Quora Sets Up a Leaky Pay Wall — But for Registrations, Not Money

Quora responds to growing frustration about locking down access to user-generated content.

New Republic, Old Pay Wall

The 98-year-old magazine’s renovation includes a new gate: Eight articles per month, per device.

Voices

Washington Post Plans a Paywall

The Washington Post, one of the last holdouts against the trend of charging readers for online access to newspaper articles, is likely to reverse that decision in 2013, according to people familiar with the matter.

Readers Pay More for New York Times, Advertisers Pay Less

New quarter, same news.

NBC Drops Pay Wall for Michael Phelps vs. Ryan Lochte Livestream

You won’t need a pay-TV subscription to watch one of the biggest Olympics events of the day. But you’ll have to hurry up.

No News for the New York Times: Circulation Up, Ad Sales Down

One new wrinkle: The paper took a big write-down on About Group, the original content farm.

Google Says Forced “Sharing” Is a Bug, Not a Feature

No, you don’t have to spam that AdWeek story to your pals before you read it. But somebody’s gotta pay something for this stuff, someday.

New York Times Makes Its Paywall Harder to Jump

A year after launching a controversial pay wall, the New York Times says it has nearly half a million paying subscribers — and plans to make it harder for people to read online without paying up.

Bundles and Paywalls

As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.

Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

News Byte

New York Times Digital Subscription Numbers Grow 20 Percent

The New York Times ended 2011 with 390,000 digital subscribers, up about 20 percent from its third-quarter total. Some of the new subscriptions came from the publisher’s International Herald Tribune, which started digital sales last fall. The Times saw overall revenue drop 2.8 percent for the quarter, as ad revenue shrank 7.1 percent while circulation revenue increased.