Tonight, the company responded by holding firm on its efforts to limit content to registered users by default. However, it opened up three different loopholes that allow non-registered users in, similar to the way pay-walled news sites like the New York Times offer access to non-paying users.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick argued in a blog post that people should join Quora because participation is a key part of the site. When users register, they contribute answers and votes and follows, and they are drawn back into the site. That engagement and retention results in “increasingly large audiences” for writers, Bodnick said.

But for those who want to share their own writings and their favorite answers and posts more broadly — which is, after all, another way to find an audience! — Quora is providing the following openings:

1. Share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Starting today, when you use the Share button to share on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, people won’t be asked to join Quora to read what you’ve shared.
2. Sharing URLs. Another option is to share pages using short links (e.g., when you want to share via email). You can get a short link by clicking the Share button and then copying the short URL listed at the top of the Share box. Other people can open that link without being asked to join Quora to read the content.
3. Open any Quora URL. If you come across a Quora link anywhere and you want to read it without being asked to join Quora, you can add the text “?share=1″ to the end of the URL. Example: http://www.quora.com/Hostage-Situations/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-hostage-negotiator?share=1

As for mobile access, Quora still would rather users download its apps, Bodnick said in a follow-up statement.

Accounting for about 25% of overall traffic, mobile platforms are important and growing on Quora — for both reading and contributing. We’ve worked hard to create the best mobile experience with our Android and iOS apps, and we encourage users to download them for the optimal mobile experience. We are always listening to the feedback of our community, and will continue to iterate the way that we help people discover the best Quora experience on any device.

(Image courtesy of imageshunter/Shutterstock)

The same way lots of other online publications are handling the balancing act: A freemium/pay wall model.

Hughes’ publication, which relaunched yesterday with a redesigned website, iPad app and print magazine, will also use a new pay wall, which will allow nonsubscribers to read up to eight online articles per month, per device. That is: You could read eight articles on your MacBook, and another eight on your Kindle, etc.

Hughes doesn’t reference the pay wall in his letter introducing his redesign, and there doesn’t seem to be any direct reference to it anywhere else on the site. But a registration page does note that paying subscribers will get “unlimited online access;” a rep for Hughes confirmed the pay wall this morning.

“Free up to a point” is an increasingly common strategy for online publications: The New York Times, for instance, launched its pay wall in the spring of 2011, but allowed nonsubscribers to read up to 20 stories a month; a year later, it made the wall harder to jump by lowering the limit to 10 stories a month.

And our News Corp. colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have had a much stricter pay wall in place for years, and only allow nonsubscribers to read a handful of stories. (But AllThingsD is 110 percent free, free, free! No plans to change that, as far as I know.)

Hughes, who got his start and made his fortune when he helped Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg build Facebook, looks like he wants to position the New Republic as a not-super-exclusive club. In addition to the print and iPad magazine, subscribers will also get access to other goodies, like live events.

Will that pitch, plus a dollop of advertising, be enough to ensure that the 98-year-old publication turns a profit? We’ll ask Hughes himself at our own live event next month: You can see him at our D: Dive Into Media conference Feb. 11-12 in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

That one isn’t free, but it is going to be an excellent show, says this very conflicted reporter. Head here if you want to join us.

While details are being finished, people familiar with the matter said that a metered paywall — meaning a Web site that allows casual readers to read a certain number of stories free before charging a subscription fee — is likely to be rolled out in 2013, along with increases to the print newspaper’s newsstand price. One person familiar with the matter said the paywall will be introduced no earlier than next summer.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Times says ad sales dropped 8.9 percent last quarter, while circulation revenue climbed 7.4 percent.

The Times blames the ad drop on “the challenging economic environment, ongoing secular trends and an increasingly complex and fragmented digital advertising marketplace.” It says it expects to see similar numbers for the rest of year.

But the Times’ readers keep giving the publisher more money. It is selling fewer print copies of its papers, but it is charging more money for them. And it now has nearly 600,000 people paying for digital subscriptions, up 11 percent from the last quarter.

