Exclusive! NYTimes Paywall To Increase Readership?

The New York Times is putting up a paywall again;  each month, the first X number of nytimes.com articles you read will be free, after that they'll block your ability to navigate the site unless you pay a subscription fee.  Media watchers speculate that the NY Times will lose a lot of readers.  Lets all pretend we're sophisticated enough to be among those effected. 

Remember back during the early "aughts", when TV was for morons.  The only show people would admit to watching was The Sopranos.  Part of the appeal of that show was that the common dullard couldn't watch it.  In order to watch it, you either had to be rich, or you had to know a guy. 

The exclusivity of The Sopranos made you feel sophisticated, it gave you higher status; its possible this created more demand for the show than if it were offered for free.  This runs contrary to the normal law of demand, but it applies to many luxury goods in the economy.  These are called Veblen Goods, and they're a real, verifiable phenomenon, unlike the as-yet undocumented mythological Giffen goods.  By the way, why can't we call them Griffin goods?

 

Important question:  do griffins take bird shits or lion shits.

For some people, NY Times articles are a Veblen good.  Part of the appeal has always been that reading it makes you feel superior, which makes it a source of self-identity.  We all know people who would go out of their way to read more NYTimes just so they could tell people they had to pony up the subscription fee. 

The opposite of a Veblen Good is pussy, the value of which drops to nothing the instant its price rises above zero. 

 

This is a product you don't want to identify yourself with.