Jon Simpson
NYT's blogs are set to be paywalled
The moderator, Staci Kramer, then asked Nisenholtz whether that meant there wasn’t something very weird going on as a result: that if you follow a link to a NYT story from a NYT blog, then that counts towards your quota, while if you follow a link to a NYT story from any other blog, then it doesn’t.
The subtext from this article seems to be that the NYT are trying to simultaneously have a paywall and let links in to drive traffic. Which, rather logically, leaves them in very strange situations about internal vs external linking and who to barricade from what. Their policy of allowing article views via Google referrers has already been causing this kind of strange, I’ve tended to just copy and paste article urls into Google when I hit the subscribers-only message…
Will be interesting to see how the paywalls roll out across News Corp by 2011.