Giving away the same content customers once paid for is no longer an option—think of it as your new circulation marketing program.
Last fall, one of the largest membership websites decided to make all of it’s content free and abandon the subscription model. That website was NYTimes.com. After opening up their website, they saw a traffic jump almost immediately of over 2.2 million unique visitors to the site.
Following this news, Rupert Murdoch seriously considered leaving his more than one million subscribers behind and opening up WSJ.com for free as well. He didn’t, however he did open up much more of his content and has since seen a 256% increase in unique visitors this year .
Everything you publish can be found somewhere else, plain and simple. Your content may have more integrity and a brand behind it, but on the Internet, people are not looking to pay for information. Google is their online God, and Google will deliver them the most relevant information for free.
This is where publishers come in. Some of us have decades of content that no one is going to see. Putting your content behind a firewall with a subscription fee is not going to get you indexed in Google the same way posting an article on a blog will.
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Even with a membership website, your users are still only seeing a small percentage of what you have. Taking it from behind the firewall skyrockets the number of pages you have on your website and gives you supreme visibility in the search engines. Add some conversion architecture to let them sign up for a free email newsletter (that eventually will sell them a product) and that’s where you can make your money if you’re product-driven. If you’re ad-driven, it’s easy. More pages = more page views = more advertising revenue.
Every 21st Century media company MUST use the Internet to:
- Offer users many products on many platforms. Recognize the Internet as a place to recycle, reuse, and republish information in many different formats to save on material costs, maximize customer satisfaction, and increase revenue.
- Offer users a free, robust online content experience. Tons of valuable, fresh content will keep users returning to the site(s) again and again, allowing a publisher more opportunity to cross-sell them into other product platforms.
- Offer users a personalized marketing experience. A publisher’s website or network of websites should become a digital marketing machine and act as the basis for the publisher’s entire online strategy.
People are always going to find the same type of information on the Internet as you are offering to them. The key is to make sure it’s your site where they find it.
