Migrating to a paywall: an interactive case study

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 21 June 2005 04:57PM CST

Section: Media

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?”

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