[JumpCrisscross]

> Unless you're already a name brand (e.g. the NYT, a handful of very high profile columnists, etc.) you can't just assume people will know the value of your work

Sure. This problem is conserved across private enterprise.

> providing half your content for free while keeping half behind a paywall seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy to address this discoverability problem

The New York Times runs a 12% operating margin [1]. Giving away half their content without sacrificing quality would require incurring the same 88¢ of costs for 50¢ of revenue; it just doesn't work. Sales and marketing is usually a single-digit percent of revenue for a reason [2].

The partial-reveal strategy particularly fails for news because I can now decide which articles I'll run through the Internet Archive. If you paywall everything, that's too tedious.

[1] https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2024/11/Q324-Press-Release-...

[2] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2...

[gowld]

NYT literally gives away some content for free and charges for the rest.

NYT doesn't charge per article; they charge for tiers of access.

[JumpCrisscross]

> NYT literally gives away some content for free and charges for the rest

Yes. Not half.

[Drew_]

And not 0 either - meaning your numbers and thesis are wrong. The NYT is a successful publication using a "hybrid" model. In fact, basically every publication is.