The New York Times has abandoned its "Times Select" subscription service. The Financial Times is making more of its content available free. Rupert Murdoch is widely rumored to be planning the same for The Wall Street Journal.
Is this a trend? Several eMarketer analysts weighed in on the state of fee-based versus ad-supported online content.
Ben Macklin
Many content providers dabbled in subscription content in 2001 and
2002 when the economy tanked and online advertising dived. They did
this out of financial necessity rather than any great strategic play.
Clearly, the old model of getting eyeballs to your site and selling
advertising is successful today as online advertising continues to
expand.
David Hallerman
If The New York Times is influential in this area, the
archives may become free as well. That would take care of a lot of
searches and opens up all those older pages to new advertising—perfect
for targeted ads.
There are experiments in fee versus free content in online video
as well, such as NBC’s free downloadable shows.
That might just be seen as a delivery difference, not a fee-free
difference, since the streaming versions of the shows were already
free.
It’s still a smart idea.
Lisa Phillips
The conundrum for publishers is that a print reader is still more
valuable than an online reader, even as print readership is dwindling,
or flowing to the Internet.
Advertisers pay up to three times more to reach print readers than
online users. They’re not convinced online readers browse a news Web
site the way they believe print readers still browse through an entire
section of a newspaper.
As far as newspapers go, there’s not much of a trend there. Only
three of the top 100 US newspapers (by circulation) charge visitors to
see content, according to The Bivings Group.
However, more local newspapers are requiring online visitors to
register before they see content (up 6% in 2007 at 29 of the top 100 US
newspapers). It helps to be able to show real local traffic and
interest when selling online ads to local businesses.
Karin von Abrams
As in the US, newspapers in the United Kingdom would have liked to
charge for content. Equally, they realized that it would never have
worked in the long term, unless there was a large volume of "premium"
content involved. And the figures for that didn’t add up.
The norm now seems to be the exchange of the user’s registration data
for full access to a site, as with The Guardian.
Yet the Financial Times recently announced a hybrid approach.
Online readers will be able to access articles and data free if they
don’t exceed 30 views a month. Beyond that they will need to subscribe
and pay either monthly or yearly to see more material. The FT may be one of the only content owners in the world that can pull this off.
Paul Verna
It seems that the proponents of Web content being free are on the winning side, at least for now.
One potentially game-changing development is the launch of
SpiralFrog, a fully ad-supported music site that has gotten licenses
from major labels. The fact that it launched says a lot about how the
music industry is at least testing the "free content" waters.
Even user-generated content, which was born and raised as the poster
child of unregulated free content, is being monetized through
ad-supported models.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so one way or another someone
will have to pay for content. If it’s not consumers digging into their
pockets, it’ll be advertisers and agencies that decide that the Web is
a viable way for them to reach their target audiences.
Via eMarketer
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