The Times’ ad slump is hitting both its print and digital operations. Print ad sales are down 10.9 percent, and digital is down 2.2 percent. Here’s the breakdown by category:

The race is scheduled to go off around 3:14 pm ET, so if you want to watch, fire up your browsers now. Don’t know if this will also work on NBC’s Apple and Android apps. Can’t guarantee this will work at all, actually, but worth a shot. (Stream seems to work, but we’ll see.)

Update: NBC sports PR confirms that the pay wall will be down for this one, and says it does so for “some” events daily. Given that this is one of the biggest competitions of the day, that still seems like a meaningful decision.

Background: Earlier today, NBC officials held a press call to argue that their Olympics coverage has been a big success. Part of that strategy involves streaming all events live on the Web, but only to customers with pay-TV subscriptions.

That is, the publisher says that over the last three months it saw circulation revenue increase, and both print and digital ads decrease.

Growth in circulation was a little bit slower than the last quarter — the Times’ core “News Media Group” saw an 8.3 percent increase, compared to a 9.7 percent bump in Q1. But the digital ad slump was also a little less bad: That same unit saw digital ads decrease by 1.6 percent instead of 2.3 percent.

Some of those circ gains come from the Times’ digital paywall. The paper says it now has 532,000 subscribers, up from 472,000 last quarter. It credits some of that rise to its decision to make it harder to read the paper online without paying for it.

The other news coming out of Times Square today is also familiar: The publisher has big problems with About Group, the content-generation machine that set the template for the likes of Demand Media.

The Times took a $195 million goodwill write-down on the unit, which it bought for $410 million in 2005. But the publisher did say cost-per-click ads were improving for About.

Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says About “continues to execute on its turnaround strategy and we expect it to be on track to post continued meaningful improvement in the second half of the year.” No news on that CEO search, by the way.

Update: Strike that. The NYT talked to someone at the NYT who says the NYT board could announce the hire “as early as September.”

That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

The Times is cutting back on the number of “free” articles it lets nonsubscribers read, from 20 a month to 10. The change goes into effect in April.

The rest of the paywall’s architecture appears to remain unchanged. The publisher will still let visitors who end up at the paper after following a link from Twitter or Facebook go over the 10-article limit as many times as they want. And it will offer a similar, but more limited dispensation for those sent there by Google.

The idea is to offer a “porous” wall that lets the Times have it both ways: Avid readers will need to pay up, but the paper still gets the benefit of search and social Web traffic.

At launch, that strategy seemed to befuddle the Times’ critics, and the paper didn’t do the most effective job at communicating the details. But consumers seem to have figured it out. In the last quarter of 2011, circulation revenue was up about 5 percent, driven by digital-subscription uptake.

But the Times’ overall revenue continues to decline, and late last year, CEO Janet Robinson was shoved out the door (along with a very generous parachute).

So here’s the important question about today’s news: Is the Times cutting back on its free reads because:

A) It can, having proved that people will pay to read the paper online?

or

B) It has to, because the rest of its business continues to weaken?

Discuss.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/contax66)

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

That’s good for Sony, the people who paid the bill for “Dragon Tattoo,” right? Nope. Terrible, says Sony.

The studio is livid that the New Yorker is running Denby’s review today, more than a week ahead of a Dec. 13 embargo. Why does the studio care? If you want a good explanation of modern-day movie marketing and the push-pull between filmmakers and film reviewers, check out this lucid explainer from NPR’s Linda Holmes.

But for everyone else, this won’t matter at all. New Yorker readers (and now, drive-by visitors as well, since the review has been placed in front of  the magazine’s online paywall) will see the review, and a larger group of people will have a vague idea that the New Yorker likes it. That’s about it.

And that’s the moral for folks like myself in the technology-news-industrial complex, who spend way too much time thinking about, fighting with and cursing embargoes. This stuff can matter a lot (sometimes) to us, but that’s really only because we decide to agree that it matters. Readers don’t care at all.

I’d spend more time explaining this, except that if you care about this at all, you’ve already read many boring essays about it — perhaps even today! And I can’t tell you that I’m swearing off embargoes, because I can’t — I worked with three of them last week, have probably at least one more embargoed story coming this week and, I’m sure, many more down the road.

