New York Times announces pay wall for online content beginning March 28
New York, NY, United States (AHN) – The days of reading every article in the New York Times online ends for most readers on March 28 when the newspaper will put much of its content behind a pay wall.
Some 49 million people worldwide reportedly visited the NYTimes.com site in February, up from 46 million in December.
Casual visitors will still be able to access 20 articles on the NYTimes.com site monthly without paying, but after that to continue reading people without a subscription to the newspaper must choose one of three digital news plans, the New York Times announced Thursday.
Four-week digital news plans include paying $15 for Web site access and a mobile phone app, $20 for Web access and an iPad app or $35 for all three.
Also, people who find New York Times’ articles through a link from some blogs or search engines will be able to read those in addition to the 20 free articles accesses directly from the newspaper’s Web site.
Free and unlimited digital access across all platforms continues for people with either daily or weekend home delivery of the New York Times, as well as those who subscribe to the paper’s global edition, The International Herald Tribune. However, that will not be the case right now for people who have e-book subscriptions.
In addition, readers in Canada will face the pay wall immediately. The company said it would use experiences with those readers to work any kinks out of the system before it goes live in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world on March 28.
Readers will have a choice of payment options including credit cards or PayPal.
The Times said that economics were behind its decision to institute a pay wall 15 years after it first put its content online free of charge. Before that move, people could only access the content of the New York Times if they had an actual home delivery or mail subscription to the newspaper, read it at a library that had a subscription or lived in an area with a newsstand that had newspapers flown in, if the town was outside the Times’ delivery area.
It becomes the largest newspaper to institute a pay wall. Other newspapers with full or partial pay walls include the Wall Street Journal, Britain’s Financial Times and various small circulation newspapers around the country.
Both print and digital advertising revenues have declined for newspapers, including the New York Times.
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