august 31 nyt
For a long while, New York Times subscribers were afforded only ten gift links/month to share stories with other people. Recently that changed. Subscribers like me now have unlimited gift links to share with you.
The change isn't a mystery. The Times clearly wants new subscribers and they're using subscribers like me to do it. Giving me unlimited gift links will ostensibly make me want to share more articles, which will in turn lead me to sharing more articles with you.
Sidebar: This doesn't necessarily work for reasons including but not limited to that the Gray Lady, in 2026, ain't what she used to be. The same can likely be said of us all, of course, but most of us don't platform Bret Stephens, a lipless nitwit who looks like he thinks oatmeal is spicy, in an effort to appeal to the kinds of people who openly and loudly hate the Times, a publication they've never read.
Okay, so, anyway, they're giving me unlimited gift links so that I share stories and whatever with you, because
a) the kinds of things I, a Times subscriber, will send to you, a person who for the purposes of this example do not have a subscription to the Times, are likely things that you are interested in for reasons including but not limited to that you and I probably have some non-random similarities in re: our demographics, psychographics, education, income, political leanings, media habits, etc; and
b) it's likely way, way cheaper to acquire subscribers like this than by running some kind of CPC (cost-per-click) campaign that doesn't actually guarantee conversions.
In essence, the Times is using me as an affiliate marketer —— but they're not paying me. The gift linker actually gets the worst end of the deal, if you think about it.
Youget free access to articles or multimedia pieces created and disseminated by a paid publication of some note and will likely qualify for some discounted subscription rate as a result; the Times gets access to a person whose demographic/psychographic profile is similar (or at least not dissimilar) to an existing Times subscriber, whom they will likely try to persuade to subscribe themselves; and I get nothing except maybe some social currency, which the weed store across the street keeps telling me they don't take.
To be clear, I didn't just figure all of this out. I used to work in CRM, and have been on both sides of the affiliate marketing relationship. I just wrote it all out today because I thought the realization at the end of it —— the person doing the marketing is the only person who doesn't "get" anything —— was funny, and because writing it out here made me feel better on a day where I felt slow and limited, as if my head was full of peanut butter.
Fuck, maybe I have something in common with Bret Stephens after all. It's a pity, that.
🌲 gonna huron
🌼 go ontario
🌱 touch michigan
🌳 grass erie
🌷 now superior
Be good to yourself.
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