But this is a nice reminder that every time I do deal with one of these, it almost always means I’m not spending time on something geniunely interesting. Like news no one else is writing about, or a fresh take on something everyone else has already written about. Or even seeing a good movie.

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)

The Times saw Q2 revenue drop two percent and overall ad dollars drop four percent — digital ad dollars were up a modest 2.6 percent, and that wasn’t enough to make up for a 6.4 percent drop in print.

Circulation revenue was flat, but that number masks an interesting split. Print circulation dollars were down — the publisher didn’t disclose the size of the drop — but digital subscription dollars made up for the loss.

The Times says it now has 224,000 subscribers to the digital editions it rolled out in March; a month after launch, it said subscriptions for that service had “surpassed 100,000.” The paper also says it has 57,000 subscribers for digital subscriptions it sells via platforms like Amazon’s Kindle.

The Times also said it had signed up 100,000 free digital subscribers via a giveaway sponsored by Ford’s Lincoln brand, and that 756,000 home delivery subscribers were getting digital delivery as well, which comes free with their print subscriptions.

The Times says it expects to see circulation revenue in the “low single digits” next quarter, presumably because of more digital dollars. “Our ability to further monetize our digital content will provide us with a significant new revenue stream in the second half of this year,” says CEO Janet Robinson via press release.

Other notes:

• The paper’s About Group, once the major engine of its digital operations, saw revenue shrink yet again, this time by 17.3 percent. And again, the Times blamed part of the drop on Google: “Design changes in the cost-per-click advertisements served by Google had a negative effect,” as did “algorithm changes Google implemented during the first quarter of 2011.” The Times also cited “an increase in competition in the content space”; it didn’t mention that in May it had pushed out About CEO Cella Irvine.
• If you ignore a $161 million goodwill write-down for some of the publisher’s regional papers and other one-time charges and gains, the Times’s earnings would have been 14 cents per share, down from 18 cents a year ago. Operating profit, minus one-time charges and depreciation, amortization, etc., was $83 million, down from $93 million.
• The Times says it expects to see similar ad results next quarter.

Beginning in August, players will no longer have to spend $10 a month in order to enter Lego Universe. Now they can play for as long as they like before deciding whether to subscribe. The game is also becoming a digital download, so players will no longer need to buy a DVD.

By lifting these barriers, Lego is hoping that more players will get introduced to the game and therefore more will end up paying over the long run, much like games found on Facebook or other virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft. Lego has been very successful at building videogames on other platforms, like Nintendo, but most have been for a substantial upfront fee.

Lego says that “thousands of players” have played Lego Universe since it launched in October 2010.

Lego says it has no current plans for microtransactions and will stick to its tiered subscription model, which starts at $10 a month. Nonpaying players will have access to two adventure zones and the ability to build Lego models on one property. Full members will have access to all areas in the game and be able to compete and participate in community events.

Photo Credit: Christopher Vigliotti

Is that good? Bad? Make your own guess. Times PR boss Bob Christie, says that number doesn’t include free starter subscriptions offered to some readers, via Lincoln. But he says it does include launch promotions which offered a four-week trial for $0.99.

If all of those subs stick around for a year, that’s at least another $19.5 million in revenue for the paper. But that’s a big “if.”

Here’s the Times’ take: “So soon after the launch, the Company does not yet have visibility into conversion and retention rates for these paying customers after the initial promotional period, although early indicators are encouraging.”

The rest of the paper’s numbers are OKish, for a big print publication: Revenues are down 3.6 percent, with ad revenue down 4.4 percent and circulation dollars down 3.7 percent.

The Times’ digital story is a bit of a mixed bag. The publisher’s media group saw digital ad revenue increase 14.9 percent, but revenues at About.com, which have been a big component of its Web business for years, dropped 10.2 percent, and operating profit at About dropped 13.9 percent.

The Times lays some of the blame at Google’s feet: “Design changes in cost-per-click advertisements served by Google had a negative effect on click-through rates in the quarter, and the Company expects that to be the case through the second quarter of 2011. The About Group also experienced a moderately negative impact on page views from the algorithm changes Google implemented in the quarter.”

