Sales people and business-side executes tend to believe as a matter of faith that if people can get something for free, they won’t pay for it. But all they need to do is look at their own behavior to see how that isn’t true: when they go to a restaurant in a distant town that they’ll never visit again, they still leave a 20% tip.
The fact is that no one subscribes to the WSJ or the FT because of their exclusivity. As a result, the smart thing for both papers to do is to maximize their paying readership by maximizing their overall readership. Instead, both have taken a scared and defensive approach to digital subscriptions, fearing that if their readers can get their content for free, then they won’t pay.
Wonderfully, the NYT seems to have disproved that idea, claims Felix Salmon at Wired.
Except he is looking at it through the most idealized prism possible, the kind of thing possible when the magazine is a small piece of a multi-billion dollar corporation, like Wired is. The NY Times is losing money and the Wall Street Journal is not. If that's a win, Rupert Murdoch is better off losing.
