What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
One bug riddled, easy to cheat New York Times paywall. This, from Philip Greenspun, is baffling:
Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting. In any case, a rack of database servers shouldn’t cost $40 million.
And courtesy of the Atlantic Wire: The Easiest Way to Cheat the New York Times Paywall Still Works
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
Their whole presentation scheme for displaying pages has to be reconsidered to work around this. This is why server side protection schemes are the way to go. Fancy new client side mechanisms to do everything are very easy to roll out these days, but browsers are extendable beasts, once the content is on the user's box, revealing it is a freshman exercise.
The underlying pain? Hiring capable, responsible technical support is as important to a business as finding an honest, engaged doctor when you are in pain. As in many things, the folks that excel in showmanship don't necessarily excel at the technical end. Many shops hire kids fresh out of school to keep costs down. Sadly, many kids graduate without developing the basic skill of anticipating the behavior of the system they are building in the environment where it will be deployed. Or in researching which software tools can be hardened for security and how.
I see this stuff all the time. It is usually where I find out what kind of a client I have. I find something like this, take the appropriate managers & execs into a conference room, and demonstrate. The reactions are priceless.
Aug '10
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
It's the Mexican Way. Carlos Slim, the billionaire from south of the border, is the de facto owner of The Times, isn't he? Most likely he hired people from his own companies to do the job and laundered the millions through front companies. He can engineer tax advantages and who knows what else by such a scheme. Mexican financiers live in an alternate universe.
May '10
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
I write this sort of software for a living, and this is an unimaginable amount of money for an "enhancement" to an existing system. It's even too much to pay for a brand spanking new system built from scratch. This is the scale of wastefulness that heretofore only government agencies could generate. As River says, there is likely some funny stuff going on here. Someone is moving money around and this was a convenient cover story.
They have have had servers supporting a high-volume site for years. A pay-wall will make traffic go down, even under the rosiest of forecasts.
Whatever madness has infected the NYT, I hope it spreads to my clients! I'd like to get those sort of fees for a web site upgrade.
Feb '11
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
Much complexity was apparently added by the T's pricing strategy, which involves lots of optional plans, limiting how many stories a user can read under a particular plan, etc. The NYT no doubt convinced itself that this array of complexity will be a marketing advantage: I think it's more likely to have the opposite effect.
In any event, $40-50MM for a paywall project is ridiculous.
Dec '10
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
Everyone's over thinking the issue. I can tell you in a heartbeat what the money was spent on.
From Despair.com's demotivational poster on Consulting:
"If you're not a part of the solution,there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."
I'm a consultant - I know these things.
Aug '10
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
I wish I'd have known they were willing to spend this much. I'd have been happy to do it for $35 million.
Jul '10
Re: What Can $40 Million Buy These Days?
I'll do it for $34M and throw in a Think Geek Wi-Fi finder t-shirt.