Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (aka The New York Times Is Delusional)
Here are the annual prices of a variety of services, all of which allow users to access the service from the web and across multiple devices with a single unified subscription. See if you can pick out which one is the outlier:
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times has spent two years telegraphing this move: it first mulled an online fee in March 2009, floated a $5 monthly web-access charge that summer, described 'membership' plans in July 2009, and in January 2011 said it would charge less than $20 a month for web access as part of multiple bundled digital packages. The Understatement's chart puts that number next to annual prices for other unified multi-device subscriptions — web plus apps under one login — where the Times stands out as the most expensive option on the board.
The critique landed the same week the paywall machinery was being stress-tested publicly: the piece was picked up by Mixed Media, which framed it alongside reports that the Times asked Twitter to shut down paywall-dodgers exploiting its 'nyti.ms' short links — a reminder that the paper's own social distribution tools double as bypass routes.
First-order effects
- Readers comparing unified multi-device subscriptions now see the Times priced as the outlier, forcing the paper to justify its rate purely on exclusive-content grounds rather than feature parity.
- The bundled packages the Times prepared for its website, smartphone and tablet apps — including the full iPad app it already flagged would eventually require payment — become the concrete product readers must choose among at launch.
Second-order effects
- Other paywalled publishers get a reference price point: if the Times sustains premium rates, rivals gain cover to price above commodity media subscriptions; if conversion disappoints, they can point to the outlier chart.
- Sharing infrastructure becomes a battleground — the same nyti.ms links the Times built with Bit.ly to seed social traffic are the mechanism readers use to route around the wall, putting the paper in the position of policing its own referral channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news organizations split into two camps: those pricing on scarce, differentiated reporting like the Times, and those competing at the low annual-price tier set by music, video and software services — with little viable middle ground.
- Publisher economics shift toward measuring how much free social distribution is worth sacrificing at the paywall, since every sharing tool a paper builds also functions as an access loophole.
The trend: News publishers are testing whether exclusive journalism alone can command prices well above converged multi-device media services, with the New York Times setting the high-water mark.