Friday, April 04, 2003

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Killing Pop-Ups and -Unders Like almost everybody, I hate po-ups and pop-unders. Lately, I've been using PopNot, to suppress them, and so far I am very happy with it. In fact, I just shelled out the $20 to buy it. The one trick with this kind of software is to realize, whatever times you DO want/need to have pop-ups, what is going on. It will let you configure it to allow pop-ups from specific domains. So, for instance, when using the Web version of Outlook, I need pop-ups, so I added a rule to permit pop-ups from www.MyEmployersDomain.com. It REALLY makes surfing life more pleasant. 8:57:43 PM    comment []

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Pricing Models for the New York Times Archive The New York Times archive is now charging $2.95 per for access to linked articles that are older than 30 days. They have always charged to access an article found by searching the archive itself. But until very recently, articles accessed directly via a link were still free. No longer. It's easy to bemoan this state of affairs, but hard to really complain about it: it is only reasonable for the Times to expect some amount of compensation (above and beyond that received from the ad "impressions" from the pop-ups that I have been suppressing!) for their useful, original content. But I think this model could use some improvement. So I have a number of suggestions that I think would improve their total revenue, at the same time providing greater convenience for internet readers. Though of course none of these alternatives will ever be nearly as good and convenient as free links. The cornerstone of all these suggestions is to continue to price-discriminate between people motivated enough to search the archive (and maybe willing to actually cough up the $1.05 - $2.95 per article), and those casual browsers accessing the article by traversing a hyperlink. Charge $0.25 per article for casual browsers; of course, that only works well with micropayments. As I have requested previously, charge me some reasonably low monthly price for a subscription. For that monthly subscription fee, let me access unlimited, or nearly unlimited, archive articles for the price of, say, $5.95 per month (offer a subscription combining this with the current on-line edition for $9.95 per month). Let the referrers pay for subscriptions. For instance, a weblogger could pay $5.95 per month for up to 100 separate referrals (article-reads) to 20 individual articles (just making up some numbers). I think #2 and #3 are particularly strategic for the New York Times, in that people will only pay grudgingly for any web content, so, if they can be persuaded to pay at all, they are going to be very stingy and will want the most bang for their buck. That means they will want to subscribe to only 1 general news site, they will want it to have lots of content, and most of all, they will want it to be the same one everyone else subscribes to, so they can get the same broad access/exposure, after paying their monthly subscription, that they used to get for free (an example of Metcalfe's Law). As the 800-pound gorilla of both dead-tree and on-line newspaper publishing ("the paper of record", as it is often referred to), it seems that the Times is ideally positioned to exploit this fact to its strategic advantage. But since strategic lock-in is to be considered evil, there is one more proposal: Some kind of ASCAP-style amalgamation, so there can be access to a universe of participating sites, all equally accessible, interchangeable and transparent. With an array of pricing options, including ones that match up to the patterns suggested by #1-3 above. 8:50:27 PM    comment []