After the New York Times announcement recently, one could be forgiven for assuming that paywalls are finally beginning to come down. The FT announced today that they’ve changed the model for access to FT.com. It would appear that the first five articles are free to all; a further twenty-five, or thirty in all, are to be made available every month free of charge, but only to “light-touch” registrants. Beyond the 30, people will need to subscribe.
My initial reaction? Bemused, maybe even confused. How would someone police the first five articles being free to all? I assume free to all means no registration. Sure, you could store IP addresses and grant each address up to five articles per month without registration, but what a nightmare. What a palaver. For no value. So I must be wrong. Some sort of registration must be in place for the 5 free. In which case I don’t understand the difference between the first five free and the next 25 free, unless there’s a second stage of registration. Whatever it is, there would need to be some form of reset every month-end as well. It all seems so pointless.
Content is not king. The customer is. Scarcity is not king. Abundance is.
Paywalls will come down. More later.
Wondering how much it cost them to (a) come up with such a system and (b) implement it. And what they hope to earn through it…
it is a pioneering system according to the article -
so everone has to wait with baited breath on the details
JP,
There might be a easier way of implementing this using cookies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
This appraoch of restricting usage sounds familiar to “fair usage policy” of Broadband service providers which appears very complex and confusing!!
If you use cookies without any registration, then surely all you are doing is moving from an IP address control point to a physical device control point. Still onerous and cumbersome and ultimately pointless.