he New York Times Used Twitter to Announce Online Subscription: Followers Lash Back

On Thursday, The New York Times told their 3 million-plus followers on Twitter that they were introducing a plan to implement an online subscription to their website beginning March 28th. Announcing this change on Twitter was a brilliant move by The Times because they can reach out to millions of The New York Times followers on the popular social network with the click of a button.

The site will allow you to click on 20 free articles. Once you click on the twenty-first, a page will load asking you to subscribe to their online services. Three different options will be available to readers. The first option will cost $15 every four weeks or $195 for a year subscription. This option will give you access to the news website and a mobile phone app. The second plan will cost $20 per month or $260 per year. This plan will give the subscriber access to the news site and access to an iPad app. The last plan offered will cost the reader $35 or $455 a year for a full access unlimited plan.

Customers who subscribe to the home delivery service will have free and unlimited access to all Times digital platforms. This excludes downloads to e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Furthermore, customers who subscribe to The Time’s global edition, The International Herald Tribune will also have free digital access.
Most of the Times Twitter followers were not in favor of this change. Tweets fired back at the Times with “Good luck selling news you can get for free.” And “$15.00 is crazy. What a rip off.”

Overall if you weigh out the cost it is not so bad. Six days a week from Monday through Saturday costs $1.50 per day, and $4 for the Sunday edition. That’s $13 per week, $52 per month or $624 annually. That is much more expensive than any of the three plans offered.

Certainly there is a lot of free content available to us now. We live in a world where we are updated every minute. With all the mass media that is available to us today, how could anyone pay for an online subscription? The truth of the matter is that The New York Times will get subscribers and in my opinion this will slowly grow into something big for them because of one important word we all need in our busy lives, “convenience”.

If history repeats itself, the New York media giant should have no problem getting new and existing customers on board. For those who are old enough to remember when cable television was first introduced most everybody questioned why you would pay for TV when you get it for free over the airwaves. Now most every household subscribes to a cable or satellite dish service. How about satellite radio? When XM Satellite Radio hit the market back in 2001, nobody would pay for radio when you can get it for free over the airwaves. Today, Sirius XM radio reached 20 million subscribers and continues to grow.

As a Kindle owner I recently subscribed to the free 14-day trial to The New York Times. I can honestly say I love it and will probably keep this service for $19.99 per month. I wake up at five in the morning, turn on my Kindle and in less than a minute, The New York Times is downloaded and ready for reading. Just stop and think about this service and who it will benefit. Elderly people will no longer have to walk outside to the mailbox to get the paper. The salesmen or executives who travel for work will be able to download their favorite newspaper from anywhere in the world. The people in New York who ride the subways and buses will no longer have to open a bulky newspaper in a crowded area. A subscriber will no longer have to worry about if the delivery person is late due to a snowstorm or if the snow plow buried their paper under a mound of snow at the edge of the driveway. All your content will now come to you with the click of a button.

The printing industry is also a dying industry. Slowly more and more print shops are closing their doors due to lack of work. Reason being is we live in an electronic world today. An instruction booklet, owner’s manual or product specification sheet can now be downloaded right from a company’s web site. We can register our products online now instead of mailing in a card with our information on it. Certainly newspapers around the world are still being printed by the millions daily, but as the younger generation gets older, can you honestly see that child twenty five years from now grabbing a newspaper off a news stand? I can’t, because a newspaper will seem primitive to them just as terrestrial radio and compact discs will seem to them.

You can’t blame the New York Times for trying to stay current. With all of today’s electronic gadgets that are available to us which are able to deliver updated products and services within minutes, you have to be part of that market. iPads and tablet style devices will eventually become household items just as the home computer and cell phones have become.

One time years ago we had a photo album in the bedroom closet and a book shelf full of books in the den. All our albums and compact discs were downstairs in the family room and all the newspapers were on the kitchen counter. We now can keep all that stuff on one small device. As the popularity continues to grow in the marketplace, there is no better time than now to start thinking about electronic services to your customers.

I feel this is a brilliant idea by The New York Times and even though it might take some time to see their online subscribers grow they will already be ahead of the competition; and once their competitors want to get in the game, it might be a little too late.