Peter Kafka in Media on May 15 at 11:38 am PT
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.
Peter Kafka in Media on March 20 at 6:19 am PT
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.
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
Peter Kafka in Media on February 2 at 6:09 am PT
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.
Peter Kafka in Media on December 5, 2011 at 10:20 am PT
A story about embargoes. No, wait! Where are you going?
There is a very cathartic crisis that’s gone on, and it’s not clear where it’s going to go. But at least everyone knows things are rotten. We’re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.
Facebook investor and futurist Peter Thiel, profiled in the New Yorker (article only available online to subscribers)
Peter Kafka in Media on July 21, 2011 at 6:02 am PT
The paper says its Web pay wall strategy appears to be working, as digital subscribers grew to more than 200,000 and cancelled out a drop in print subscriptions.
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on June 21, 2011 at 9:33 am PT
The Lego Group, which makes the primary-color building bricks that are a part of most every kid’s childhood, is doubling down on its efforts in digital by making its multiplayer online game free to play.
Peter Kafka in Media on April 21, 2011 at 5:55 am PT
Meanwhile: Print ads down, digital up, but About.com tumbles, and the Times blames Google.
