Comment by FloorEgg
5 hours ago
Hi Ronan,
I would love to read your piece and pay you and new Yorker for it, but I am not interested in paying a subscription. If I could press a button and pay a reasonable one time license such as $3 or $5 for just this article, or better yet a few cents per paragraph as they load in, I wouldn't hesitate.
However I'm not going to pay for yet another subscription to access one article I'm interested in.
I'm sure you can't do anything about this, but I just wanted you to know.
You deserve to be compensated for great journalism. In this case, unfortunately, I won't read it and you won't earn income from me.
You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound sarcastic).
The public library [digital edition] is absolutely the correct answer. I maintain a library card at 3 different local municipal library systems. My local city's library offers access to several Digital Library apps, including Overdrive, Hoopla, and Libby. It took me a couple searches in Libby to locate the New Yorker and it offered up the current issue right away. The article is on page 32. It is ridiculous that anyone considers to access this from "The Public Internet" or the newyorker dot com website, rather than simply turning to your public library, which has been the go-to resource for basically everyone, for hundreds of years.
You're already paying for your library with your tax dollars. If you don't use it, you may lose it, but you will certainly lose out by subsidizing bums, vagrants, and other families who use the library to their heart's content.
The public library also features lots of streaming and CD music, videos, and video games, that you can freely check out without any cost. In fact, my local library staff told me that they've abolished overdue fees. Libby and the digital apps will automatically renew or return materials. My physical books even got auto-renewed three times before I needed to manually do it, or bring them back into the building.
You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells magazines and buy a physical copy
Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.
I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.
Many have tried it (as well as the oft-recommended micropayments idea) and it never justifies the added expense and overhead of the customization. Closest is probably the NYTimes’ gift article feature.
I really doubt the implementation difficulty is the actual reason. It's not hard to have an extra table of specific article permissions.
You could hit up a public library...
Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)