NYT's Digital Subscription Plan: A Loss For Advertisers, A Loss For Readers

Here we go again: backwards.

Effective online advertising is, at long last, leaving behind its past models.  To say the very least, banners aren't just digital versions of print ads any longer.  There is today incredible technology creating targeting and messaging and optimization opportunities for advertisers.  Platforms and advertising systems months old deliver more eyeballs to more and more specific destinations than ever.

But the newspaper business seemingly can't leave anything behind.  The New York Times certainly can't.  With their move to a paywall, the Times is telling us they look at their product as a dead-tree object in a blue pay box.

Online advertisers are equipped with the newest and most powerful tools their industry has ever seen.  More than ever, advertisers can take a large audience and segment and subsegment and optimize simultaneously.

The New York Times' response to those advertisers?

To cut down on the audience.  To put up a paywall and lock most of those eyeballs out.

You might think that the Times has faced a serious question and made a serious choice:  Between their readers and their advertisers, who is their customer?  This choice seems to suggest that the Times thinks their readers are their customers and the advertisers are a secondary market.

But they didn't really.  They couldn't have, because with the tiniest handful of exceptions, a newspaper paywall first, foremost and forever, drives away readers in droves. This decision will do more to divorce the readers of the NYT from their preferred content than putting Sunday funnies in the paper would have.

All that optimized marketing firepower.  Thrown away.  All those eyeballs.  Driven away.  Whatever remains, locked into a blue box on the street.  Asking for quarters while leaving millions on the table.