Online Content - Free, Registered or Paid Access

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Permalink Reply by Kathe Lemon on November 25, 2008 at 8:11pm

All of our online content is free and we try to put the entire magazine online although we often tweak the material to increase its web friendliness (i.e. more display, smaller bits, more graphic depictions of information, databases etc). Our print publication is a free pickup city lifestyle magazine with a circulation of about 33,000 monthly. Initially we planned to only have some content online or only a list of stories that readers then had to subscribe to to read. We were convinced to go fully online and free by the City and Regional Magazine Conference in Denver a couple of years ago and by looking at the sites that we used and enjoyed most regularly. We also have a weekly events newsletter that has just broken even after six months and looks like it will be profitable in 2009 through a combination of automation that lowers our costs and ad sales.

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Permalink Reply by Keith Gregory on December 1, 2008 at 11:55pm

Great question.

The key discussion point here is how unique is your content and how niche is your audience?

Think of these as your two axis.

The more niche your audience, and the more unique your content, the more likely you will be able to charge for access.

I took a quick look at your site- looks like you are consumer-enthusiast magazines.

So, I would think there might be some content you can sell & some you will want to require registration for. But, you will need to keep some free and completely open in order to generate traffic from the broader internet.

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Permalink Reply by Rory Brown on December 2, 2008 at 2:48pm

My preference would be for the 'freemium' model. I just don't think you can put subscription content behind a wall anymore and expect to compete http://rorybrown.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/how-will-subscription-pub...

Rory.

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on December 4, 2008 at 11:23am

If your content is very attractive to the customers, then using so called previews/summaries exposed to outside, while full content available to registered (pair or unpaid) users will help you do a lot of lead generation.

General notion we see and advocate among our customers is all content must be free, optimized and always available, including full archives.

I've been in touch with couple people at Kalmbach and what I remember is that you have very niche content that would always be relevant. So why not to make couple bucks on an article that you wrote up 10 years ago? Won't hurt, right?

Another model that you might consider, if there is strong resentment agaisnt all-content-free model is having your archives and recent content available for free, and having part of latest content paid. After some time, let's say 7-14 days that paid content becomes free, while new content is now paid.

This kind of approach gives you a lot of SEM advantages, while giving you a chance to make some money on online subs.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Baird on December 4, 2008 at 1:40pm

take a close look at the Meredith magazines. They have put considerable marketing effort into developing their business models, and are in niches somewhat similar to yours, albeit highly-focused on selling print subs for their flagship titles.

Consider the financial value of a number of comparatives:

AD SALES REVENUE. What sort of CPM can you charge, ads per page, etc., and therefore what is the value of an incremental page? The higher the value, the greater percentage of your content should be all-access. Factor in too of course some assumptions for lost revenue from your print product content.

OPT-IN EMAIL REVENUE. Consider this as well, because it drives your decision about registered-access content. Include ad sales, product sales and subscrIption sales.

CONTENT VALUE. Do you have any content that's worth 3 to 4 times the value of your magazine edit content? If you're like most consumer publishers, probably not, and thus having user fee-supported content's probably not the right way to go. Things that drive value most on the web tend to be information that's more timely than in print, then higher value for expensive decisions (carfax), and top value for truly interactive functionality (salesforce.com, match.com, etc.)

PRINT PRODUCT VALUE. What is the marginal profit for your least profitable print sources? Consider this too to drive your decisions about how prominently you should promote paid products on line.

Bill Baird
Baird Direct Marketing, Inc.
http://www.bairddirect.com

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