The New York Times has announced new plans to limit the amount of content non-subscribing mobile readers can access each day with a new “mobile meter”.
The company announced the plans on Thursday, with the new measures set to come into effect from June 27. It said that the change will apply to its apps on iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7.5 (and up) and BlackBerry 10. It will also apply to The New York Times on Flipboard.
“The launch of the mobile meter allows users to choose which articles they want to access across dozens of sections and also provides them with an opportunity to discover content they may not have been expecting to find,” Denise Warren, executive vice president, The New York Times Digital Products and Services Group, said. “This change better aligns the app user-experience and the amount of free content available with that of the mobile Web site, as well as the browser experience on NYTimes.com.”
The restrictions mean that non-subscribers will have access to just three stories per day from across all sections of the site including blogs and slideshows, the company said, although video content remains free within the app. While in some ways it’s a reduction in the number of articles that people can read per day (currently, mobile readers can only view news from the ‘Top News’ section) it does at least provide a better choice of which three articles or sections those can come from. Subscribers get unlimited access to all the content from a mobile.
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To mark the introduction of the ‘mobile meter’, the organisation is offering a seven-day free trial (providing unlimited access to all sections) to users that download or update the iOS or Android versions of the apps, it said.
Visitors to the newspaper’s NYTimes.com website get 10 free articles (including blog posts, slide shows, video and other multimedia features) each calendar month, as well as access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds.
Image Credit – Thinkstock
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