From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital.

Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.

Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.

Presumably the price of print ads is in some way related to typical response rate? Obviously there is less direct feedback than online, but advertisers aren't flying completely blind and just assuming people see their ads, right?

in order to promote sales of product X, make it only slightly more expensive than the one it is marginally superior to.

http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...

All of that content, written, designed and published by some of the best news producers in the world.

It's instantly accessible, from anywhere you are. Updated all the time.

I simply cannot understand how you could argue all of that is worth no more than $1. Even $5 a week for an Internet/mobile subscription is reasonable considering the volume of edited and proofed material you get.

It's unfortunate that the mashables and reddits of the world have so soundly devalued the expectation of quality in news reporting.

tl;dr: you pay for content without ads, instead of a disposable paper version with ads.

But they don't.

See full prices here: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...

The average income in Norway is $6909 (USD), monthly and the average income in the United States (which is kinda a useless stat since cost of living is significantly different in different places) is $2678 (USD) monthly.

I used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway

for quick stats.

I feel like there should be some technical way to handle letting a user pay a flat amount, and distribute the proceeds to the sites you actually visit, in a sort of fair way.

Five dollars might buy you a meal at lunch at a fast food place, once, per week.

Five dollars might buy you a specialty coffee drink, once, per week.

Five dollars might cover your commute, bus fare, maybe once a week.

Five dollars a day won't even cover what most people put into car notes, its barely less than what many pay to play some MMOs.

So in the grand scheme of things its not a price point, people just like to gripe about having to actually pay for what they do not place value on, or sufficient value. Face it, far too many geeks do not see the complexity of delivering the news. Oh sure they see the web side but even then they vastly under estimate the costs to create the process let alone maintain it.

As with all other pay services, find those which are relevant to your needs, but damn, quit trying to tell these places how much it costs to run their business

The main problem I see is that there's a fairly strong argument to paying based on your ability, so that wealth customers ought to pay more.

Pricing information goods is hard.

The main problem is that it would create an economy where the the media outlets that produce the media desired by the paying authority (people are people and the fund will not be unlimited dollars) are prioritized over others, so that the only news will eventually be that which will be known to get you paid.

I.e., the controlling body -- I'm guessing a government entity, here -- will be the sole voice of the fourth pillar, and the whole notion of press freedom is buried and forgotten.

And that's precisely what you've got now, except that the paying authority is advertisers, with access mediated by whatever roadblocks Google's thrown at SEO this week. In earlier schemes, you got the content preferred by patrons (royalty and/or the Church), or what could support small roving troups of actors, players, musicians, bards, raconteurs, etc. Back in the 1980s I was watching an early "festival of computer animation" and noticed that shorts from cigarette advertisments (largely from Europe) featured heavily. It was, effectively, the Church for patronage of CGI development (nascent and expensive at the time).

The syndication need not be through a single agency, and there are existing examples in the music industry (not that that's perfect either): you've got The Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. For airtime play there is both logs (of airplay) and sampling methods to determine who gets paid for what. The licensing even covers live performance venues such as bars and nightclubs. There it's the club owner, not the band, who has the license for performances (it's much easier to conduct audits and enforcement against a street address than with a band whose location isn't fixed, has few assets, and can scatter to the winds).

The other question is how to link receipt and payment. In many locations, Internet access is sufficiently concentrated (often monopolized) that tying major providers into the scheme might work. Access bundles could be tied to your Internet subscription, possibly with tiers of service or credits available for content. This removes the problem of subscribing individually to different source publishers, though it could drive up the cost of Internet access.

Another approach would require more government involvement, essentially an income- or wealth-indexed content tax (addressing the "ability to pay" scenario). Collections are based on payment ability, _distribution_ is based on actual access and utilization.

There are a lot of thorny details, and the question of whether or not there's a process path from the present system to something resembling what I'm suggesting is very much unsettled.

Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart, the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways.

I think what's happening is that they have only one online price while there are many ways to get discounted print subscriptions.