The New York Times is rolling out its new digital subscription policy. There's a whole article by its publisher about the shift explaining the different options. What struck me is that they are struggling through many of the issues we are encountering and it will be an interesting experiment to see how users react. Some highlights that I thought echoed our experiences thus far with vialogues:

- They want to let people access some limited content for free (so people don't just turn away from the site), but want heavy users to pay for it.

- They don't want to penalize people for coming to the site from other places. If you follow a facebook link to a site, then apparently you will be able to view the article even if you've reached your unsubscribed limit of articles. This is just like our struggle to let content producers give away their content for free to encourage the production of content, while also realizing that when people access that content it will cost some money.

It will also be interesting to see how people try to game this system and if anything works. For example, could I subscribe to NYTimes and then just post a link to all the articles on NYTimes on my facebook?