R.I.P. TimesSelect

Gabriel 

Last week the New York Times ended its policy of charging for online access to its op-eds. There has been a lot of commentary on this (which I’m too lazy to link to) about how this was a failed experiment, and how (unlike WSJ) NYT was giving away its expensive news and charging for its cheap opinion, etc. The interesting thing to me (and I’m not claiming this is original) is that absolutely nobody reads the NYT op-ed page because it has Bob Herbert, people read Bob Herbert because he’s on the NYT op-ed page. The reason for this is not because the NYT op-ed page has so much institutional credibility that we dutifully attend to it despite the lack of compelling content (like going to church even though your preacher couldn’t sermonize his way out of a paper bag). Rather, the reason is network externalities: we used to read the op-ed page because we thought other people were reading it and we didn’t want to be left out of the conversation. Although it’s hard to remember, a few years ago a good portion of the political blogosphere was a Talmud to the op-ed page’s Torah. National Review Online even had a column called “Krugman Truth Squad” devoted to fisking the columnist, an enterprise that would seem rather pointless today. After TimeSelect, this huge cultural presence of the op-ed page crashed overnight.

This is a good example on how a shock can affect a complex system. One way to think about it is to imagine that everyone else in the chattering classes got TimeSelect, would it be worth it for you to subscribe? For myself, it would probably be worth paying $50/year to converse knowledgeably with my colleagues and the entire blogosphere. However, this was not the actual situation. If a few people drop the service this decreases the network externalities of the service, and in turn it becomes less valuable to the remaining subscribers, many of whom drop it until you’re left with only the few dozen people who actually think the op-ed page is an intrinsically riveting read. This is a dynamic threshold model with positive feedback of a type first described by Schelling and later generalized by Granovetter and still later popularized by Gladwell. The original model was to explain residential segregation. Suppose that whites have a distribution of preferences for the minimum whiteness of their neighborhood with a mean of 70% and a standard deviation of 15%. The naive prediction would be that there would be a lot of neighborhoods that were about 70% white, but in fact there are MSAs like Detroit where almost all neighborhoods are either greater than 90% or less than 10% white (you can practically see 8 Mile from space). In Schelling’s model you start with a neighborhood that is 100% white until a few non-white households move in, moving the white rate to 98%. The vast majority of white households don’t care because they have preferences of between 50% and 98%, but a few hyper-bigoted households can’t stand their new neighbors and move out, only to be replaced by more non-white households. This upsets the whites with preferences between 95% and 98% and they move out which pushes the rate down to 95%, which in turn upsets the 90-95% preference whites, etc. Since you’re still in the upper tails of the distribution this all happens fairly slowly, but eventually around +1 sigma you start reaching the fat part of the curve and the neighborhood “tips,” with all the white households leaving overnight. Thus you have segregation much higher than that implied by the mean white preference (and no doubt the mean non-white preference as well). Likewise, you can imagine the NYT op-ed page going into a downward spiral where the more readers who abandon it, the less valuable it becomes to the remaining readers, who in turn also abandon it. Alternately, imagine that you subscribe to TimesSelect, but few other people do. With whom could you discuss it? Many bloggers subscribed to TimesSelect but were reluctant to link to it for fear of making the implicit demand that their readers subscribe to the unpopular service. (As Ezra Zuckerman recently observed in the comments, network externalities can not only create value but impose obligations. I for one am glad to be through with the chore of reading the NYT op-eds).
So one puzzle is whether having fallen off the paywall, will we put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I am actually inclined to think not. As shown theoretically by Banerjee and empirically by Salganik et al, positive feedback systems are fairly arbitrary in their allocation of success. If I had to guess what will eventually serve as the top dog, my money would be on the Atlantic blogs. I RSS several of these blogs and I would prefer any of them to any part of the NYT op-ed page. Part of it is that three of the six Atlantic bloggers are my age, but the real thing is that the Atlantic lets them write posts with no minimum or maximum length whereas the NY Times standard of 800 words twice a week can turn even the Wolfe-ian style of David Brooks into a font of boredom. One indication of the Atlantic‘s success is that Megan McArdle is beginning to experience the backhanded compliment of serving as a focus of hatred for some of the left blogosphere in the same way that Paul Krugman used to for the right.

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