We should stop expecting things to be free

The New York Times announced yesterday that it would start a “metered” system that would charge readers of its NYTimes.com website a fee to read articles after a set number of articles have been read. You can read the press release here. Given the state of the newspaper industry and the status of the New York Times being one of the more respected newspapers in the US, this has generated a lot of buzz online. You can read about some of the reader feedback here.

As someone who reads stuff on NYTimes.com everyday for the last 12 years or so, this obviously affects me directly as I would like to continue reading this fine newspaper. My response to their decision to charge for content that is currently free is this:

I will gladly pay for a subscription, provided that 1) it is at a reasonable price and 2) it means less advertising on the site.

I want to emphasize the “gladly” part of my previous statement — yes, I’d gladly pay money to continue reading the Times online. To be perfectly honest, I don’t agree with people who think it needs to remain free. The New York Times is obviously a business and is out to make money. If the advertising revenues can’t support its operation completely, it’s gotta do what it’s gotta do. But why should anyone jump up and down and scream, “No this is evil. It needs to stay free!”

Take something else people often get for free — music. I know when I wanna get a song, I go to Baidu MP3 and find the song online to download for free. Quite frankly, I would be willing to pay for that, too, even though in reality I don’t right now. Here’s the problem… The music industry can’t make enough money from CD sales but that doesn’t mean that music is not something people will pay to enjoy. It simply means the business model should change and they need to provide either different products or a different experience/method for us to consume its products.

When something is reasonably priced and provides you the value you expect it to deliver, people ought to pay. And in fact that’s what we do with most of the things we want or need. Just think of the lunch you had today. You paid, didn’t you?

So why is there a sense of entitlement with this particular case?

I guess for one thing people have been spoiled. In the case of the NYTimes.com, it is free right now so of course some people have a hard time changing their mindset. And it’s not just online news. A lot of content/tools/services we get today online is free. Google certainly doesn’t charge us to search. Heck, Gmail (or Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, etc etc) is free, too. There is indeed a culture of us enjoying all these great things at no direct cost to us. However, people need to start understanding more the business aspect of the things that we get for free today.

More importantly for the NYTimes.com, though, is that they need to make sure after they start charging, their loyal readers, such as me, feel it’s worthwhile. If they can do that, then it’s only reasonable we accept the costs.