If NYT‘s Paywall Won’t Impact FiveThirtyEight Fans, Who Will It Impact?
Following yesterday’s announcement that The New York Times would be hosting Nate Silver’s popular FiveThirtyEight blog, perhaps as soon as August, statistics enthusiasts in the blog’s comments section worried that the Times‘ forthcoming paywall might impact their rabid consumption of Silver’s analysis.
That fretting may be in vain, The Wrap reports. A Times spokesperson said that the paywall only kicks in after a reader has read a certain number of stories. “The majority of our readers will be unaffected when using the site and will continue to have the same experience they have always had,” the spokesperson said.
Gee, that line sounds awfully familiar. Plus, we’re not convinced that the “majority of our readers” refrain applies in this case. As New York Times executive editor Bill Keller recently told MediaMatters:
Those who mainly come to the website via search engines or links from blogs, and those who only come sporadically — in short, the bulk of our traffic — may never be asked to pay at all.
Judging from the 241 comments on Nate Silver’s post announcing FiveThirtyEight’s partnership with the Times, the politics blog’s readers are anything but sporadic visitors. If anything, they’re the kind of avid readers the Times has said it wants to rope into online subscriptions.
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