Click here...

BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Crain’s AutoNews Goes Under the Pay Hood
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Steve Smith

AutoNews.com, the online extension of Crain’s Automotive News weekly for the car trade, is bringing much of its content behind the pay wall. Starting Dec. 21, general non-subscribers now can access only a few stories at a time at the site, which will be open mainly to print and digital edition subscribers. “If you don’t subscribe, you’ll miss out on a lot,” says Web editor Dave Versical in a post on the site. “You’ll be able to open only a few stories each day and your daily and weekly e-mail newsletters will be skimpier.”

Coinciding with a major site redesign and relaunch early last week, Automotive News now has several paid content models. Subscribers to the print weekly ($159/year) can access all online news commentary and reader comments as part of their subscription. Users can purchase an online-only subscription for $99/year that opens up the same online content and provides a digital magazine version of the print weekly. A new data package offers access to sales and production figures for the industry. The Data Center package is available to Automotive News subscribers for an additional $59 a year and as a stand-alone offer to non-subscribers for $199 a year.

AutoNews.com is following a tiered packaging model that WSJ.com and FT.com also have deployed in recent months. WSJ has multiple access models for different platforms with a variety of print, Web and mobile bundles involved. FT.com has been using the limited-access model to lure new subscribers into the paid fold. General readers are allowed to read a set number of stories during a given time period before being prompted to get a subscription.

No doubt we will see more of this in coming months. For b2b publishers, this model revisits the classic controlled circulation approach. For years, trade publications have courted crossover traffic to their sites via linkage from general news or search engines. This ancillary traffic can pump up the monthly page view and unique user counts, but does not necessarily give advertisers the kinds of targeted professional audiences they expect from trades. It will be interesting to watch how the online advertising inventory within some b2b sites shrinks as these pay walls come down, and what effect—positive or negative—it has on ad sales. Some publishers, like Investor.com and WSJ, often argue that the smaller, paid audience behind their restrictive pay walls proves to be more lucrative than a larger, less-targeted free audience.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

More Breaking News & Views

Breaking News & Views Archives

COMMENTS

Intriguing & Top-Selling Magazine Covers

View Details

The State of Digital Media

View Details

Twitter Best Practices for Media Companies

View Details

Internet Sales Guidebook

View Details

All min Press

Events Calendar

September 15
Awards Event: September 15
More Information

November 9, 2010
min day Digital Summit
Learn More

All Events

Copyright © 2010 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Access Intelligence, LLC is prohibited. For more details please see Terms and Conditions.

min day Digital Summit
November 9 in NYC
Register Today!