1) If this is indeed a good way to sell content, why not roll your own rental service through your own journal? Why is a third party middleman necessary? Are readers likely to use a specialized search engine for this type of content, or Google, which will bring them directly to your journal where you can offer them your own rentals?

2) Is the 99 cent price point reflective of the value of the content or is it based on the market for music sales? Why not $!.25? Why not 89 cents?

The smaller consulting resources in the room (like me) just went nuts. It’s the perfect model for our consumption habits. It also tends to convert non-consumers into paying consumers. Not a bad idea at all.

In reading about, it seems they are going to explore versioning for the content, to try and maximise the returns, but perhaps more than that, to try and do some complex profiling of the NYT users so that the the equation that determines when and at what level a visitor hits the call to pay, is based on an understanding of what bits of the NYT that that particular visitor values. I value bits of the Tech section. The sports, meh. Lifestyle, doubleMeh, so totting those up on my pages visited is bad way to try to get me to convert, better to add that traffic to the ad numbers the NYT still wants to keep. Tech pages though, count those very carefully and then provide me with an offer to pay for the things that I value. If they get this right (and I think they will want to iterate this a bunch of times) they can start to get very flexible with the pricing and price to me, as my interests change over time. They can also add in pricing for access via devices as well… You only use the web? Meh, You use the web/iphone/tablet(whomevers!) and want what you have read/not read to follow you across the devices, there might be a charge for that. Hal Varian’s paper on versioning is well worth the time, if you can keep up with the maths. There are a number of subscription based models spinning off from his thinking. I wonder if the NYT can do bespoke pricing for each of it’s visitors?

I do think there’s a lot of potential in remixes and repackaging of material for individual sales though. We’re already doing this with print, and like everyone else, I’m curious to see the storefront Apple sets up this week, as doing it electronically would be easier/cheaper and allow for more experimentation.

But the institutional subscription does allow many labs to take advantage of scale and spread the costs of subscribing so each only pays a small portion. It’s a philosophy in-line with what many institutions are doing for expensive research equipment, setting up shared centers for things like imaging, sequencing and such. Instead of each lab buying their own microscope, each contributes to a center that can purchase a wider variety of scopes than the lab could afford on its own.