago.

So if that’s the case, what’s the real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn’t as real as we’ve been told.

Tagged with: advertising, Ann Moore, Apple, digital, Felix Salmon, Internet, iPad, MediaMemo, NiemanLab, Peter Kafka, Steve Brill, Time Inc., Time magazine, Time Warner

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Ralph Bassfeld

I stopped reading Time and Newsweek many years ago, when their weekly editions replaced more and more indepth analysis and valuable content with advertisements while reducing the size of the individual issues. These skeletons have now returned to their closet and can be buried in peace.
spira

What people don't seem to remember is that publishers started off putting the content of their magazine/newspaper on the web because they were too cheap to produce new content. There's no particular reason Time shouldn't keep its web site and magazine distinct, emphasizing the content that is appropriate for each medium on that medium. That doesn't mean that there should be no content crossover, just that they shouldn't just dump all their print content onto their web site.

Time Magazine still has a huge circulation and still makes money. It's not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Editorial should be trying to make both products distinct, worthwhile products. That doesn't mean they should never share content, but such things should be decided on an editorial/production level, not as a means of business strategy to protect the print product. A real paywall is a bad idea, but that doesn't seem to be what they are doing, at least not yet..
http://twitter.com/davorado Davorado

I just got a big popup ad when I visited time blocking the homepage, so I guess I'll turn my adblock on for Time now and probably cancel my print subscription because I don't want to jump through hoops to share interesting content. I'm also not likely to buy the next iPad version either. I'm all for publishers making money -pub execs don't seem to realize they made money from the people that liked the open content and brand model. I shared plenty of time content and can still name some advertisers from the last issue. ….. sorry time!
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/YP6NAPEBREPIODX52FKGRCZ5DU Walter Elly

Let me be the first to say this: Time magazine had a website?
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/YP6NAPEBREPIODX52FKGRCZ5DU Walter Elly
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/CJOPVIUFM5STIXLUQBKMK4F7KI Atilla Hun

Free is dead. It's the old adage: “If everybody did it then the police can't arrest everybody.” In the past not everybody did it and stuff stayed free on the web. This time everybody will do it and the web will not be free – even for all those “twitchy” web surfers who only want today's news.

The US as a 20% real unemployment rate and the rest of the world is in the same boat. There are over 1 billion people who are unemployed. Nobody is rich enough anymore to give anything away for free.

Free is dead.
renegade98

No, I'll stop reading Time. No big deal, lots of other content to sift through.
scytherius

Not a chance in hell.

As with some other posters here, I stopped reading them (except VERY occasionally) years ago when they stopped investigative reporting and became a pop culture news rag.

I am not an expert on these things. Not by a long shot. But I swear I don't see these news outlets going behind a paywall as a good move. People don't read the news when its free. Why will they pay? I read the news ALL the time and even I won't pay.
PDQ

Good luck with that………
56Pixels

No thanks. If there's something I really want to read about, I'll just buy it at the drug store. They don't produce that many interesting articles anyway.
http://www.myspace.com/_lovedaddy_ JohnnyMorales aka Jonathanseer

IT'S ABOUT TIME!

You can't simply give your content away for free, not only because you can't make money that way, BUT PEOPLE VALUE things based on price far more than ever.

Therefore, by giving their content away for free (and this goes for all print) they are telling the public their product is worthless.

Now millions have it ingrained that news comes from google. and yahoo, and can't tell you AP from Reuters and don't think they matter.

I hope Time makes the effort they have to reverse this stupidity for themselves and set the trend towards properly valuing the companies that actually investigate and report rather than those who aggregate without doing a dam* thing except devaluing their product.

If they fail, they're in the same spot they are now, getting nothing for their valuable product.

If they succeed then perhaps the remaining shreds of decent news media in this country can find a way to grow again and be taken seriously over the likes of faux news.
Vandenbroek

They'll be back. Remember CNN Pipeline?
maxlent

What news media have yet to discover is that they are working with an upside down business model. Instead of having a huge administration with highly paid executives and administrators with fewer and fewer news reporters, they need to have not more than a dozen people working their administrative offices and thousands of news reporters paid a fair wage.

No executive at a news organization should make more than twice what a reporter makes.

With this new business model, Time could become profitable very quickly.

Oh, and consider the cost of printing a magazine instead of distributing some electrons over the Internet. If it costs dollars to send pieces of dead trees to readers it should cost fractions of a cent to send electrons to readers. If I pay $20 a year to have a paper version of a magazine sent to me by mail, my estimation of what I should pay for an ipad version should be about 20 cents. If the ipad version were ad free I might consider $2 a fair price for an annual subscription.

I also do not consider electronic versions of books a deal when they are only discounted a few percent below paper-based books. If an paperback book lists at $25 for a paper version, I might be willing to pay up to $2 for that book in electronic form.
davesmall

I have mixed feelings about Time Magazine. I do think they provide some interesting perspectives on Afghanistan and Iraq. However, their political activist support for the DNC is a bit over the line for an organization that purports to report the news.

Still I would pay $4.99 for a one year iPad subscription. Sorry but $4.99 for a single electronic issue just makes me shake my head and ask, “What were they thinking?”
http://ericfloresca.posterous.com @clickeric

Content is all over and the wall will mean that I just go somewhere else instead, not that I will pay to get the content from time. That is the issue that publishers have to deal with and I don't think the walls will do it. They may help mitigate the bleeding but I don't think it will stop it.
Anonymous

Time Magazine is a world known magazine. And I really love this magazine so much. And the content and features of this magazine are really so cool. And this one is really one of the stunning information regarding that one.

Time Magazine Walls Off Its Web Site: Will You Pay Up?

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