

Ars Technica Announces A Subscription Based Service - Brentley_11
http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/

======
htsh
Just to be clear, this is their 2nd subscriber program. The first Ars Premier
program launched eight years ago:
[http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2009/09/introducing-
ar...](http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2009/09/introducing-ars-
premier-20.ars)

------
ScottWhigham
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.

~~~
mrkurt
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.

------
albertsun
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.

~~~
stuff4ben
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?

~~~
tjogin
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.

~~~
steveklabnik
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."

The difference is pretty big.

------
rbarooah
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.

~~~
russross
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.

------
rw
They could follow the LWN model of freeing paid content after a week (or after
a month).

~~~
sjs
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.

------
trinket
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.

------
ironkeith
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.

~~~
mrkurt
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.

~~~
ironkeith
Oh, that's great news. I must have misread the announcement page. Thanks for
clarifying.

------
ryanspahn
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!

