Inside Salon Premium
Are Consumers Ready to Pay for Content?
By Scott Rosenberg
The Web's great free-for-all is coming to a sudden, sharp end. Under today's market conditions, Web companies can no longer expect to sustain themselves by losing ever-larger sums of money to gain ever-larger slices of market share. As more traditional business yardsticks take hold, many companies face the difficult decision to charge for some of their online content and services—and users have begun to accept that they can no longer get everything they want or love for free.
Sure, the Web continues to offer a vast, unprecedented array of gratismaterial. But professionally produced sites need to pay their bills, and relying on advertising alone is a risky proposition in an economic slump. As senior vice president of editorial operations for Salon.com, I've become very familiar with these realities. For content sites like Salon.com, charging for subscriptions—once considered anathema on the Web—is now an essential move for survival.
In April 2001, Salon launched its Salon Premium subscription service. For $30 a year, we offer users a package of content and services unavailable anywhere else. We planned, built, and deployed this project in three months. We made some mistakes along the way, of course, and learned some unexpected lessons. We also signed up 10,000 subscribers in our first 11 weeks, and brought some critically valuable revenue into our company's coffers.
In the months since we introduced Salon Premium, a host of other companies—from Yahoo! to The New York Times—have announced plans to offer for-pay Web content.
