Comments on: Paid Subscriptions: The Next Great Trend In Online Advertising?

By: Steve V.

Steve V. — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:39:34 +0000

This is the ‘cable TV’ model people have been talking about for years. It requires mass scale ($5/mo spread across thousands of sites still doesn’t mean squat til you get tens of millions of users.)

The difference is a) that cable programming was unique, and b) it was not available already for free.

This is a noble idea, but risks becoming as popular as… oh… DRM?

By: Paid Subscriptions: The Next Great Trend In Online Advertising? ¦ Online Media Cultist

Sun, 17 May 2009 04:11:30 +0000

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By: td

td — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:03:31 +0000

Ads can work. I just can’t see making much money off them unless you have a huge audience.

I don’t mind ads so long as they are not overly animated, blinking gifs, or flash. Or delay loaded the page because some ad server is slow/not responding. Even worse than flash – including the unbelievably obnoxious automatically playing flash movie – are layers that appear on top of the content.

There are very few sites I would pay for.

By: Steve - Make Money Online

Steve - Make Money Online — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:41:25 +0000

I don’t see the fee based model working. Pick up any newspaper or magazine and the editorial and content are surrounded by adverts.

None of this is offensive to me, the reader, and I believe it to be so with websites. The majority of searches ignore banners and other advertising and just read the content unless a particular advert catches their eye.

I don’t see this model changing in the foreseeable future.

By: RLD

RLD — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:43:44 +0000

A fee will never be enough. The model has to be mixed. How will you support the production team, including writes, tech team, editors, etc… of massive companies like NYT or any other? Just by charging a small fee? If the fee is high we know, as a fact, people won’t pay it. I think the model should be mixed. fee+ads, like any print paper.
Of course in order to bring back fees a very hard to achieve coordinated action will need to happen. there are too many news sources today and if only a few of them keep offering their content for free the whole idea is dead. (Just as an example: I would pay to read NYT if my alternative is Yahoo or MSN News but if Globe & Mail is free I wouldn’t pay for NYT).

By: Brandon Mendelson

Brandon Mendelson — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:43:34 +0000

It has to happen, I feel. The advertising model is broken and advertisers only want their material in front of polished, consistent content. Most people who blog / create content and do other things cannot do that long enough to build an audience large enough to make money through advertising revenue.

At a certain point, if this really is what we want to do for a living, we have to make money by other means, and I prefer the pay for content model. You may have a smaller audience, but who cares? That audience clearly likes what you’re doing and they’ve invested something to keep you going. That’s more than most of us can say about web advertising.

By: Mkcoy

Mkcoy — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:43:34 +0000

Interesting. I wonder though will this ever take off? Are people really that bothered by ads on a site as long as their content is served first? I think this is a long way off yet for the casual mainstream internet user.