Like the Times before it, the Telegraph is going behind a paywall. Fine. I can live without it. I’m certainly not paying them any money. I don’t buy print newspapers for a very good reason – I refuse to enable their behaviour by giving them money. Likewise, I’ll take the same approach with their online editions. There are other sources of news.
The world is changing and it seems that the MSM is struggling to keep up.
Newspapers need to realize that if they want to charge money on the Internet they need to make their fee structures reasonable. People are willing to pay a fair amount for hardcopy papers because they clearly see the physical expenses involved. Online there ARE NO physical expenses and people resent paying anything close to what they’d pay to have it delivered to the door or picking it up from the newsstand.
While I understand your comment about “enabling” them, what they SHOULD do is ask people to sign up, allow them one free article a day, and then have the site charge five or ten cents per article after that. The paper would make money, people wouldn’t feel cheated, and it would work all the way around. They could also offer a “subscription” on a monthly or yearly basis: but it would have to be no more than a quarter or so of their hardcopy price for people to accept it.
– MJM
They appear to be going for a monthly subscription of between two quid and a tenner. Not a huge outlay, but more that I will pay for the reasons stated above. I won’t buy newspapers on principle.
Oh no – didn’t see this. It was one of the few which didn’t. Like you, I won’t be paying.
You’re still paying, but in a very long and convoluted manner, by buying products that are advertised in the newspapers.
I can’t say that worries me over much. Not least, having switched adblock off to see what is advertised, there is nothing being plugged that I would buy anyway, so a result.
DT went behind a paywall about three months ago for me. However, since I consider it the best of a bad lot out of the UK MSM, I now pay. At £1.99 a month I don’t think it’s outrageous. I think you can access 20 or 30 articles a month without paying, but that’s a bit of a pointless exercise to my mind, and I wouldn’t bother at all if I was limited like that.
The problem is that once you agree to pay them, really in any amount at all, you’ve broken the barrier.
:/
MJM
Apparently the Sun will also be considering it too.
The Telegraph now allows its readers to read 20 free articles a month. After that time a charge chips in. I’ve gotten around this by using a range of proxy servers that hide both my IP address and location. Thus I pay nothing and continue as per usual to read the Telegraph on a daily basis.
All well and good, but what do you pay for your proxy servers? I use one and it costs me €6 a month.
I use free proxy servers…there are plenty to chose from if you look them up on Google.
Alternaively you ould just delete cookies when the limit is reached. If for some reason you do not wish to do this as it affects automatic log on to other sites, keep one browser, there are ctainly enough of them around, jus for viewing DT content.