NYT Feels Music Industry Pain
“If it was as easy as it looks, everyone would do it.” These words may best describe some of the early pain being felt by the New York Times as it struggles to adjust the rules, technology and concept of its, about-to-begin March 28, paywall. And although the music industry is just an onlooker in this info-tug-of-war, no doubt music leaders can see a close parallel to their own industry.
A loophole purposely built into the NYT system has already backfired. NYT decided that links from Twitter and Facebook should get free passage through the paywall and be able to exceed the 20 item limit per month imposed on non-subscribers. Search links would get five items per day. The thinking seems sound, since these social networking/search links are responsible for directing large amounts of traffic to the newspaper website.
Enter new Twitter feed @freeNYTimes. The feed tweets a link to every story published on nytimes.com. This allows readers to easily surf around and through the paywall, avoiding its restrictions. According to a Forbes.com story, NYT has already asked Twitter to shut down the new feed. At press the feed has 562 followers and explains itself by saying, “NYTimes articles as they’re published. Read more than your 20 articles/month allotment, because you came from Twitter! Data provided by The New York Times.”
A second similar twitter feed has already sprouted at @timeswiretap. It now has 92 followers.
Another widely reported NYT hack was created by a Canadian blogger in just four lines of code and bears the name, NYTClean. The site is already experiencing a massive slowdown due to a rash of unexpectedly high visitor traffic.
NYTClean coder David Hayes sums up the problem saying, “Wow, I’ve gotten tens of thousands of hits since this went up yesterday, especially considering this was a lunchtime project — You just can’t see a wall like this without wondering how you can get around it. I love the New York Times, don’t say that I forced you to not pay for it.”
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There already was another way for anybody to see any article without any hacking . Simply Google the articles title, author or anything relating to it, and it will pop up in Google search. Click NYT link to article and you are usually there.
The NYT is wasting the publics time trying to charge people money for access to information that is already free. They lost most of their credibility in the Arts anyway over 2 decades ago, for various reasons to lengthy to pursue here. Not going with Liz Taylor as a lead obit on the cover was very tacky. Kedofiy has been a pain in the butt for 40 years, someone like LizT only dies once on one day. RIP