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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

On the other side, I rarely read the New Yorker. I enjoy the occasional article that pops up here, but I wouldn't pay to read any of them. They'll lose me as a reader by going behind a paywall.

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The pay wall isn't meant to attract people who "rarely read" the New Yorker. Those are the consumers they are OK with losing because they didn't make up an appreciable demographic for their business model anyway.

Readers are readers. They now have zero chance of converting me into a paying subscriber, since I can't read their articles. With a more flexible paywall, I can be encouraged to subscribe every time I'm linked to an article.

It's a metered paywall [1]. You'll still be able to read a few articles a month. IMHO, that's fairly flexible.

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/note-readers

But you yourself said (in GP) that you wouldn't pay to read them. So the chance of converting you into a paying subscriber is 0 to start with. What's the loss? :D

But they had a zero chance of converting you to a subscriber to begin with. You represented only an expense to them.

The slate article calls it a "metered paywall" which means that unsubscribed users will be able to read a limited number or articles per week. You'll probably be below your limit every time "the occaisional article" pops up.

Not to mention that if you're the free rider type, you can just read the articles in incognito and avoid the metering issue.

You don't even need to go incognito.

There are extensions available for every major browser that will let you set detailed cookie policies, such as wiping per-domain cookies once every x hours or x days.

This can be set up once, and then be completely transparent to the user afterwards.

> I wouldn't pay to read any of them

Then why should they care about you? If you're not willing to give them money you shouldn't expect them to give you content for free.

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