NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Slate Subscription Fees
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Slate Subscription Fees
Kenneth C. Jenks (mindseye_at_tale.com)
Thu, 25 Dec 1997 00:13:03 -0600
Kathy E. Gill <kathy.gill_at_boeing.com> asked:
>Where are the micro-payments to read the select story you are interested
>in? Not $2 ... $0.02. Then you've moved into the realm where the extreme
>elastic demand now works in your favor.
The micro-payment technology is here. CyberCash <http://www.cybercash.com/>
offers a solution, CyberCoin, for any merchant willing to sign up and pay
the transaction fees. There are a couple of others, too, most of them with
higher fees or still in beta testing. We built our own home-grown system
with no transaction fees. What's missing is the users willing to sign up
for the micro-payment system.
We have more than 33,000 visitors per month -- fewer than two percent of
whom use our pay-per-view system to purchase short stories. The results are
enough to keep us in the black (unlike most of our competitors), but not
enough to make anybody rich.
Slate has a much higher traffic volume -- for now. When they impose a fee,
their traffic levels will plummet. They must have run the numbers for
adversiser-sponsored content vs. subscription and come up with an answer.
It's interesting to see more sites coming up with the same answer.
Here's the Catch-22: Standard banner ads don't generate much income per
user. In order to use advertising to pay for top-quality content, you need
to attract a lot of traffic. No content, no traffic. No traffic, no money,
no content.
Subscription fees for Web sites appear to offer a way out of the bind, but
because of Web users' unwillingness to put out cash for content -- what
Spider Robinson calls "shell-out falter" -- they haven't proven very
profitable outside of the sex biz.
Here's the secret of a profitable Web site: High-quality content, multiple
revenue streams, and continual promotion.
It's hard to see why Slate is failing. My guess is that they're paying too
much for their content and advertising in expensive venues. I suspect that
the deep pockets they used for their start-up capital fooled them into
thinking that their large expenses would eventually be covered by ad
revenues. Many other publishers have made that same mistake, and we'll be
seeing more fallout from poor business plans over the next few years.
-- Ken Jenks, Editor-in-chief, Mind's Eye Fiction
http://tale.com/ Short stories on-line
MindsEye_at_tale.com
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age, sex, income and/or zip code. Better than banners!
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