For some reason, the debate over paying for newspaper content online seems to always break down to a black and white, either-or argument: Make the whole site free, or charge for all the content. But there are a lot of interesting business models in between, and the Financial Times has hit on one: It's going to allow casual visitors up to 30 free page views a month; everybody else pays for a subscription. This is smart, and the answer to letting inevitable traffic from search engines through the pay wall. Similarly, StarTribune.com used to allow one or two free pages before asking for registration (that seems to be defunct). Again, the idea is to serve the casual readers—and maybe tease them into wanting to register or subscribe because they like what they see.
These are subtle differences, but they're huge—and they allow smart sites like FT.com to maximize both online subscription and advertising dollars.
This kind of thing comes from having good metrics, which alas many sites (not just newspaper sites) don't.
If you can look at your user base and see the distribution, you can make these types of decisions.
Of course you also have to be on the look out for people gaming the system -- for example, deleting cookies that track the 30 visits -- but those people are in the minority.
And some people will cancel their paying subscriptions if they know they can get most of what they need for free. That's OK, too. You just need to make sure that on the basket of low volume users you're still making money.
Posted by: Rocky | October 01, 2007 at 05:15 PM