I've heard many say that it's stupid to sign up for the monthly fee because they let you read stuff for free if it's a link from Facebook or something. And, yes, that does make it seem like they're cutting their own throat.

But, are they? http://www.nytimes.c...nd-purchases.html

12. Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, search engines or my blog?

Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you've already read your 20 free articles.

Like other external links, links from search engine results will count toward your monthly limit. If you have reached your monthly limit, you'll have a daily limit of 5 free articles through a given search engine. This limit applies to the majority of search engines.

So, it seems to say there are ways of reading 150+ articles (suitably spaced) at the NYTimes for free every month.

Of course, there are already stories that their paywall has been cracked open, so I'm sure there are ways around it (for a while, anyway).

I am not seriously thinking about subscribing (it's an awful lot of money for a little convenience), but we'll have to see how it goes.

Cheers,
Scott.

After all, in addition to all the competition from other (still) free sources, they're offering certain classes easier access while keeping track of others. I guess I was thinking there'd be something on the server side, but that was naive, I guess.

http://www.boingboin...ent=Google+Reader

Cory Doctorow:

[...]

4. Which means that lots of people will take countermeasures to beat the #nytpaywall. The easiest of these, of course, will be to turn off cookies so that the Times's site has no way to know how many pages you've seen this month

5. Of course, the NYT might respond by planting secret permacookies, using Flash cookies, browser detection, third-party beacons, or secret ex-Soviet vat-grown remote-sensing psychics. At the very minimum, the FTC will probably be unamused to learn that the Grey Lady is actively exploiting browser vulnerabilities (or, as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse statute puts it, "exceeding authorized access" on a remote system -- which carries a 20 year prison sentence, incidentally)

6. Even if some miracle of regulatory capture and courtroom ninjarey puts them beyond legal repercussions for this, the major browser vendors will eventually patch these vulnerabilities

7. And even if that doesn't work, someone clever will release one or more of: a browser redirection service that pipes links to nytimes.com through auto-generated tweets, creating valid Twitter referrers to Times stories that aren't blocked by the paywall; or write a browser extension that sets "referer=twitter.com/$VALID_TWEET_GUID", or some other clever measure that has probably already been posted to the comments below

8. The Times isn't stupid. They'll build all kinds of countermeasures to detect and thwart cookie-blocking, referer spoofing, and suchlike. These countermeasures will either be designed to err on the side of caution (in which case they will be easy to circumvent) or to err on the side of strictness -- in which case they will dump an increasing number of innocent civilians into the "You're a freeloader, pay up now" page, which is no way to convert a reader to a customer

[...]

(via Brad DeLong)

I guess I'm thinking that this is going to end up like "Times Select" unless they handle it better than they have so far. Micropayments or Donations or something like that would make sense if they don't want to drive people away from their web page. But, reading other articles, the point seems to be to encourage people to get the physical paper (even if only 1 day a week) - since that gets you all the digital content for no extra charge.

Forcing people to buy a digital subscription that includes smart-phone access even if they don't have a smart-phone, and charging more than double for people who want both smart-phone and iPad access, is stupid.

But who knows, maybe this will be a great success for them and for subscribers....

Lincoln's (not lincoln ;-) offering to pay for some free subscriptions - http://www.crainsnew...18/FREE/110319858 I haven't bothered with it, myself.

Cheers,
Scott.