NYT to Halve Free Online Access
The paper announced plans Tuesday to impose a stricter paywall on its website.
| Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2012, at 11:30 AM
Photo by Ramin Talaie/Getty Images.
Bad news for New York Times lovers who get their online news fix sans subscription: The paper announced Tuesday that, starting next month, it will halve the the number of free articles a reader can access per month to ten.
The Gray Lady instituted its current paywall last year, providing readers with access to 20 articles per month for free but requiring a subscription for those who wanted to read additional stories. While readers could still circumvent the paywall with the help of a handful of simple tricks, the move toward subscription content was nonetheless seen as a major one for the paper.
The NYT says that one year after it began its latest paywall experiment, it has roughly 454,000 paid subscribers to its various digital subscription packages of the Times and the International Herald Tribune.
News of the stricter paywall comes as other newspaper companies have taken on similar pay models for their publications. The Times media blog notes, for example, that the Los Angeles Times began offering a "membership program" in early March that gives readers access to online articles and other benefits. Meanwhile, Gannett, a publisher of more than 82 daily papers, announced last month that it will start asking readers to pay for online content in a model similar to that at the Times (readers will get 5 to 15 stories free, depending on the publication).
