The New York Times subscription service, or "paywall," goes live at 2 p.m. Eastern today.
Readers can access up to 20 stories for free every month, as well as a limited amount of gratis content via the Times smartphone app. After that, it's a metered service; $15 a month buys unlimited access to the Times Web site and the premium smartphone app, $20 per month covers online access and the Times iPad app, and $35 a month buys access to the full range of Times' digital products. All of this is available to print subscribers are no additional cost. Perhaps to hook more readers into subscribing, the Times is offering the first four weeks at a discounted rate of $0.99.
The paywall has been hotly debated since it was announced earlier this month. One of the most pervasive criticisms of the platform is that there are too many ways around it, legitimate and otherwise.
Articles posted on Twitter and Facebook can be viewed for free, and a handful of feeds have already popped up with the specific purpose of posting all Times content. There's also NYTClean, a bookmark tool created by a Canadian coder that demolishes the paywall with four lines of code. Other than that, a reader could simply clear his or her browsing data reset the 20 story limit.
Although the Times has recognized that there are many holes in the system, the company is betting that readers will still cough up the cash to access the publication. (Will you? Vote in our poll below.)
"We believe that enough people will pay, but we will not cut ourselves off from the rest," chairman of the Times Company Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said at a conference in Munich earlier this year.
But the paper's head of digital operations, Martin Nisenholtz, has noted that the pricing options could change.
"We're as confident as we can possibly be in a research setting," he said. "Obviously, whenever research hits the real world, there are changes."
Newspapers have struggled to maintain profitability and find their place in an age where news is increasingly consumed both online and for free. Circulation for the weekday edition of the Times has dwindled to 877,000 and 1.35 million for the Sunday paper. Meanwhile, traffic is on the rise at NYTimes.com; comScore says the site had 48.5 million unique views in January.
That said, Mediabistro pointed out that a print subscription is still cheaper. That the Times has opted to shift to a paid model is big news. After all, the New York Times is one of the most respected news organizations around. But whether or not people will actually pay for something they're used to getting for free, and something that they can still get for free by various means, will be apparent in the coming months.