A Solution for Subscription Sites From the Gaming World

Wednesday, over a very tasty seafood lunch, I watched Felix Salmon spend two hours trying to convince FT.com (PSO) managing director Rob Grimshaw to abandon his newspaper’s attempts to get its readers to pay for online content. He did not succeed.

Currently, FT.com has a hybrid model whereby readers are able to view a set number of articles for free each month but required to register and then to subscribe if they wish to exceed that ration. Felix hates this model because he believes it gets the incentives all wrong: Any reader who understands the model and doesn’t wish to subscribe will be careful only to click on stories that he absolutely must read, thus depriving FT of page views and ad revenue. And he has a point. While it allows FT to wring out some revenue from an area that yields many newspapers none at all, it’s still a bothersome kludge that encourages readers (and bloggers, a.k.a. readers’ sherpas) to frequent the sites of FT’s competitors.

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