We notice that Ireland.com, the Web site of The Irish Times of Dublin, has begun putting more stories in front of its paid content gate. Is this a bit more of a retreat from its paid access content model? A way to increase the pageviews and ad banner exposure counts that Ireland.com lost when it converted from free to paid access.
When it then converted to a paid access model in mid-2002, Ireland.com’s monthly pageviews dropped from 30.4 million to between 6.5 million and 7.1 million, which had a direct effect on its banner advertising revenues.
Although Ireland.com as a free access site had 2.3 million monthly unique users (of whom between 1.2 million and 1.5 million used the site at least several times monthly), the site has managed to signup less than 10,000 users as paying users, a one percent conversion ratio.
More than 80 per cent of those subscribers chose to pay the site’s
Related posts:
- The Three Criteria for Paid Content We're making available from this site some of the essays...
- Few Japanese Online Publications Succeed at Paid Content According to a story in the bulletin of the Nihon...
- The Albuquerque Journal as a Bad Paid Content Model Online Journalism Review‘s lead story today is a first-person account...
- Paid Web Content in Spain and England Spain and England are where the most interesting experimentation about...
- Security Holes at WSJ, Salon, and NYT Paid Content Adrian Holovaty shows the security holes in the paid-access firewall...
