The ongoing discussion about Murdoch turning WSJ.com into a free site and the rumours about the NYT dropping Times Select and making all their material freely available — it’s so familiar. The media business worldwide has been discussing the question of free/ad-based vs. paid/subscription on the web for at least 12 years. But it keeps coming back at us, and the free model wins — almost every time. I think this is because audiences are still growing online and web publishing is becoming more and more dynamic. More and more people are using the web actively, and this keeps driving innovation and new possibilities for those media companies who understand the power of free.
It’s so clear when you read Jarvis’ analysis. What sounds more like a winning strategy — trudging along with the WSJ.com subscription model, gaining a few thousand new customers per year? Or this:
By going free and with Murdoch’ls investment in the product – that is, in the reporting and services and with his promotion – WSJ.com can become the unquestioned leading financial information brand worldwide, winning over its many competitors: Yahoo, Reuters (now stronger with Thomson), AOL, FT.com, Forbes, MSN, CNBC. But that will happen only if it goes free. (…) The reason to go free is to explode the brand and make it many times bigger – internationally – than it is today.
Related: The Freakonomics blog is moving to the New York Times site. A scoop for the site. And a model for the future; big news sites hosting popular blogs and enhancing them with journalistic resources?
UPDATE Aug. 14: Advertising Age with another in-depth piece on the same topic, that also mentions The Economist and CNN dropping their online subscription models and going free. Note the trade-offs that have to be considered, as Jeff Lanctot of Avenue A/Razorfish puts it: “As demand grows, your prices can rise more quickly (…) In a subscription business, your pricing is pretty stable.” The Norwegian example is relevant here: For years, the most popular sites have at times been fully booked on their most valuable ad space; hence they have increased the prices.
(Times Select rumour via Tid og Tanke (in Norwegian). Ad Age story via Martin Jönsson).