The Internet has traditionally been the home of the free. Everyone who uses the Web seems to expect to get everything downloadable for free. If you’re offering content for free, then you’re potentially losing money every time someone views your site. It’s tough to run a business for free, and this is the reason that many Web businesses are moving to pay models. Let’s take a look at what some companies are doing to make the most of their free content.
One strategy used by some online companies is to begin by offering free content to site visitors, then gradually move to a pay model. A recent example of this trend is the Financial Times. Once a completely free site, FT.com now charges its visitors a subscription fee to view its contents. The Wall Street Journal currently does the same. The lure of this model is obvious – a site already has a dedicated group of visitors who have had a chance to see the quality of the content, and this same group is then charged for the privilege of continued access. Magazines and newspapers that already have a subscribership benefit the most from this model. If you’re planning to move from a model that allows visitors to use content for free, then you must be certain your visitors value your content enough to pay for it first.
Other established online companies have taken a similar road. Yahoo.com has recently begun to charge for games that it once offered for free. Once it had established that there were people who were interested in playing their games online, it then offered them for a fee. In addition to the basic games, Yahoo’s tacked on additional functionality that enhances the game player’s online experience.
Yahoo’s tactic of offering additional incentives to paying visitors is commonly used among fee-based Web sites. Google.com continues to offer free Internet searches, but it also offers in depth research – for a fee. Webster.com, the online dictionary, still lets visitors look up words, synonyms, and pronunciations for free. However, it also offers more for those willing to pay an annual subscription fee of $29.95. Subscribers get the basics but they also can perform specialized searches, examine the etymologies of words, find rhyming words, look up authors, find quotations, play word games and use the online atlas as well.
Video is another item to offer visitors when you’re encouraging them to pay. People browsing the Web often enjoy watching video clips, but storing the large files and providing the proper infrastructure to deliver them to the user’s desktop is expensive. Fees, which can be either through subscription or paid per view, help to offset the cost and helps generate revenue as well. The New York Times continues to maintain its free site, but it charges for RealMedia video clips of interviews with famous people in addition. The fee is paid in two ways – the viewer can choose to have access to the entire collection for $19.95, or view a single clip for $5.95.
Smaller enterprises have focused on niche video products, such as SoapCity, which offers paid on-demand episodes of TV soap operas. Post Time Technologies streams racing video to the horse racing industry, and Campus Crusade for Christ trains pastors all over the world. Capitalizing on this particular area of pay content is simplified by RealNetworks’ popular RBN Managed Subscription Service software. This package can help you manage online billing, the way the video is delivered, and RealNetworks will host your video or audio streams on its Real Broadcast Network Service.
Online journals, news services, and newspapers are also choosing to offer fee-based services. While the latest version of a particular magazine or newspaper may be available for free, the site charges users to access archived articles. The Washington Post offers this service, as do many other news entities that accumulate so much content that storage and access becomes expensive to support. Fees help these companies to continue making their valuable information available.
Other sites offer incentives to would-be customers by taking something away from their online experience – ads. Slashdot.org announced that it would offer an ad-free version of its computer news site to subscribers via PayPal, one of the most popular secure online transaction brokers. Additionally, Live365.com, a streaming music service, offers a similar deal – if you pay, you don’t get ads. If your banner ad sales are flagging anyway, this can be a lucrative option to explore.
On the shadier side of the street, any article discussing online content must deal with the undisputed champion – porn. Perennially successful, porn sites top other pay content enterprise. While most of these companies aren’t in the news very often, they make considerable amounts of money streaming movies to user desktops. Though such business is almost a surefire way to make money, there are, of course, many legal and ethical concerns to consider before diving into the porn business.
Pay content is a trend that looks like it will continue, especially as free sites are increasingly unable to support themselves on ad banner sales alone and fewer sites offer free content. The overall trend of pay content sites is clear: begin with a valued commodity, build a loyal base of return visitors, and then shift to a pay model. Keep in mind, however, that Jupiter Media Metrix found that only 42 percent of adults were willing to pay for online content. Yet if you can capture the attention of that 42 percent, then your free content site could become the next pay content success story.
Jackie Rosenberger is an editor with murdok
