Bruce Brandfon, Scientific American: always charged for content and a few years gave it away for free on the web. Couldn’t monetize it by way of advertising. A year ago decided to publish tidbits and took the features stories off the web. Previously published features on the web for free before the magazine came out. As a result subscriptions increased. Lesson learned as publishers of content is that rates they were able to generate on the web were very small compared to the rates they could generate in print. Was able to replace direct mail by using website. Goal is to enhance experience to the extent that people will pay for site in addition to the magazine. People are hung up on devices too much cause that will shake itself out. Scary part is that 25 year olds getting information from completely different sources, not papers and magazines. Biggest challenge of us as curators of information is that we are now becoming responsible for the quality of the information we consume.
Steven Kotok,The Week Magazine 500,000 print circulation and launched website last year. Don’t put the print content on the site. Launched a free website. Get 30K new subscriptions/year from website plus another 20K related subscriptions to the site. Website makes a profit on ad revenue. No free content any more. Looking back should have charged a higher subscription price earlier. Hard to see how publishers will create enough bells and whistles, in an economic manner, that will beat what is available on the web, which is competing on the same device.
Michael Lonier, The Deal, LLC. Paid product is bulk of revenue. Financial news site. Have a magazine sold to corporations. Publish news and data all day long. Converted from a free model. Had to transform the company completely: different sales force, new marketing force and move to a business to business model. Mobility has become so important that specific device doesn’t matter but that’s how people will want to access the information.
Samir Husni, Magazine Innovation Center, moderator: welfare information society. Once give people giving something for free it’s hard to take away.
Sweet spot indeed. How to provide information online profitably is still very much trial and error. Seems to me to be about 50% error. Some of the long time science from the physical print industry just does not transfer to high tech.