Medium is not the NYT. They have a hundred years of reputation as one of the best newspapers in the world to build a subscription model from. People want them to survive.

Medium.com used to have a good reputation. But it never had anything like the NYT's and right now the only reputation you have is "hot garbage cash grab". Most people want your service to die. I know I did, before reading your responses here at least.

Sorry to be blunt, and I wish you luck in digging back out of that. But I would gently suggest that looking to the NYT as your shining success story is... Well I think there's a parable to match this but it escapes me now. Like an ant looking at an elephant maybe.

Is that the inclusive of the games? I used to pay them for access to the crosswords (they really are the best, but couldn't care less about their "journalism"), and as far as I knew that's under the same umbrella.

Of course, that was before I found out that canceling requires talking to an AOL-like retention droid rather than just clicking a button, and that's when they stopped getting my money permanently.

This is my impression as well, about NYT's business.

The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.

Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.

Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.

Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.

I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.

It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.

I've been thinking about something related to internet paywalls.

In the old print model, you paid for up-to-date news on whatever topic. If you didn't want to pay for that, the news was available to you anyway, just slower. Your friend subscribes to a magazine and you can read it once she's done with it. There's a newspaper in the break room, usually 2-3 days behind today. Which newspaper it is varies.

Internet paywalls seem to place more emphasis on restricting their content permanently. Subscriber content goes to subscribers, and non-subscribers aren't supposed to see it.

I suspect that the availability-with-delay model of the older system generated a lot of influence for the content that permanent locks don't generate. If you can't afford a subscription to Seventeen, you might still care what it says because you can follow it anyway. If you can't follow it, it's a short step to not caring what it says.

I heard AOL was doing great in revenue too.

It won't happen over night, of course there will be a temporary boost in revenue when one decides to force everyone that visits the site to pay.

How much of that is from existing NYTimes subscribers, marketing tactics (eg. wordle), shady subscription offer deals, forgotten subscriptions, and lack of suitable competition.

Over time though that withers and once that withering starts, nothing brings it back.

See you in a few years.

The New York Times's paywall is more than a decade old at this point.

Then something changed recently then as I personally never noticed an annoyance on nytimes til recent years after where it seemed any article required paywall.

In addition, there is one important thing that is not being paywalled (yet), the 'news' value of nytimes is still accessible via the headline + summary on the front page.

The moment the guys chasing a buck remove that is the day nytimes dies.

The NYT paywall has gotten far more aggressive in recent years.