Comments on: Paid vs. Free vs. Someone Else Pays

By: Jackie Danicki

Jackie Danicki — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 05:17:55 +0000

My ex is gloating about this, too:

http://antoineclarke.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/me-1-wsj-0/

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:31:58 +0000

The other factor to consider is that there is a widely help belief that we are coming to a big correction in the advertising marketplace, as a consequence of a broader economic correction. This means it will be incumbent on publishers do a lot more than justify ad rates with pageviews and time spent. Here I think the WSJ has an upper hand, their demographics are about as good as it gets.

At any rate, online advertising really needs to evolve to be more interactive and useful.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:56:27 +0000

To tell you the truth, I don’t think we have enough evidence either way to be sure what works. I’d like to see more experiments with premium paid content–there really haven’t been that many offerings. There’s just an assumption that it doesn’t work among innovation-averse publishers, without much empirical evidence.

I certainly don’t believe it should be the sole source of revenue (though it is for consumerreports.com). Advertising has to be in there, as well. But if there’s a market for subscription services, I think that’s a revenue stream worth pursuing. Why leave the money on the table? WSJ.com will give up north of $70 million in annual subscription revenue if it goes free. That’s a lot to make up on the ad side, even with 15X traffic (per Murdoch’s boast).

I just want to see more experimentation with the form, and less dismissing it out of hand. The jury’s still out, as much as we’d like it not to be.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:58:58 +0000

But Mark, it is statistically evident that few people will pay for premium online content when you look at overall online population, growth of free vs. paid, and sub growth/monthly recurring against the growth of the broader market.

I’m willing to submit that there are more paid premium sites than I am allowing, but if you are attempting to argue that paid premium is viable as a business model then you will find yourself way out on a limb.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:52:16 +0000

Well, if you want to limit it to newspapers, the Spokane Spokesman-Review (spokesmanreview.com) is subscription-based site, and reportedly is quite happy with that model. My point with the others, playing off your theory that few people willingly pay for online content, is that they’re all consumer products whose subscribers indeed do choose to pay for online subscriptions. Consumerreports.com has more than 1 million paid online subscribers (I can’t find a recent number–they went past 1 million a few years ago). That’s pretty good.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:22:54 +0000

Mark,
Consumerreports and Zagat are but a fraction of the traffic that WSJ.com generates. Zagat is interesting to look at because they have been without serious competition for years, Michelin guide sells a fraction of what Zagat does.

Regardless, it’s pretty clear in looking at their business that Zagat lives and dies by their print publication, however, they are doing something really smart by blending in user content from their website. Hats off to them, but it’s not even a close comparison to WSJ.

Lastly, I think you raise a really good example with ESPN but they have a ton of content that is available without the premium subscription so again, not a fair comparison.

We could argue with examples to a draw, how about if I said “mainstream newspaper publication”?

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:59:32 +0000

WSJ.com is the only “mainstream publication” successfully employing a subscription model? I can give you three more off the top of my head: Consumerreports.com, ESPN.com and Zagat.com.