Is The NY Times Looking To CwF + RtB?
One of my big complaints with all the stories from newspaper people about how they’re suddenly going to put up paywalls and charge, was that they never actually talked about adding more value. They seemed to just assume people would pay, when the truth is that they’ve never really paid for the content. But, of course, if you can really connect with people, and give them a reason to buy, then that’s something different. But “the news” alone is not a reason to buy, because it’s not scarce. It’s quite abundant, and if someone charges, then people will just go elsewhere. But there are plenty of scarcities that you can charge for if you’re smart about it — and it looks like the NY Times may actually be taking a more intelligent approach to its own business model. Last week, as you hopefully know, we kicked off our latest business model experiment, by launching our CwF + RtB options, based on the formula that we’ve seen many musicians use successfully: Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Bu
