Wednesday, January 16, 2013; 2:33:44 PM Eastern
Gamify the NY Times
The word gamify is kind of weird but nice. - It means to take something that isn't a game and give it game-like features.
- Twitter is gamified because it shows you how many followers people have.
- It seems the NYT could benefit from a little of that.
- How might it work?
- 1. Everyone starts out with 10 free article reads per month. As it works right now.
- 2. When I tweet a link to a piece on the NYT site, I get my own code, so they can tell that a hit came from me. For every 100 clicks, I get another free read.
- 3. That way we can put aside all that michegas about 99 cents for 8 weeks, which seems pretty crass, because I'm a veritable flow machine for the Times. Or at least I would be if they would gamify. :-)
- What do you think?
- PS: They can give us twice the reads for traffic generated for competitive articles, ones where they want to beat out the WaPo, BBC etc. And when the NYT gets their own Twitter-like system, which they will have to do someday if they want to stay independent, they can offer triple-points there, to encourage use of that system.
