How much content should you give away to entice people to subscribe or join? It’s a tough question. Last week I spoke with Max Hotopf, president of Healthcare Europa, and he said something interesting about this quandary.
“We have headlines with the first line of the story [available for anyone]. The problem is I think [certain readers] kind of get used to that level of ‘subscribing.’ Maybe I need to send them the whole article when it’s particularly good to show the difference.”
Most of us do that to some extent—read the first line or paragraph of listings that are sent to us. A behemoth like Yahoo just reconfigured their home page into a whirlpool of first lines, designed to draw us into the warm waters. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. The prevailing thought might be that if it’s free, we’ll take that next click. But what if this sub-culture has gotten us too used to a one-line world? With the limited time we all have, what if one is all we think we need?
Looking at today’s Yahoo homepage…Lance Armstrong won’t tell all to USADA—fine; water tested in L.A.—enough; crude oil prices decline-got it; India going to Mars—interesting. Am I clicking through? Not really. So what’s the answer?
A relatively new site called MATTER stresses the quality of their journalism. It “isn’t quite a website, it’s not really a magazine and it’s not exactly a book publisher either,” they write. “Instead, MATTER is something else—a new model for high-quality journalism, an area that’s been hit hard by the transition from print to digital media.”
That perception works against SIPA members, many of whom have come from newspapers and the like and continue to create exceptional journalism. MATTER offers free previews of their long-form articles. The advantage of these is that they are long enough to show off their excellence but still only a portion of the entire piece. Then you can pay 99 cents to get a “distraction-free” web edition and an invitation to a Q&A with the author. I’ve often said that I like the Q&A segments of webinars—sometimes better than the presented content; they can address specific needs—and here’s a business focusing on that.
After that, MATTER offers memberships—I believe starting as low as 99 cents a month—where you then get a place on their “Editorial Board.” “The system is based around All Our Ideas, an open source tool developed at Princeton. Members can use the tool to suggest ideas for stories, filter and refine suggestions made by others, and vote on the subjects they want to see us cover.”
I just received an email from a member listing the five areas he would like to see covered: social media strategies that won’t take all your time; new pricing/marketing strategies for newsletters; enforcing copyright (there will be a terrific pre-conference session on this at SIPA 2013!); online tools for editors; and how publishers are using text messaging to reach subscribers. Imagine if we—or any company—could get this open source tool to elicit more great ideas, filter and refine them and then have our audience select what would be most helpful?
Contrast MATTER’s pricing with a typical member like Hotopf, who is charging around £900 for subscriptions and £2300 for site licenses. It’s such a wide swath! His renewal rate is 90% so he’s putting out quality, useful stuff. But getting new members is tough. He has the data on the people who are just peeping. Does he give them a free preview like MATTER? Does he invite them for some kind of survey just to involve them more in the information? Or does he try to encourage more referrals since his audience is seemingly happy with what they’re getting? Or D, all of the above?
“MATTER is building their most valuable asset: community,” wrote Craig Mod in his recent, much talked about article titled Subcompact Publishing. “They’re hungry and talented. And they’re the tip of an iceberg.”
Mod believes that MATTER successfully marries the old and the new—“an understanding of editorial ethics, storytelling, craft” while changing “the shape of the content and distribution models of the content to match digital.” This is, of course, what SIPA members have the power to do. How to best show that off to attract new members remains up in the new and rarefied air.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA