Earlier this year I proposed to open my day job’s website redesign and restructuring process to public scrutiny, comment, and help. But The Media Center beat us to the punch with an interactive case study of Edweek.org‘s migration from an open content model to a paid content model.
Andrew Nachison, director of The Media center, has written an excellent introductory analysis to the interactive case study.
Utne.com made a similar migration to most content being placed behind a paywall in late 2002 and I’ve been struggling with the pros and cons ever since.
It will be fascinating to watch how this plays out and I’ll be paying close attention.
Where Utne.com employs a two-tiered content strategy—most magazine content is behind the paywall; everything else is freely available—Edweek.org plans to use a three-tiered strategy with the addition of some content requiring registration. Predictably, Edweek.org is struggling with what content to place in which bucket: “Should we put some of our high-traffic pages behind the subscription wall, or should they be free—to market our journalism and entice more people to subscribe?”
Welcome to online content strategy hell. Risk pissing your readers off and losing information authority in exchange for a few dollars, or make everyone happy and abandon any hope of sustainability. And then there’s always the hope of advertising, that seems to be growing everywhere but manages to evade me real good.
I mean, the seemingly unanimous wisdom of the net dictates that if you charge for content online, your readers will just find their fill elsewhere, right? Like the Greg Brown song: “If you don’t get it at home, you’re going to go looking.”
But Edweek.org has an advantage, shared with trade publications but not with consumer publications like Utne. Their target audience can expense the subscription.
Gary Kebbel, interim executive producer of edweek.org writes, “switching to subscription is like flying blind if you don’t first set up registration and gather demographic data on your users.” I’m not so sure this is true, and I hope Kebbel expands his thinking on this issue.
So far the comments have been less than enlightening. Here’s hoping that situation changes and attempts like this to engage the community will be seen for what they are—invitations to dialog—in the future.
Disclosure: I was awarded an Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation fellowship by The Media Center for its “Monetize the Web” seminar in September 2004.
The reasoning about why registration info is important to us relates to how we are deciding which pages should be free and which should be for subscribers. For instance, we know a given page is very popular. But that doesn’t help us much unless we know with whom it’s popular. If the page is mainly viewed by superintendents and principals, who can write off subscriptions, we feel safer in putting that page behind the subscription wall than if it were mainly viewed by students. Without registration, we would not have had this demographic data to aid our decision.