LibraryTechtonics

I’m sure there’s a whole lotta links to the New York Times announcing the opening of their site to the masses out there, so I’ll try to make this post brief and unique.

I must say, I do find it refreshing that they were completely honest and pragmatic about their reasoning, and that they didn’t try to sugar-coat their shift as a democratization of content. TimesSelect brought in a good number of subscribers, but the site traffic showed them that they could get more money out of eyeballs if they just opened everything up, and they’re owning up to it. This is definite progress in an industry that has been floundering it’s way through the wikinomicalization of the web; instead of continuing to force the old newspaper business model on the new economy and failing, they figured out how to use the new economy, and it’s new user culture, to their advantage.

It’s a very user-centered approach that makes them money, so everyone wins. You know, if you can just suffer the ads (or deftly apply AdBlock to your Firefox browser).

More sites are trying to figure out how to serve ads on their sites and still keep the services free and open, and, in the process, still preserve at least some of the user experience. Facebook is adding context and data sensitive ads to News Feeds, and YouTube is testing a new in-video ad system that gives content producers and viewers a few options on how to deal with the ads. User-centric is a huge hingepiece of Web 2.0, and it’s something we need to remember as librarians going forward.

Tags: New York Times