Ars Technica Announces A Subscription Based Service
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I ask because I have a strong feeling that there are a lot of people who think that yet won't actually pull the trigger and buy it. I understand the model and I think it's very forward-thinking yet I'm not paying.
There is also a non-significant segment of our traffic that wants long form articles in PDF form. For these people, the subscription may be worth it, and it can easily turn them into repeat visitors (because, hey, why not get the other PDFs too?) who then get more utility out of the other features.
The important bit here is that no one expect this to replace ad revenue anytime soon. It's a diversification that also gives us a nice cross section of visitors to listen to attentively.
Particularly, I like the idea of providing a better reading experience for subscribers. That seems like the kind of thing that you wouldn't value at first, but after you have it becomes hard to give up.
The content that is behind a paywall is going to be less broadly appealing, and supplementary to what's already freely available.
The most interesting thing, and probably the most daring, is the whole editorial round table thing. If it works as planned, we'll basically be giving subscribers a great deal of influence over what the site publishes, and vast amounts of information that media sites don't generally give out. There's already a planned discussion, for instance, on the economics of producing long form content, all because subscribers consistently ask for more of it. We may not be able to deliver it as much as they or we want, but we are going to involve them in those discussions.
And critics of the newspapers (or at least my criticism of the newspapers) plans to go paywall isn't that it's bad or wrong, just that it's a bad idea if it's all-or-nothing since readers will simply substitute. If newspapers were proposing something closer to what Ars is trying, I think you'd hear less criticism and more curious interest...
News organizations are just about calling their online readers freeloading cheapskates who need to start paying for news again (while in the same breath saying that their news are essential to society, all the while misunderstanding that readers never paid for the news itself to begin with).
Ars instead are presenting you with an offer of even higher quality content, which you can opt-out of and still have access to their current product.
Long story short: Ars are doing it right, news corps are doing it ass-backwards, misunderstanding their own business, their readers and their product.
The difference is pretty big.
I think you can only charge for the unique content, which is what Ars's is doing.
I'd love to pay money to subscribe to a newspaper that was like this.
Read any of the Jon Stokes articles, for example, and he usually makes predictions or makes a claim about the hidden reasons behind some industry action, but he doesn't pretend otherwise. He states that he thinks x was a bad move, and then explains why.
Many commenters have pointed out that Ars Technica manages to have in-depth technical articles supported by only ads and asked why LWN can't do that same. Honestly, I'm not convinced the Ars Technica proposition is enough to make me sign up - but I'm a poor student and so very little really would unless I viewed it as essential to my studies.
Content behind the pay wall will be additive and complement what's already there. John Siracusa's going to have a subscriber only chat, for instance, but his massive Snow Leopard review was (and is) freely available.
We'll be doing exclusive chats and some new types of content that only subscribers can see, but the normal Ars bread and butter will be free for all.
Reading Hacker News & other news sites on the iPhone is not the greatest experience! A lot of sites could charge for this and in turn offer a better UX for a nominal charge & in turn have another revenue model, that's easy to create & advertise!