The NYTimes is indeed erecting a paywall, as the rumors had it.

I won’t address the decision to charge users directly for content, but I will note that $15 every 4 weeks is annoying and ridiculous as a pricing methodology. That’s not $15/month; that’s $16.25/month.  (Already feels like a “gotcha”, doesn’t it?)

And then there’s this: assuming you’re being billed via recurring charges to a credit card with a monthly statement (a pretty safe assumption), one of your credit card bills per year is going to have 2 charges from the NYTimes on it.  (Yep, there’s “gotcha”, part 2).

Wherever NYTimes had decided to set its price, this is absolutely the wrong billing methodology.  It’s going to make for some terrible customer relations; just imagine all the the people who are going to look at their credit card bills at some point in the first year and go “wait…why did they bill me twice?”