&gt; Examine this truism — that you would never pay a nickel for a New York Times article that you enjoyed. What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five cents?<p>Some questions:<p>- Do I have to pay in advance, before knowing that I enjoyed an article?<p>- How would I feel skimming in 30 seconds through an article that I had to pay for and move on to the next one? This is something I do routinely. Would I keep paying for that or would I totally skip paid-for articles?<p>- Why should I pay for that NYT article and not for a free one from Reuters with about the same content? Should we differentiate between plain news, opinions, investigative journalism?<p>I understand that somebody writing a blog gets paid by something else and the journalist gets paid by that very article, but the journalist is competing for reader time (time, not news) with so many other things, from instant messaging to casual browsing.<p>To answer the question... 100k readers * 5 cents = 5k. Too much or too little? Did the article took a hour, a day, a month, a year to write? If it&#x27;s a hour, no way, even 1 cent would be too much. If it&#x27;s a month it&#x27;s spot on, maybe even cheap. But competition from free news, even the ones reporting on that article, is hard to beat.