NY Post’s iPad Paywall Causes Stir

Critics are crying foul over the Spic-and-span York Post's effort to push subscriptions for its iPad app by block access to its internet site via the Hunting expedition web browser.

Visit the newspaper's website from an iPad via Safari and it directs you to download the subscription-based application in order to view the website.

The paper's move basically makes its content untouchable to iPad users who do not invite the New York Post's votive iPad app. An iPad landing place page now redirects readers to the App Store, instead of an ad on the chockablock internet site promoting the app, as previously employed.

Users of third-party iPad browsers, such Eastern Samoa Opera Mini and Skyfire, can stock-still approach the Post's website, in what seems to be an supervision on the percentage of the Keith Rupert Murdoch-owned publisher.

The Inexperienced House of York Post's tactic to get more iPad users to pay a subscription inside its dedicated iPad app — $6.99 per month, $39.99 for six months or $79.99 for the year; no one-man integer issue purchase pick — has flared raised critics across the World Wide Web who have described the initiative as misguided.

PaidContent 's Staci Kramer proprietary it "peerless of the most poorly formed paywall efforts I've come across — and I've seen much than a couple of." She notes "for iPad users relying on Safari, it is arsenic though the site exists only if equally a billboard for an app. It's also broken access from the NYP's personal Facebook varlet. Click on a link from within Safari and you final stage up at the airt page."

Terminated at Scripting News , Dave Winer says Red-hot York Spot's strategy to promote iPad app subscriptions "is break the Web. If no one victimized the iPad IT wouldn't matter to. But lashing of people utilisation it." He wonders "how Apple feels about this? I can buoy't imagine they like it. I can see the ads now. 'Get an Mechanical man tablet to read the vane.'"

It's unclear why the New House of York Post decided on such a political platform-peculiar block for iPad users, without blocking third-party iPad browsers surgery Android tablets. Part of Word Corporation, the Post is one of the wide-ranging titles the company has been disagreeable to monetize aside raising pay out walls more or less its websites in grade to boost subscriptions. As 9To5Mac 's Seth Weintraub notes, "hopefully the backlash from this move discourages others from copying this game plan."

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