When I put down my credit-card a few months ago to pay for the NY Times IPhone app, I did it mostly because I know that journalism costs money and that the model using money only from advertising is not enough to sustain the type of journalism I demand. In a democracy it's important that you have a free media to be a watch dog to make sure the politicians, big-wigs and bankers are staying in line. For this $15 I'm supposed to get unlimited access but I wasn't told that with my unlimited which earlier on was offered for free but I was at least hoping for a better app as the old NY Times app was dreadfully inadequate as it would crash 10 times throughout my commute home.
For the first few weeks I was happy to see that the application froze less often but over the last few weeks I noticed that the 'new-toy' thrill has kind of worn off when at some point the app basically tripled the amount of ads I see. Not only is basically every article now flanked with an ad, if you click through about 10 articles you'll get blasted with a full-page ad. Now ignoring the ones on the bottom are OK and in a world where the MTA puts advertisements on the turnstiles it's expected but when I'm already laying out $15 do I have to have to deal with the full page ads too?
I remember people would use NetZero back in the late 90's but had the understanding that they would have to deal with your browser crashing, a flurry of pop-up ads plus a few Trojan-horses, viruses and deals for Viagra. Most people would opt out of this 'free' deal by paying $20 to AOL where you would have a much lower level of these nuisances.
The issue with this NY Times ad is that if you downloaded the new app you got both a $15 bill and a ton of ads, if you are still using the old one you get free unlimited access and almost no ads. Something doesn't add up.
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