New York Times Memberships

The New York Times is considering two levels of paid membership packages ($50 for Silver, $150 for Gold) that offer a bundle of benefits including early access or additional background on some stories and preferred access to tickets for NYT events.

Mike Masnick is experimenting with something similar (with added fun) at Techdirt based on successes he has seen in the music industry. So it’s not surprising that he likes where the NY Times seems to be going with this. Conversely, Martin Langeveld over at the Nieman Journalism Lab does not like the idea at all.

One thing these memberships do start to do is shift the focus away from arbitrarily walling off content and towards providing potentially valuable services to users. Fred Wilson made that point recently although I’m not as keen on the FT model he uses as an example.

The Times’ membership packages focus specifically on Times enthusiasts in so far as the actual services on offer are conceivably things that might appeal to loyal Times readers. However, I think there is an important distinction to be made between active users and people with an affinity for the Times brand.

From that perspective, the membership packages look like a mixed bag. BackStory and FirstLook might appeal to news hounds. Tote bags, crossword puzzles, discounts on Times memorabilia and perhaps even TimesEvents to the latter group.

Perhaps most importantly, the benefits don’t appear as though they will scale that well individually and there is no collective synergy or network effect to promote further engagement with Times content. For example, the value of preferred access to tickets for Times events will diminish as more people enroll.

Attempting to derive revenue from users rather than content and extending offerings for the most valuable users are good ideas but I think both need to be woven into the fabric of using the Times online.

Connecting users to each other and harnessing their participation might be one way to achieve that goal. I’ll talk more about what that means and how it might work in the next post.

Posted on July 28, 2009