Popularity vs. Value

The recent action at the New York Times to make their flagship columnists available online only to paying subscribers is a good case example of a tactic that is repeated elsewhere, by many different types of service and product providers, from time to time. The logic runs like this:
-the NYT wants additional revenue
-it justifiably considers the fact that their online readership exceeds their print readership, and tries to leverage that demographic
-their op-ed columnists are by far the most consistently emailed and linked features
-so...charge for the most popular content!

The overall reaction seems lukewarm at best. The Times has yet to announce any subscription numbers, which implies underperformance. But this should come as no surprise. Jay Rosen neatly sums up the particulars of the case:

The value proposition there is muddled...do we value Nicholas D. Kristof's column more if he's an "exclusive?"

We don't. In fact, it's probably the reverse. If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If "everyone" isn't, less of a must. "Exclusive online access" attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist's power.

Perhaps the NYT is mistaken as to their own importance. Rosen's business analysis is apt, but doesn't speak directly to customer action. I think there's a more general principle that can be extracted here.

The powers at the Times obviously have equated popularity more or less directly with value. The columnists are popular and widely read, therefore they must be of value to the individual, right? Sometimes this is certainly true--Harry Potter has made a hobbyist housewife into a billionaire author. But this relies on social networking effects for its strength. Many schoolkids (and adults) can't bear to not be part of the in-group when the topic of Harry Potter comes up. They'll pay; not just for the pleasure of reading the story, but also for the social potential it brings.

Within the chattering class, this may hold true for NYT op-ed columnists. But what percentage of the readership numbers do they account for? I suspect that most people reading and even emailing these articles could do without them--although the NYT is betting that they can't. The flip side of this value equation is the value of the individual's time. Many of us have amounts of time here and there which we don't value very highly. In modern life especially, this can come in small chunks. Idle minutes at the office between tasks is a daily reality for many workers. Many of us read favorite sites online during this time. If a lot of those people read the NYT columnists, it is not necessarily because they are deemed important, but that they can quickly and cheaply fill some quick, cheap time. If either the time or the reading is no longer cheap, the pattern dissolves.

This behavior also applies to larger chunks of time. I've played more than one free MMORPG, and enjoyed the hours I've spent on them. But when they become premium services, I won't pay for them. This is not because I'm so poor or cheap that I can't--but they're just not worth it to me. In other words, I use the service because it is free, not because it is a valuable service. It is a good match for my cheap time, when I have it, but a premium service, even if higher quality, would force me to recoup my losses, so to speak, with greater time investment that I'm just not willing to give.