NYTimes.com Connects With Facebook; Users Must Opt In
We're not tracking every site that adds logins using Facebook or Twitter but when the site is a few months away from putting up a paywall—and it's one of the top news sites— it's worth a little attention.
Context & Ripple Effects
paidContent flags NYTimes.com connecting with Facebook because of what sits a few months out: a paywall at one of the top news sites, per the outlet's own framing. The integration is opt-in, meaning the Times is wiring a third-party identity layer into its registration flow just before registration becomes the thing readers must pay behind.
The timing matters against the wider platform picture in late August 2010: Twitter has just forced all third-party apps onto OAuth authentication as of August 31, so both major social platforms are consolidating their grip on web identity at the exact moment publishers are deciding whose login button to embed.
First-order effects
- Readers signing in through Facebook get a faster path into NYTimes.com accounts, while the Times acquires opted-in social-graph data attached to registered users right as it prepares to convert anonymous traffic into paying subscribers.
Second-order effects
- Facebook extends its identity layer across top-tier news properties at zero cost to itself, pressuring rival publishers to match the reduced sign-up friction or lose registrations; Twitter, locked into serving developers via OAuth rather than consumer logins, cedes ground in the publisher-identity channel.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news subscription systems consolidate around platform-operated identity providers, leaving publishers structurally dependent on companies like Facebook for both the login and the audience data their paid products run on.
The trend: Major publishers are adopting platform-run social logins as the identity backbone for paid content, trading user data access for registration convenience ahead of their paywall launches.