I’ve noticed that both the Financial Times and the New York Times seems to have articles I want to read, but the Financial Times, on clicking the title link in Twitter makes me take the time to register or become a subscriber, which discourages me to open the article even though it has an eye catching title.  On the other hand we have the New York Times, which also has eye catching titles, but allows me to read 10 articles a month without registering or subscribing.  The content was so good I became fustrated every time I reached my limit and eventually, since I quote them so much in my own blog posts (or students for school), they get me thinking about opportunities, I finally payed the initial .99 cents and also will probably renew for the $35 USD. It’s a good business model for online periodicals. The New York Times experimented with showing the first paragraph of the article as a preview to help move forward the consumer with the subscription purchase; however, that was not enough to entice me to purchase, AND only annoyed me further which caused me to want to go somewhere else for my news, a detraction to the content no matter what the preview said.  If the preview was very good, it almost enticed me, but it was  a detractor in a quantifiable way, outweighing the + & – of the psychological effect .

Thanks for sparking the idea Newsweek with your announcement, Newsweek Will End Print Magazine in 2013.  It has been floating around in for a while in my head, but thought it was fairly straight forward.  I was wondering why very periodical didn’t adopt the NYT #subscription   #business  model of how to charge for #periodicals .  Then I thought, maybe it’s just different cultures, different people, different mind sets on acquisition of news / media, which could still be true.  The Financial Times headquarters is in #London , #UK, but these periodicals both have diverse cultures where their headquarters are ‘posted’, so no that can’t be it.  Is it the target market?  No, not really both audiences seem very busy, time is money, so that can’t be it.  Maybe  the spark flashed, the New York Times #nytimes  just has a better approach to getting subscribers than the #financialtimes , so here’s the post I whipped up.