NY Times has another stab at the paywall

The New York Times, the most visited newspaper website in the US, has announced that it is reintroducing a paywall in an attempt to boost flagging revenues. The last time it tried was in 2005. The experiment ended in tears in 2007, with columnists complaining no one was reading them any more.
 
This time round, users will hit a content ceiling of 20 articles a month, after which they will have to pay a minimum of $15 for four weeks. The most expensive package is $35 a month for an all-access plan that includes the iPad application.
 
But critics are saying that the paywall is seriously flawed, and falls far short of the bolder model introduced by the Wall Street Journal and the London Times.
 
NYT estimates that about 85 per cent of its online readers do not use the website often enough to have to pay for content. For those that do find themselves up against the paywall, there is still unlimited access through Facebook and Twitter. Users accessing the site through Google, which apparently accounts for 15 per cent of the NYT's visitors, will be restricted to five articles a day.
 
With the global community accustomed to getting their news for free, however, the biggest question is whether or not the paper can convince consumers to change a 15-year-old habit.
 
"A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the Web," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of the New York Times Company, yesterday.
 
"This move is an investment in our future," he said. "The challenge now is to put a price on our work without walling ourselves off from the global network, to make sure we continue to engage with the widest possible audience".
 
The decision is indicative of the dire situation newspapers find themselves in as they scrabble to generate enough income off the back of advertising attached to online content.
 
Between 2009 and 2010, US newspapers have seen a fall of 6.3 per cent in advertising revenue across both digital and print platforms. This is despite an national overall increase of 6.5 per cent across all media during the same period.

In Britain, the Times and the Sunday Times recently joined the Financial Times behind a paywall. There are also rumours that the Daily Telegraph will be jumping on the bandwagon. Success so far has been mixed, with the Times reportedly losing 4 million users a month in the initial stages. ·