Why Did The New York Times Paywall Cost $40 Million?

There’s been a lot of speculation as to how the New York Times‘ paywall cost a whopping $40-50 million. The final product is hardly a fortress, seeing as everyday another amateur hacker seems to come up with a theory of how to work around it. And the Times certainly didn’t spend it copy-editing their advertising.

Philip Greenspun explains the exorbitant sum:

A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting.

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