The New York Times Changes Access to Old Content. The New York Times has just changed their archival policy so that all links we've used in the bIPlog that are more than 30 days old will redirect to a page requesting that you purchase the article for $2.95. Links have worked before now, even though articles were months or years old. Vin Crosbie, President of Digital Deliverance, talked last week at the JSchool about news online, and the mechanisms and logic that publishers use... [bIPlog]
This could be the end of the Times as a source of links in the Internet. I will no longer link to any of their pages since no one would be able to see anything after 30 days. Why tell anyone else about something interesting if they will have to pay 3 bucks to read it. For anyone to have to pay $2.95 to read single article that is over 30 days old is ludicrous. You can get a great deal by paying $25.95 for access to 25 articles. Wow!! That is so nice of them. Plus you get 6 months to use this. Actually, all you buy is access to the article, not the article itself. You can look at the article (without pictures or graphs) for 90 days. Then you have to pay again. And, apparently, this holds true even if you are a subscriber. At least there is nothing on the payment page that says differently What is funny about this is that scientific journals are going exactly the opposite way. It costs money to read the current issue but many are making all their work open to everyone after a period of time. PNAS, for instance, allows open access to anything 6 months older or more. So, at least here there is a benefit to having a subscription. You can get access to 6 months of material at a reasonable price. But, if you can wait a while, you will eventually get older material. Now, scientific papers may age more rapidly than newspaper articles. But I am skeptical. The NYT just lost its premier role in links and moved itself way down the list of places to read. (I wonder if the writers get any of that $3 as a residual?) [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]
What is the economic issue here? I would not pay $3.00. So I ask myself what would I pay? It might be 25 cents. But then the issue of convenience arises. The same with music. What would I pay for a song. Maybe $1.0 Maybe?? But again the issue of convenience arises. Isn't there a mix between the amount and the convenience of paying? One of the issues behind why I do so much business with Amazon is 1click - when I see a book I want, I just hit the button and it is all done. I think that 1 click has had a huge impact on my compulsive book buying. If I did not have that convenience, I would buy far fewer books. At Amazon, my average spend is between $25 - $35. So for me, the real barrier seems to be convenience. How about you?
8:35:33 AM 
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