[mjfern]

The porous New York Times paywall works because it effectively segments the market. [1]

The first segment consists of customers with a higher willingness to pay that aren't aware of the paywall workarounds or enjoy accessing the Times without futzing around. Who are these readers? Readers with high disposable income, older readers, and heavy readers.

The second segment consists of customers with a lower willingness to pay, who have identified the workarounds, and are willing to deal with the additional steps involved in bypassing the paywall. Who are these readers? Readers with lower disposable income, younger readers, and light readers.

The result of this segmentation is that the New York Times has been able to attract a significant number of online paying subscribers (segment 1), without decimating its overall readership figures (segment 1 + 2). By maintaining its overall readership figures, the New York Times has been able to preserve its online advertising revenue.

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[1] Since the product is nearly the same for both segments, aside from the steps involved in bypassing the paywall, you might consider this as an example of price discrimination.

[tripzilch]

I never identified any workaround. In fact, I never even identified this paywall. I just have my browser set to throw away cookies on exit, except for a small whitelist of sites I want to stay logged in to (Opera can keep per-site preferences, but even before I found out about that feature, I preferred not to keep my cookies around forever). Assuming that's the "workaround", it appears that I have never read more than 10 NY Times articles per browser session, since they started doing this.

I also keep a rather extensive blocklist of URL-patterns I don't need my browser to load, ever. It took quite a while before I noticed (on a friend's computer, about 1.5y ago) that YouTube makes you watch ads before a video. I actually have no idea how that particular URL-pattern got into the blocklist, since I honestly hadn't seen those ads before. I suppose I was messing around with the webdev tool one day, noticed some resources that seemed unnecessary, I disabled them, videos continued to work fine, and forgot about it.

I realize this places me securely in the second segment, of course.

[biesnecker]

Segments the market into people who know about their browser's incognito/porno mode, and those that don't.

[derleth]

> the steps involved in bypassing the paywall

And to everyone who objects "It's one step!", remember Step Zero:

Knowing it can be done.

Which implies Step Negative One:

Caring enough to find out.

It's hard to take those steps. There are, in point of fact, very likely a huge number of Steps Negative One you haven't yet taken, or are not going to take. I know that's true for me.

Were there worlds enough, and time, perhaps, but not as long as I'm living on the fourscore and ten plus change.