MediaFlect

Jon Friedman of Marketwatch has his conjecture about what’s going on at the NY Times and their decision to charge for columnists. He thinks the Times is betting liberals (or at least what I’d call the Great Liberal Elite) will pay to get their daily Dowd and (Tom) Friedman fix. I’m not sure, and I’ll give my analysis of how the Times may have made its choice in a sec.

But first, I want to point out what I see a mischaracterization of what the No-Longer Gray Lady is doing. Jon Friedman and others are portraying the Times’ move as charging $49.95 per year to read the New York Times’ columnists — Dowd, Friedman, Nick Kristoff, Paul Krugman, etc. But a close reading of the NY Times’ own memo on the planned transition makes it clear the columnists are only part of it. For $49.95, you get: *access to the archives (which now costs much more than $50/year if you use it just a few times per month), *NewsTracker, basically a clipping service (which costs $29.95/year), *sneak peaks at upcoming stories (which used to be the purview only of a select few who would, for example, buy the Sunday edition’s early materials on Wednesday after they were first printed), and a few other pieces of functionality. So, really, the $50/year is not so much for the columnists, but rather for the kinds of archival access and info-manipulation that Internauts are getting used to paying for. Take me: I love my Maureen Dowd, my David Brooks and my William Safire, but it’s the other stuff that’ll make me cough up the cash.

Now, here’s my conjecture on what might be going on at the Times and how they decided to put columnists behind the wall: They wanted to figure out a way to test the paid content waters, consolidate some products, get some buzz and make some more cash by increasing volume to offset whatever decrease there was in incremental revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to hurt ad inventory. So what editorial content could they put behind the paid wall that, if there were a drop in pageviews, wouldn’t hurt ad revenue, could get some new subscribers, and generate some buzz so people like Jon Friedman would write about it? Columnists!

I don’t know how many pageviews those pages generate (quite a few I’d guess from outside linking), but I do know that the OpEd section is notoriously free of the kinds of high-paying ads that populate real revenue-generating sections like Technology, Business and, perhaps, Movies. Today on the OpEd section there’s a lot of Times house ads and the columns have one small text ad. Meanwhile, Business and Technology sections and articles are blinking and popping with what looks like high-priced sponsorships. So, there’s what I think is very good business math: Put the columnists behind the wall, lose few big ad dollars, pick up some subscription dollars, convert that ad inventory into potentially higher value inventory (because subscribers are worth more to advertisers than any old readers), give yourself an excuse to repackage archives and newstracker, throw in a few more gizmos, AND generate the kind of buzz you’d never get if all you did was the gizmos and archives. Not sure if it was thought through like this at the Times (I’ll see what I can find out), but I think it was very well done, at least from a business perspective.