Paywall For This Blog

People should have to pay.

I put soooo much effort to put out blog posts at this blog. And people get to read it for free! It took me almost a week of not blogging at all to come to the realization. And I put myself to work.

At midnight tonight the paywall will be unfurled. You are paying now on.

Readers coming directly from a Google search result, or from a Facebook update or a tweet or from other social media destinations will still be able to read for free. The rest are paying. Those of you who come directly to the blog's web address, you know who you are. You are the hard core readers, and you are paying now.

Got you addicted over the years, didn't I? Now it is pay time. Don't worry, it is a tiny amount. This blog knows its worth, but it also knows its limitations.

The New York Times Is Bullish On Twitter

Image via CrunchBaseThe New York Times is Twitter's new best friend. I have cultivated a new habit. Now when I see a link to a New York Times article even on the New York Times website itself, I copy the subject line and feed it into the Twitter search engine. Twitter has never failed me so far. There is always some soul out there, usually a whole bunch of souls, that have tweeted out that particular New York Times article. It is called crowdsourcing the need and desire to not pay the New York Times a dime.

Me In The New York Times

New York Times: 100,000 PayWall Payers

Image by Laughing Squid via FlickrThe New York Times did not get me, but looks like it got 100,000 people and counting. When they erected the paywall I think they had an inkling as to this number. But the numbers are still not adding up for me.

Let's crunch. 100,000 people paying $20 each is two million. Is that per year? Per month? If it is per year, the paywall is a fail whale. If it is per month, the paywall might still be a fail whale, although a smaller one. 20 million can't keep the New York Times afloat.

New York Times Paywall Sucks

Image via WikipediaSo yesterday the New York Times website kept bombarding me with pop ups saying I had only two more articles left for the month, two out of 20.

They should have warned me at 10 left. I would not have read all those travel articles I read: vicarious living.

Pop ups are bad. Period. Don't do pop ups. Firefox climbed up by simply helping you fight pop ups. What is the New York Times thinking?

Tear Down This Paywall

I thought I read somewhere that if you show up at a New York Times article from some social media destination like Twitter or Facebook, that does not count against your monthly limit. Well, I did.

Paywalls Make No Sense

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.