More Publishers Considering Pay Model

As revenue-strapped publishers consider paid content models, some are quietly tucking more of their material behind a pay wall, while others from Newsweek to The Economist are working on hybrid approaches.Music pub Spin has been phasing out the availability of its features, while science magazine Discover plans to make its features available only to subscribers or digital copy buyers in the coming months. Henry Donohue, CEO, Discover, said the move is less about making money off digital copies than reinforcing the value of print—a message he hopes to underscore by hiking the cover price to $5.99 in 2010 from $4.99. “It's about positioning the print product as something you pay a premium for," Donohue said. "On the magazine side, we try to do what magazines still do well-long features, beautiful photos, great design. But the cost of that content is more, so it needs to be content people want to pay for."Elsewhere, The Economist is working on a reader-paid digital product that would replicate the print magazine-reading experience and may create paid-for online events, said Ben Edwards, online publisher. It's something of an about-face for the British newsweekly, whose site was subscription-only until two years ago. It also is thinking about charging for early access to the issue and for archives. Rival Newsweek expects to soon start testing paid content ideas, said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital. And The New Yorker, which already limits the amount of magazine content that's freely available on its site, expects to test various pay models in the coming months.With its long-form, heavily investigated articles, The New Yorker seems well-positioned to successfully charge. But for most publishers, identifying a service or content they can charge for when free news and information abounds online isn't easy. That's why many see their best hope in new mobile applications or premium features. “I see multiple models, and the model has to fit with what the product is and what relationship it has with the reader,” said Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital. “The magazines that are broadest in audience have probably the lowest opportunity for charging for content.”Runner's World is one that sees a future in paid tools and services. The Rodale book is looking to introduce premium online content and interactive tools like shoe reviews that it would charge for, possibly bundled with a subscription to the magazine. Editor David Willey said he's encouraged by the results of a new marathon training plan he launched that got more than 500 signups from people paying a $130 or $250 fee.“This gave us confidence [that] there are areas where our readers and users trust us enough that they’re willing to pay for it, which gives us hope we can conceive of a paid model in some way,” Willey said. With ad spending down drastically this year, he added, “we have to figure out a way to charge for content.”The implication for Web traffic is another question. Until the ad market cratered, publishers were keen to maximize their audience size online and sell ads against it. But if publishers limit access to content, they can expect audience shrinkage and a resulting loss in advertising.“You always have to weigh the likelihood of someone paying for it and the ability to drive subs against the advertising opportunity,” Chubb said. “We want money from both places.”Many would say that as that opportunity shrinks, publishers have no choice but to go the paid content route. And some believe they still can have it both ways—charge for some content, while maintaining a free online presence, which they recognize as a crucial to promotion and subscription-building.Even The New Yorker will probably always make some degree of content freely available, said Pamela McCarthy, deputy editor. “It's a way to communicate with our readers and be part of a public conversation that sometimes gets going online,” she said. Or, as said The Economist's Edwards put it: “Freeness is a way to acquire customers.”

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More Publishers Considering Pay Model

Lucia Moses

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