New York Times paywall to cost less than $20 a month

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 21 January, 2011 at 10:42 am, filed under Paywall, Tablet Computer and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

Bloomberg is reporting that the New York Times paywall is to cost less than $20 (£12.50) a month and maybe as little as $10.

The news service quoted “a person familiar with the matter. The paper had talked about launching its paywall this month, but it looks like it will go up early in February.

Apparently what is on offer will be maybe $20 a month for a “digital bundle”. This would give users access to the web version and the NY Times on Amazon’s Kindle. For just the web, the NY Times is understood to be considering a price of half that $20.

I also wonder how closely executives at the New York Times have been looking at what The Times has done in London with its paywall in terms of price.

The NY Times has already made clear that it will have a social media friendly site (unlike the Times’ anti-social media approach), which will help it maintain high levels of traffic as its content continues to be widely shared.

The Times charges £1 a day or £8 a month, which would cost you about $12 is you were paying from the US.

Could the New York Times be looking at a price as low as $10 a month? Such a low price point would mean it would be charging just 30 cents a day and would ensure the liberal voice of America remained both highly affordable and build a large subscriber base. Well that’s my guess.

Others have already made there’s as well and are predicting that the New York Times paywall will be a success.

If you didn’t see it there was an interesting piece earlier this week that suggested that paywalls were having little effect on newspaper web traffic.