(subscription required): Time Inc’s strategy to close off their sites to print subscribers only, starting last April, has paid suprisingly good dividends for them, according to this story…Subscriptions are up, traffic for most titles is steady despite predictions it would be halved, and ad sales are ahead of projections. In fact, the move may be helping Time Inc. more than AOL, which continues to see declining subscriptions.
“We are taming the Internet for the benefit of our magazines whereas in
the past, we might have been a little too credulous,” says Ned Desmond,
executive editor of Time Inc. Interactive.
The results aren’t uniformly positive…People and Entertainment Weekly,
have seen traffic fall. With Time for Kids and Sports Illustrated for Kids, many laws complicate how companies may market their products to children. Meanwhile, at Sunset, a Western-lifestyle magazine, online subscriptions sales are up 67% to 900 a week, though the data are still preliminary. At Parenting,
they’re up 70% to 1,800 a week, the company says.
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