Conversion being just the first – It's not just pay but how difficult/easy is sign-up and how secure etc. Design choices alone could be the difference between success and failure.

Then there's pricing – for a world wide market. What suits a mass US audience is out of reach except for the rich in other countries. And for sites like NYT who also want to benefit from it's high number of unique visitors that will be a balance – especially as the number of sites or outlets that offer a mass audience is diminishing so that value will rise.

This is a noble experiment – an having paid users insulates you from the well known censorship that groups have tried on TV shows – by forcing advertisers to pull ads from specific shows – generally because of content.

But I'm still not sure that content and good writing alone are enough. I think that they have to think about the totality of their offering and partition it so that paid users get something more than content – even vast amounts of it.

Earlier access is one dimension where pay has value – especially for commentary and investigative work. Graphic analysis is another (NYT diagrams are typically very insightful) . Ability to extract specific comments might be another – or identify theme's easily is another – because this is a form of surveying.

To implement pay you have to think beyond the content and think about how it is used, can be used and who values it. Partitioning and repackaging will be the name of the game.

It's a difficult dilemma that more and more content producers will face.

Conversion being just the first – It's not just pay but how difficult/easy is sign-up and how secure etc. Design choices alone could be the difference between success and failure.

Then there's pricing – for a world wide market. What suits a mass US audience is out of reach except for the rich in other countries. And for sites like NYT who also want to benefit from it's high number of unique visitors that will be a balance – especially as the number of sites or outlets that offer a mass audience is diminishing so that value will rise.

This is a noble experiment – an having paid users insulates you from the well known censorship that groups have tried on TV shows – by forcing advertisers to pull ads from specific shows – generally because of content.

But I'm still not sure that content and good writing alone are enough. I think that they have to think about the totality of their offering and partition it so that paid users get something more than content – even vast amounts of it.

Earlier access is one dimension where pay has value – especially for commentary and investigative work. Graphic analysis is another (NYT diagrams are typically very insightful) . Ability to extract specific comments might be another – or identify theme's easily is another – because this is a form of surveying.

To implement pay you have to think beyond the content and think about how it is used, can be used and who values it. Partitioning and repackaging will be the name of the game.

It's a difficult dilemma that more and more content producers will face.