In what will be a much-watched experiment throughout the industry, the New York Times announced today it’s working on a plan to charge frequent readers to access NYTimes.com. Users will get a certain number of free pages before they’re asked to pay a fixed fee for the month. The Times is light on details — such as cost and the number of pages — and rolling out the metered pay model has a long ways to go. “There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, SVP for digital operations. “And I think if you were to benchmark this against other, similar implementations, you would find that a year is not excessive.”
The comments in the Times’ Media Decoder blog are mostly against the plan. “Is NYT misaligned with the world’s reality?” asks one reader. “There are so many other options on the internet for free.” This, of course, is the crux of the question.
There was no mention of the role of the Apple Tablet, which an earlier report speculated will feature Times content for a fee.
