Rob at BusinessPundit comments:
If anyone who reads this blog works for Fortune or Business2.0, I have a complaint. Both of those magazines are great reads, but you are hurting your business by limiting online access so dramatically. If you would make a handful of articles available each month for free, many business bloggers would link to them, you would get more traffic and a result more subscribers. Fortune used to have a lot of free stuff, but it seems now that everything is subscriber only after the first page. I am a subscriber, but I can't share some of your best articles with the rest of the blogosphere. Fast Company has the right idea. Make just a taste of the magazine available initially, then when the new issue comes out make most of the previous issue accessible by anyone. Media people in general seem afraid to give something away, which prevents you from gaining the following that you really deserve.
I imagine that Jackie or Ben at Church of the Customer would say that these mags aren't following the evangelism tenet of Bite-Size Chunks: find something to give away in order to spread the word and get greater return. One of their blog posts on this topic dealt with bite-sized chunks at retail. John at BrandAutopsy commented:
Years ago as a marketing manager for Starbucks, we learned for every five beverage samples we would sample to customers, it would stimulate a purchase. That’s a 20% conversion rate.
I wonder what the conversion rate would be for magazines? If one subscriber resulted from every 5 blog links to a magazine article, that would be a pretty good return. I guess they'll never know...
Their thinking may come down to this: If the article is worth sharing, the magazine is worth buying.
Regarding Fast Company, I wrote a comprehensive article (as myself, elsewhere) detailing why I let my subscription lapse. From a personal ROI perspective, I couldn't justify the expense when month after month I was treated to more ads than Times Square and little snippets that often times, I could find elsewhere, for free.
This could be the scourge of the publishing industry going forward, as well. Bloggers need content to remain interesting/relevant (presuming one is "blogging" with those intentions), and traditional print media can't keep up with that kind of demand. Granted, there will still be JD Robb books, but I wonder how many computer programming books will get churned out year after year, for example, with the crush of sites devoted to that subject, often for free.
Posted by: Effern | May 19, 2004 at 11:03 AM
exactly. there has been so many times when i've wanted to 'comment on' and 'link to' articles that i've read in wired and b2 and others, but don't because i can't find the equivalent article online.
that's about 300 free impressions/day that they are missing. i am sure brand mantra is even more. add that up, and they are missing out.
most of their content isn't timely (in the news sense). they'd be well served to offer it up online for free after a month or so.
Posted by: Peter Caputa | May 19, 2004 at 09:03 AM