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Tear down those walls
Siegel+Gale | May 16, 2012
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Many businesses use paywalls to restrict content to subscribers, but is it really the best strategy?
The New York Times spends a lot of money to create the high-quality content it has, and its business model depends on getting people to pay for that content. That strategy seems to be working for the newspaper so far. Still, that paywall turns plenty of people away, and your site may be doing the same if you make users fill out a form before they can access your content—even if you're not asking for payment. Many businesses do it, and it's time to examine whether it's really the best strategy.
There has been one response to “Tear down those walls”
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Content does cost to money to write. Even as I write this reply it has a notional cost to my company and so content has to be monetised at some point, whether that is advertising funded, a subscription or paid for with privacy, Ideally content will be paid for with a straight transaction that leads to a sale of some description but until people are prepared to write for free (generally I feel that quality content creators are not) then a remuneration has to take place at some point in the chain. Bloggers take a huge chance because much of their content is produced before a transaction happens but the content is still created with the expectation and hope that it will be monetised at some point in the future.
Privacy based transactions where a user registers for free but delivers to the publisher contact details has proved effective because the content has value. If a user does not consider that this transaction is worth it to them, it is usually because the content is not deemed valuable enough, and so the counter argument is that if the transaction value is too high then the value of the private details to the content creator is likely to be negligible. Ideally a content creator wants a database of engaged subscribers, and whilst it is not as expensive as print to send out emails there is still a cost somewhere to someone. If you have a database of 10,000 subscribers of whom only 1000 are interested in your content then it is better to know this and only send out 1000 emails. The remaining 9,000 are pure wastage, and your content is likely to end up in the trash folder. I therefore think it’s significantly more complex an issue than simply talking about numbers, and the law of big numbers has got many marketers into trouble over the years.