To all of those who said, "I like the model...", did you signup?
I ask because I have a strong feeling that there are a lot of people who think that yet won't actually pull the trigger and buy it. I understand the model and I think it's very forward-thinking yet I'm not paying.
I think some of this is genuine cause for concern, and some of it is a function of the target audience for this kind of offering. We have a lot of visitors who have our site set as their homepage, visit multiple times per day, and/or are heavily engaged in the forum. These people get a disproportionate amount of utility out of some of the enhancements. Removing ads significantly speeds up at least a few parts of our site (depending on what's going down with the ad servers).
There is also a non-significant segment of our traffic that wants long form articles in PDF form. For these people, the subscription may be worth it, and it can easily turn them into repeat visitors (because, hey, why not get the other PDFs too?) who then get more utility out of the other features.
The important bit here is that no one expect this to replace ad revenue anytime soon. It's a diversification that also gives us a nice cross section of visitors to listen to attentively.
I pay the same amount, $5/month for LWN.net and the same content is available for free when it's a week old. So, I could see it working, though personally I won't be signing up for Ars's one.
I really like the model. There's a whole bunch of small things that individually aren't worth it, but together becomes a much richer experience that a devoted reader might pay for.
Particularly, I like the idea of providing a better reading experience for subscribers. That seems like the kind of thing that you wouldn't value at first, but after you have it becomes hard to give up.
this isn't directed at you, but to your opinion that seems to be prevalent amongst others. It seems like when Ars does this, it's ok, but when a newspaper or AP wants to do the same thing it's somehow not ok? Why is that? I'm not trying to be argumentative but rather looking into what Ars is doing differently that makes it ok?
We've done things a bit differently than what most newspapers and the AP have talked about. For one, we've worked really hard to enhance the overall reading experience for subscribers. They get a better "window" into the free content. It's ad free, they can read it on the pooper when they print out a PDF, etc. There's also full text (including 23 page reviews) RSS available. We actually wanted to give subscribers free Kindle subscriptions too, but that wasn't possible.
The content that is behind a paywall is going to be less broadly appealing, and supplementary to what's already freely available.
The most interesting thing, and probably the most daring, is the whole editorial round table thing. If it works as planned, we'll basically be giving subscribers a great deal of influence over what the site publishes, and vast amounts of information that media sites don't generally give out. There's already a planned discussion, for instance, on the economics of producing long form content, all because subscribers consistently ask for more of it. We may not be able to deliver it as much as they or we want, but we are going to involve them in those discussions.
Recent talk by newspapers & the AP have been to put up all or most of their content behind paywalls. What Ars is doing is placing long form/higher cost content (e.g., long form PDF documents), exclusive features (e.g., ability to vote other users into the "hall of shame"), exclusive events (e.g., live chats w/ popular writers), and an ad-free experience behind a paywall, while leaving the majority of their content on the free, ad-supported site.
And critics of the newspapers (or at least my criticism of the newspapers) plans to go paywall isn't that it's bad or wrong, just that it's a bad idea if it's all-or-nothing since readers will simply substitute. If newspapers were proposing something closer to what Ars is trying, I think you'd hear less criticism and more curious interest...
Besides the great points that sstrudeau brings up, I'd also point out that there is a big difference in how the offers are presented.
News organizations are just about calling their online readers freeloading cheapskates who need to start paying for news again (while in the same breath saying that their news are essential to society, all the while misunderstanding that readers never paid for the news itself to begin with).
Ars instead are presenting you with an offer of even higher quality content, which you can opt-out of and still have access to their current product.
Long story short: Ars are doing it right, news corps are doing it ass-backwards, misunderstanding their own business, their readers and their product.
Yep. It's all in the branding. Newspapers are saying "This is our pay service, you can maybe get a little for free," while Ars says "This is our free service, you can pay to get a little bit more."
Newspapers tend to cover a lot of the same stuff that is available in 50 different places - you can't charge for that. E.g. you couldn't charge for information about the lastest iPods.
I think you can only charge for the unique content, which is what Ars's is doing.
I am a fan of the model as well and applaud them for pushing for this.. just paves the way for other bloggers to test out the model if they do well with it.
I almost subscribed immediately and probably will. The key thing about ARS that makes them different from the average news site is that their quality is consistently high, they aren't obviously pushing a particular viewpoint, and more importantly their analysis is in depth and intelligent without being monotonous or pedantic.
I'd love to pay money to subscribe to a newspaper that was like this.
I do pay money to subscribe to a newspaper that pretty much fits your description (The Economist). I would amend your list of qualities to say that the viewpoint of each article is always stated and argued. Most sources claim to reach no conclusion, but they actually do. The honest approach is to argue a point and try to convince the reader that you are right, not try to manipulate the reader into agreeing with you unknowingly.
Read any of the Jon Stokes articles, for example, and he usually makes predictions or makes a claim about the hidden reasons behind some industry action, but he doesn't pretend otherwise. He states that he thinks x was a bad move, and then explains why.
I think Ars is in a different situation, especially w.r.t. hardware articles. By the time the content is freed ad-supported surfers have already read about the shiny new toys elsewhere. Time is less critical for longer LWN articles, imo.
This is interesting - LWN has tried to support itself on a subscription model (subscribers get access to articles 1 week early), but apparently revenue isn't high enough:
http://lwn.net/Articles/350385/
Many commenters have pointed out that Ars Technica manages to have in-depth technical articles supported by only ads and asked why LWN can't do that same. Honestly, I'm not convinced the Ars Technica proposition is enough to make me sign up - but I'm a poor student and so very little really would unless I viewed it as essential to my studies.
Kind of sucks that they're putting their "Deep Technical Reviews" behind a pay wall... I've really enjoyed a few of those in the past, but probably not $50 worth. Could be an opportunity for micro-payments I suppose.
To clarify, deep technical reviews will not be behind a pay wall. Getting those reviews as PDFs however, will.
Content behind the pay wall will be additive and complement what's already there. John Siracusa's going to have a subscriber only chat, for instance, but his massive Snow Leopard review was (and is) freely available.
right everything is always as it was before, but you get more options if you're a subscriber. There are not and never will be pay walls at Ars for normal standard content.
We'll be doing exclusive chats and some new types of content that only subscribers can see, but the normal Ars bread and butter will be free for all.
How about news sites charging say $12 bucks a yr. for iPhone centric versions of their site?
Reading Hacker News & other news sites on the iPhone is not the greatest experience! A lot of sites could charge for this and in turn offer a better UX for a nominal charge & in turn have another revenue model, that's easy to create & advertise!
