Posted by badhaircut on January 28, 2004, at 10:49:41
At http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20040112/msgs/303994.html, Dinah asked,
> Have there been studies done about how many posters you'd lose if you go to a fee based system?
I couldn't find much. I mostly saw reports of message boards switching from free to pay-to-READ, and I'm assuming PB would be kept free-to-read, even if it's pay-to-post. Haven't some Yahoo! Groups sites converted to paid-access? Anyone know?
(Sorry if this is too much info...)
http://www.babynames.com
In 2002, babynames switched from free message boards (with ads) to pay-to-post boards (minus ads). Fee: $10 / 3 mos, $24/yr renewal. They have 7,000 registered users, and get 500,000 visitors a year. Some of their boards are still free-to-read (with ads), but most of their boards are now pay-to-read. OUTCOME: They survived. No data on how many posters they lost, but I imagine they have a high turnover anyway.http://www.motleyfool.com
Also in 2002, The Motley Fool put its free discussion boards behind a pay-to-read fee. Initially it was $15 / 2 yrs, but it's now $30/yr. OUTCOME: Some very early results (from http://boards.fool.com/message.asp?mid=16593641 -- where there's a thread on switching-to-fee, losing users, what it's worth, etc):-snip-
Sign up rates have far exceeded expectations. ... I don't want to jump the gun on the early results. . . however, it is becoming clearer by the hour that there will be little reduction in the quantity of posts and a likely increase (perhaps dramatic) in the quality of the posts.
...I plan to work extremely hard to illustrate that a community strengthens when it has members invested in it -- with the aim being to win *back* everyone's business.
-Tom Gardner
-snip-Many diary sites have both paid and free versions and some have gone through a transition to paid. No stats, though. One that might be worth watching is the Tabulas journaling site, whose volunteer owner is trying to get some of his 10,000 (?!) current members to pay voluntarily and requiring new members to pay up front at $15 / 6 mos: http://www.tabulas.com/~tabulas/85672.html
One *very* cautionary tale is that of http://www.gettheloop.com/theloop.html, an amusement park business email newsletter. It was quite successful in its industry (7,000 free subscribers), but it switched to pay-subscriptions too late. It seems to have gotten about a 10% response rate in about 4 months when it switched to $22/ yr, but it wasn't enough by that time, and it had to close.
College course data site http://www.pick-a-prof.com tried to go to $5/yr paid-access in 2002. OUTCOME: They've now gone back to being free! Not clear what the story was.
News sites are very different from PB since they're read-only with expensive-to-produce content, but the trend was *away* from pay-to-read. Daily papers with online versions saw online readership drop 99% (!) when they switched to pay-access: http://www.digitaldeliverance.com/MT/archives/cat_paid_content.html
There's a site called http://www.theendoffree.com/ that follows pay-access issues.
-bhc
poster:badhaircut
thread:306403
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20040112/msgs/306403.html