If you were looking for evidence that the New York Times’ subscription/paywall plan, rolled out last week, is very much a work in progress, here you go: A couple days after debuting a plan that limited referring links from Google but not any other site on the Web, the Times has changed its mind.

Now, the Times says, it will place a limit on links from all “major” search engines, which I assume means Microsoft’s Bing, and Bing alone.

Here’s PR rep Kristin Mason’s explanation of the change, first reported by Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch: “After reviewing our options, we decided to extend the policy of five free clicks per day to all major search engines by the global launch on March 28. Our pre-launch period in Canada was undertaken to enable us to test the systems and fine-tune the model.”

Which is fine. The Times is entitled to tweak and modify their system all they want. I’m hoping they finally settle on a one-price-fits-all model, which charges digital-only subscribers less than those who want paper-and-ink copies, too. But I’m not holding my breath.

And, to be fair, the Times has always made a point of saying it was mostly interested in encouraging links from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. And that the Google restriction it announced last week could be expanded to other search engines.

Still, it does make me wonder why Times digital czar Martin Niseholtz had to go through this exchange with me last week:

Peter Kafka: Just to be clear, when the Times says non-subscribers can read stories above their 20-per-month limit if they come from referring links, you’re not just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but any link from any site, right?

Martin Nisenholtz: That’s correct.

Kafka: It could be the Journal. It could be a blog, it could be the Financial Times, anything on the Web, right?

Nisenholtz: Yes. The only other thing is that Google has a methodology where they can limit the number of inbound links per day, and we intend to take them up on it.

Kafka: So that’s Google doing the actual gating, not you?

Nisenholtz: Right. They had made this feature available prior to us going pay, so it’s not like it was inspired by us per se. We’re just taking advantage of it.

Kafka: Why limit Google’s links, but not any other site’s?

Nisenholtz: I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we’ve done, tons of people actually say, “Jeez, we’ve felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we’re supporting a valuable institution.” At the same time we want to make sure that we’re not being gamed, to the extent that we can be.

Kafka: But if you really do want to game the wall, you’ll be able to do it. You could could go through Microsoft’s Bing, for instance.

Nisenholtz: We’re obviously going to be vigilant over the next couple of months, in looking at the ways that people are doing that.

Instead, he could have simply said something long the lines of “Dunno. We’ve been at this for 14 months, but we’re still working on it. Stay tuned.”

Back? OK. For extra credit, here’s a condensed and edited–but still very long!–version of a chat I had yesterday with Times digital czar Martin Nisenholtz. I’m not convinced Nisenholtz is convinced that the plan the Times rolled out yesterday is the best possible plan. But if that’s the case, he certainly didn’t let on.

The big takeaways:

• The Times is limiting referrals from Google because it can. Specifically, it’s taking advantage of Google’s “first click free” program. (Worth noting that the 5-a-day limit gives you another 150 articles or so a month above the initial 20-per-month cut off. So it’s not particularly punitive.)
• The Times is charging more for access to its iPad app than for smartphone apps, because it thinks it can. iPad users spend more time with the paper, and the Times thinks people who spend more time with the paper will pay more for it.
• The Times only expects a small sliver of its Web readers to become paying users. Niseholtz doesn’t exactly say this out loud, but if you piece together his commentary, that’s what he’s saying. He doesn’t expect the “vast majority” of readers to ever see the paywall, so what he’s really trying to do is convert a percentage of the remaining minority. But if you’ve read Doctor’s piece, then you already know this.
• The Times isn’t trying to price its digital subscriptions in a way that protects its print subscription business. On the one hand, this makes sense–after all, the subscription plans are aimed at converting heavy users of its Web site who aren’t already print subscribers. On the other hand, given that print subscribers remain the Times’ most valuable asset, this one seems hard to reconcile.

Peter Kafka: Just to be clear, when the Times says non-subscribers can read stories above their 20-per-month limit if they come from referring links, you’re not just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but any link from any site, right?

Martin Nisenholtz: That’s correct.

Kafka: It could be the Journal. It could be a blog, it could be the Financial Times, anything on the Web, right?

