Mar

15

Who Will Pay for the NYTimes Reader?

March 15, 2007 |

I think it is an exceedingly stupid move by the New York times to move the very good and usuable Times Reader app into a subscription model. I would maybe understand if they priced it at $5 a month, but at $14.95 a month and $165 a year, this makes no sense for most users.

Today, there are ads in the reader. Actually, it is one of the few places I see ads - adblock blocks all ads very nicely on the New York Times webpage for me. I have used the Reader extensively while travelling and love the way it displays the text on my laptop.

But I can’t think of anybody who is going to subscribe to this just for the sake of it. It is a very compelling product, but it isn’t worth $165 and that price is even harder to rationalize if the website makes the content for free (I hope this doesn’t mean the site is going to move to a subscription model as well at some point).

The upside of the Reader is that you can browse the paper offline, as everything gets chached on the local machine. Over time, though, that will be less and less compelling, as mobile internet access becomes the standard.

It seems my sentiment is shared throughout the blogosphere.

Update: Also have a look at the comments on the NYTimes Firstlooks page. All from beta testers. Only one is postive.

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