Calling it a “pretend pay wall,” Daily Caller reporter Peter Tucci describes a bunch of different ways to get around the new plan that the New York Times is calling “Digital Subscriptions.” We learn from Tucci that the wall is fully breached by social media:
Here’s how it works: non-subscribers can view up to 20 articles a month for free. They can also — free of charge — view up to 25 articles a day that they find through search engines and an unlimited number of articles that they find via blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. . . .
Thanks to the social media loophole, non-subscribers can follow Twitter feeds that link to every article that The New York Times publishes. . . .[emphasis SmartMobs]
Is it smart to let the social media mob in for free? Times will tell (pun intended). Tucci opines that it won’t be smart folks who cause the pretend pay wall to be lucrative:
The Times’s pay wall targets two groups: readers who feel guilty about consuming free journalism and readers who don’t realize how easy it is to bypass the pay wall.
Comments
@ 17:21
Hi Judy,
Social media and the world wide web make it easy to obtain lots of free information.
People may not realize they’re violating terms or policies.
An alternative to the “pretend pay wall” might be to allow readers to peruse current events at no cost. The New York Times could then focus on using mobi apps to make up for the lost income.
This would improve The Times’s reputation with the public and possibly save legal fees trying to enforce the digital subscriptions.
Margie Franklin
The Home Biz Diva