Nisenholtz: Yes. The only other thing is that Google has a methodology where they can limit the number of inbound links per day, and we intend to take them up on it.

Kafka: So that’s Google doing the actual gating, not you?

Nisenholtz: Right. They had made this feature available prior to us going pay, so it’s not like it was inspired by us per se. We’re just taking advantage of it.

Kafka: Why limit Google’s links, but not any other site’s?

Nisenholtz: I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we’ve done, tons of people actually say, “Jeez, we’ve felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we’re supporting a valuable institution.” At the same time we want to make sure that we’re not being gamed, to the extent that we can be.

Kafka: But if you really do want to game the wall, you’ll be able to do it. You could could go through Microsoft’s Bing, for instance.

Nisenholtz: We’re obviously going to be vigilant over the next couple of months, in looking at the ways that people are doing that.

Kafka: I’m surprised to hear you say you’re going to spend calories trying to make sure that people don’t abuse the system. I would think you have other things to do.

Nisenholtz: I don’t think we’re going to spend enormous resources to go tracking people down. But at the same time, we’re going to obviously work to see where the source of these workarounds are, and work to close them off, if they become substantive enough.

But in looking at the research that we did, we expect [paywall jumpers] to be a very significant minority, a small, small number of people. When you look at your Twitter feed, based on the people you follow, it probably seems like it’s looming very large. But in the scheme of things, among people who don’t live in Silicon Valley or don’t cover it, the vast majority of people do not have this on their minds.

Kafka: What does research say about the total number of subscribers you can expect?

Nisenholtz: Obviously we haven’t released that. We are very, very confident, based on three rounds of research with three separate groups of loyalists, three separate vendors, over three separate time periods, that the conversion rates among that group are going to be sufficiently high to layer in the second revenue stream.

But I’d just remind you that we’re still very much in the advertising busienss. It’s our core business. We don’t expect the vast majority of our users to see the paywall, and we expect to remain a very very large player on the web. The conversion rates are built off of folks who are fairly heavy users.

Kafka: Why charge different prices depending on the screen–laptop, smartphone, iPad, etc–your subscribers use to read the Times? Netflix charges one price and that seems to work well for them.

Nisenholtz: We built the pricing architecture off of the research as well. We basically found a greater willingness to pay among iPad users. We see iPad app users spending much much more time with our brand than either Web users or smartphone users. So the more you use it, the more you value it.

This pricing research was very clear from a consumer perspective. It was not built off of what we charge for the paper, or what we think we desrve, or anything like that. It’s what our loyal users said they would be willing to pay.

Kafka: For first-time subscribers, at least, you can get more for your money by buying a print subscription than a digital-only offer. I assume that’s intentional.

Nisenholtz: Not really, no. I don’t think anybody ever had a discussion of favoring print over the Web. This research was done on digital loyalists. Obviously, the print subscribers are very, very valuable to the franchise, but I can’t remember a single disucssion where we linked the digital price point to our print subscriptions.

Kafka: You announced this in January of 2010, and now you’re going to launch it in March 2011. I know you spent time researching your customers, but what else have you been doing?

Nisenholtz: If we were just rolling out a web-only digital subscription to the Times website it would have been a 3-month project. But you have to remember that we were very intent on trying to create the kind of customer view that took customers in one setting–for whatever they had–across platforms.

What that means is we had to tie in a legacy circulation management system, as well as a digital system, as well as our legacy customer systems. You have these big iron legacy systems that have to be joined with web systems.

For us, the 14 months didn’t feel like a particularly long time. We were starting from a standing start.

Kafka: When Apple announced its subscription plans last month, you guys said, essentially, that it wasn’t going to affect your plans. And now you’re working within Apple’s new rules. Did you know about them in advance?

Nisenholtz: No. We had heard the same rumors that you had, so we knew what the rumors were. But we heard about Apple’s plans pretty much at the same time as everyone else.

———-

Again, the Q&A above is an edited excerpt of our chat. As an experiment, I’m embedding our entire 21-minute conversation here, just to see if anyone derives any value out of it. I can’t advise listening to it, as the sound quality is sub-optimal (it’s recorded via a BlackBerry’s speaker phone onto a digital recorder) and it’s also, um, rambling. But if you’ve got a weird desire to see/hear some Web content sausage being made, have at it.

