"When answering the following questions, please think about whether you would be willing to pay for continued unlimited access to nytimes.com.
"How likely would you be to pay a $2.50 monthly fee -- which would be a 50% discount for home delivery subscribers -- for continued, unlimited access to nytimes.com?"
According to Bill Mitchell (Poynter), the above was stated in a survey The New York Times e-mailed to all subscribers Thursday. Bill Mitchell is incorrect. You've got four print subscribers working on this article and none of them received that survey.
No surprise that The New York Times can't even handle the distribution of a survey.
They can't handle much of anything.
Remember "Times Select"?
Started in 2005, Times Select was a "service" that, if you paid $7.95 a month ($49.95 a year), provided you with all new content to the paper (including the columnists who had been placed behind a "wall") and allowed you the chance to read X number of archived articles. If you were a subscriber to the print edition (paying basically for one month what the Times Select 'subscriber' was paying for one year), you already had access to these "services" for free.
In September 2007, despite insisting that Times Select was a "hit" and had brought in $10 million in revenues for the paper each year, the service was ended.
Now the paper wants to return to it.
And get this, subscribers to the print edition will have to pay.
Subscribers who are already paying will have to fork over an additional $30 a year just to be able to do online what they currently can for free and could for free when Times Select was in effect.
Way to screw your subscribers. Way to piss of your base.
In an economy that's tanking, someone should have grasped that you don't want to piss people off further but telling them that the $600 or so they pay each year for the paper isn't enough and that anyone can pay $30 and get more than they do is just the thing to have people say, "You know I think I'll cancel my print subscription."
