Salon makes a go of premium service

Salon makes a go
of premium service

Claims 35,000 paying subscribers at $30 a head

By Lisa Schneider

    In traditional print magazines, subscribers express their loyalty in the yearly ritual of writing a check to renew their subscriptions, ensuring publishers a flow of income even during periods when advertising dollars are hard to come by.
    For online magazines, however, getting faithful readers to express that loyalty in a similar manner has been a tough sell indeed.
    Internet users simply have too many options to be willing to pay for content, or so many have long believed.
    So it was no surprise that, when the online cultural magazine Salon announced almost a year ago that it would introduce fee-based content, web pundits dismissed it as a futile gesture that was bound to fail.
    It appears the critics were wrong.
    By last October, just seven months after "Salon Premium" was launched, the e-zine had attracted 25,000 paid subscribers to this new service.
    For an annual fee of $30, its readers were offered unlimited access to Salon.com, including content restricted to free visitors. They were also given the option of screening out much of the site's advertising.
    Earlier this month, Salon touted a combined number of 35,000 subscribers to its three fee-based services: Salon Premium and the online communities Table Talk and The Well.
    The company claims that Salon Premium alone accounts for 30,000 of the media group’s subscribers.
    So what’s the trick?
    "In essence, it's the carrot and the stick," says marketing director Patrick Hurley, in explaining Salon’s subscription strategy.
    "The stick is that we have made some content only accessible to subscribers. The carrot is that we provide additional services to subscribers, like being able to download an entire day’s worth of information into an Adobe Acrobat format so they can print it out. Or being able to view the site without banners and pop-ups."
    Hurley claims people are more than happy to pay the $30 annual fee to avoid advertisements.
    Another stick has been to reduce the amount of content that non-paying visitors can access.
    From September to October of last year, the percentage of content freely available to viewers fell from 85 percent or 90 percent to 65 percent or 70 percent.
    In recruiting subscribers, Salon spares any subtleties in its pitch: We need the money.
    Posted alongside the list of Salon Premium’s perks are messages from contributors such as Arianna Huffington and Joe Conason and cartoonist Tom Tomorrow explaining that readers must help keep the publication alive.
    Tomorrow explains to readers: "As it turns out, putting out a daily web magazine costs money! The people who produce the journalism and essays you enjoy actually want to be compensated for their work! It's outrageous, but true!.....Since we don't have a sugar daddy like--ahem--some web magazines we could mention, it's really up to you. It's like subscribing to public radio--without the incessant badgering! It's less than the cost of a subscription to some tedious newsmagazine--and the content isn't outdated by the time you read it!...."
    Hurley says that Salon’s best advertising technique is by way of readers e-mailing articles to their friends.
    "As far as our marketing for Premium and Salon, we have relied much more on the content itself than on traditional methods of advertising," says Hurley.
    "We haven’t spent more than three-and-one-half million dollars total for advertising in the past six years. The best marketing vehicle is the product itself."
    It also doesn’t hurt that Rainbow Media, owner of Bravo and 10 percent owner of Salon, has a deal with Salon by which the dot.com publication gets free promotion across its networks.
    According to the traffic estimates just released by the company for the quarter ending in December 2001, Salon received 121 million page views, down from the 127 million for the previous term, and 3.8 million unique visitors.
   The company claims to have had no decrease in unique visitors and to have seen only a 5 percent drop in page views, even after significantly reducing Salon’s free-access content.
    For all of Salon’s recent strategizing to increase revenue via subscribers, Hurley concludes, "We’re just trying to find an equitable balance. We’re trying to not be so vulnerable to the vagaries of the ad market."

-Lisa Schneider is a New York writer and a contributor to Media Life.

Printer-Friendly Version | Send to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact Us