[UPDATE: The Times argues, gently and politely, that it would have been nice had I told Nisenholtz in advance that I intended to publish the audio of our conversation. I think they're right, so I've taken down the track.]

That’s because–even though what he wrote put the knickers of the Hollywood/New York media bigwigs who own the premium video service into a series of ever more painful knots–it is a variation of things Kilar (pictured here) has been saying for quite awhile now.

Including in homespun videos by me!*

As you will see below, though Kilar’s essay was designed to tweak, it was by no means a geek version of a Howard Beale “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” moment either.

Here is a quintet of video interviews in which Kilar talks about the end of linear television watching, the need for browser-based TV sets, how hard it is to build paywalls (and real ones, too) and more.

As you will see, it would be a shame if the clearly talented Kilar can’t eat lunch in this town for restating what he has long maintained, even though a happy ending here does seem unlikely.

Until we find out how the story ends, here’s Kilar talking, from 2008 to last summer:

April, 2008 at Hulu HQ in Santa Monica, Calif.:

December, 2008 at Hulu HQ:

January, 2009 at Sundance Film Festival (Kilar is at 8:00 mark):

July, 2010 at Hulu HQ:

December, 2010 at Hulu’s New York office:

*And one by Peter Kafka.

News International Ltd., said Tuesday that around half of the 105,000 paying readers are monthly subscribers, including those to the digital sites and to the Times iPad app and Kindle edition. The others are either single copy or pay-as-you-go customers. There are also about 100,000 joint digital and print subscribers who have activated their digital accounts to the Web sites, the iPad app, or both, since launch, the company said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The two companies say they will make ESPN’s flagship channel available online for TV subscribers of Time Warner Cable. Those who can confirm their TV subscription through an online registration process can watch live programming on the Web just as it appears on TV for no additional charge—a model known as “TV Everywhere.”

Most of the industry’s forays in TV Everywhere so far have put scripted shows online in an on-demand format—usually sometime after they air on TV. For the most part, TV networks have yet to put their channels on the Web in real time, and doing so with one of the most popular cable networks and live sports programming—the best source of high audience ratings for TV—offers a high-profile stage for a risky experiment.

“We think this can be a catalyst to drive the industry towards broader adoption of the authentication model,” said Sean Bratches, executive vice president of sales with ESPN. “We anticipate doing this with a number of other affiliates.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In August, the Worcester, Mass., paper put up a Times-style pay wall: Visitors can read 10 “local” articles a month for free, but after that they need to pay up. It’s not a coincidence that the Telegram is using the same idea that the Times will try in a few months–the paper is one of several local titles owned by the Times itself.

So. How’s that Telegram doing since the wall went up?

Just great, Times CEO Janet Robinson said during the paper’s earnings call today: The Telegram’s metrics are “on plan,” and traffic hasn’t suffered.

In fact, Robinson said, the Times was pleasantly surprised to see that the Telegram’s unique visitors number had increased since the wall went up.

What’s that? I asked the Times for numbers to flesh that one out, but it declined. ComScore, though, does back Robinson up: The Web traffic counter says 281,000 U.S. unique visitors came by the Telegram in August, and that number crept up to 294,000 in September.

That’s a tiny bump, though comScore often has a difficult time measuring smaller sites. For comparison’s sake, note that the Telegram tells advertisers it reaches 700,000 uniques a month.

Still, a bump is a bump. And it’s certainly not the plummet that many people would expect. When the London Times put up a pay wall this summer, for instance, it saw traffic drop a reported 90 percent. (News Corp. owns both the London Times and this site.)

So how do we explain the Telegram’s increase? In the absence of input from the Times or the Telegram (I’ve asked both for comment), we have to speculate. Feel free to add your own in, but I can start with a few theories:

• Maybe the Telegram had some particularly blog-friendly, Facebook-friendly or Google-friendly stories in September. If that’s the case, the metered model would work well for the site, since it encourages casual visitors to show up via referral, without having to pay up. For a relatively modest site like the Telegram, you wouldn’t need many high-traffic stories to push up its base number.
• Or maybe it’s just as simple as a seasonal spike: Traffic numbers often droop in the summer, when people have better things to do than sit in front of their browsers, and then spike back up in the fall.

In any case, this should give the Times a bit of confidence about its strategy for the flagship paper, which it promises to tell us more about soon.

UPDATE: Some readers are having a hard time accepting Robinson’s assertions and comScore’s numbers.

I have no reason to think that Robinson, the Times or the Telegram made the data up. If you’re a conspiracist who thinks otherwise, you should note that the NYT wasn’t boasting about the data during the call, though Robinson did take time to read off a whole laundry list of digital accomplishments. It only came up in response to a question about the Telegram’s performance.

But different third-party analytics companies often reach different conclusions. So if you do want to look at a different data set, here’s one from Compete, via Jonathan Mendez. As you can see, it tells a very different story–a 20 percent drop from August to September (click to enlarge):

Three months ago, the New York Times seemed to have halted its advertising skid after a very long slide.

Perhaps it has started up again. Ad revenue dropped one percent during Q3: Digital revenue jumped 14.6 percent, but that wasn’t enough to counter a 5.8 percent drop in print ads–which CEO Janet Robinson had thought would move up again this quarter. This morning, though, she cited “uneven economic conditions” and “marketplace volatility.”

Meanwhile, circulation revenue dropped 4.8 percent, and the company’s overall revenue sank by 2.7 percent.

The Times isn’t terribly optimistic about the fourth quarter: It thinks prints ads may improve “modestly,” while digital will grow by 10 percent, which is a deceleration from both this quarter as well as the previous quarter’s 21 percent growth rate.

Here’s the full breakout for the Times’ digital properties (NYT.com, About.com, etc), which appear to be doing pretty well:

• Total Internet revenues increased 13.3 percent to $89.4 million from $78.9 million.
• Internet advertising revenues increased 14.6 percent to $78.3 million from $68.3 million.
• Internet advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 21.6 percent to $47.4 million from $39.0 million, mainly due to strong growth in national display advertising.
• Internet businesses accounted for 16.1 percent of the company’s revenues for the third quarter of 2010 versus 13.9 percent for the third quarter of 2009.

Meanwhile, the Times doesn’t have anything new to say about its plan to move its main Web site to a “metered model” pay wall next year. Perhaps we’ll hear something about it during the 11 am earnings call.

Beyond that, though, it hasn’t said much. But now we’re getting a little peek at the Times’ thinking about the paywall’s particulars, via online surveys it is conducting.

Bits and pieces of surveys have appeared in online reports in the last few day; a source familiar with the company tells me the paper is specifically targeting home delivery subscribers with this round of questions. NYT spokesman Bob Christie allows only that “research … is being conducted as part of the paid model.  We will have more to discuss later in the year. “

In any case, the survey excerpts don’t tell us what the Times intends to do — they only tell us what the paper is thinking about. Still, they’re informative.

Here’s a screenshot, via Lenovo marketing executive David Churbuck, which runs through a menu of different bundle options — home delivery plus website access for $64 a month, online plus access to mobile devices like Apple’s iPad (AAPL) for $40 a month, etc:

And here’s a query the Wall Street Journal’s Zach Seward saw, which throws out a $1/month price for online access:

And finally, another price point, via Churbuck. The wording is confusing here but I think the paper is asking about Web access at $2/month for home delivery subscribers:

Again, the obvious caveat here is that none of the above screenshots tell us where the paper will end up when it rolls out its paywall. But they do show us that paper is thinking hard about giving home delivery subscribers — who are incredibly valuable — a reason to remain home delivery subscribers. And that the paper is considering a model in which access to the site via iPad and other mobile devices is a privilege you have to pay for — consistent with the approach we’ve seen from Hulu, Time Warner’s Time Inc (TWX) and other big media companies.

As an aside, I think that mobile = money approach isn’t going to pan out for most folks. But more on that later. Meantime, if any other NYT subs want to send along snapshots of their surveys, I’d be much obliged: Peter AT AllthingsD DOT com. Thanks in advance!