It looks like newsday has other issues (pun not intended) besides a very lousy conversion rate.
If they make it to next year without going bust or being sold again it would highly surprise me.
Their only saving grace is that they actually provided the figure.
I can't make the numbers work though, 35 subscribers for $20 / month since october works out to 140*$20 maximum, which is a lot less than the $9000 quoted in the article.
So, unless I'm completely uninformed about consumer law, that means they have to do recurring billing on a weekly schedule charging $5 each time the subscription renews, and customers can cancel at any one point in time.
Any two bit webmaster running a site with a subscription model would be able to tell you some of the downsides of that registration page and why you really don't want to do this (the $5 / week charge) but that's their problem.
So, what they've grossed is the number of subscribers times the number of weeks, once they've figured out their 'life cycle' they can project to future earnings.
People do not as a rule fork over a years subscription in advance, another truth of online recurring billing. That's a great way to have to refund all of the money if the customer is not 100% satisfied during the run of the subscription.
So, the 'middle ground' is monthly billing, with in case of a dispute a maximum 3 month refund.
I also love their 'opt-out' for spam checkbox (check to opt-out, default 'unchecked'), and the fact that they (optionally) ask you to fill out your gender and birth date.
> " Please check this box if you prefer not to be emailed "
I can see a few very pissed off users in their future then, and it makes me wonder what would happen if they would simply make it a monthly subscription.
Do you have any proof of this ? The website says very clearly $5 / week.
Whenever I've gotten a newspaper subscription they've said it would cost $x a week, and then when it was time to settle up they'd either charge for 6 or 12 months in advance.
I highly doubt they would even understand the question if you asked them.
That page is just about against every bit of best practice regarding sign up forms that I'm aware of.
- don't ask for stuff you don't need
- make it *one* step to register and pay
- ask positive questions not negative questions
- put the form at the top and the benefits to the right
the form is where you make your sale, so it should come first
- make it a light page with black lettering
- make it a secure server
- if you will be using an email address as a login (bad) then you don't need to ask for a username
- do not split your billing step and the signup step
Agree with all, but just curious as to your preference for login combo? I tend to use and prefer email/password and sites like Facebook and Twitter use the same.
Never been a fan of username/alias (too much variation per site - can never remember if I used John, JohnD, JohnDoe, JohnDoe77, etc) and no one can remember every account number they might have across the net.
Email address sign-ins have lots of problems with respect to support, and you have to factor in your support costs.
The automatic verification of the user identity is a bonus but for most sites you don't really need that.
In the case of this particular website, which already seems to have a bunch of free options, the 'freemium' model would seem to work a lot better, get them in small steps at the time and make a conversion funnel.
Goal 1 would be to get the user to visit several times
Goal 2 would be to get them to invest a bit of their identity in the site, make them a 'registered user'
Goal 3 would be an upsell, give them access to premium content for a fee
It's a tough model to market, but because you have a number of steps you can automate the analysis of how effective the various steps of the funnel are. By the time you are ready to ask for card&expiry you have built up a trust relationship already and 90% of the signup process is over.
I built a custom publishing system last year for a group of newspapers (some upgrading their sites, some shifting online for the first time) and used email/password. Those sites have free articles and then others only available to logged in users (though it's free to register).
I'd imagine that username-based logins would have problems of their own? A lot of people would end up with very little idea of what username they had used or should use.
If you need to ask for an email address to run newsletters, alerts and the like, it just seems to me that email/password eliminates one extra item from the sign-up form?
I have logins at many sites (like most people here, I'm sure) and a number of email addresses too, but always find it quicker to login with email/password than with a username (e.g., Yahoo's login for Flickr) and the slowest on average would be those using account numbers; I know my betting site ID by heart, and one at a software distributor client, but I have to look up the one for my domain registrar every time.
I have a single username (barrkel) but multiple email addresses (depending on degree of personal connection, so bulk email lists / notifications go in one category, etc.), so the problem is rather reversed for me.
How many people are likely to think ahead to work with a unique-enough username though? Also, to make it something that's suitable to use in casual and business contexts?
We already have a tonne of hotmamma58s are out there, I bet.
Apparently those 35 people did sign up for a year. (Edit: I guess not. I think the author is just establishing a best-case calculation). According to the article, anyway, which unveils the number 35 as the answer to the following question:
"...how many people have signed up to pay...$260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?"
/me thinks that they made the connection between the $5 per week and the year all by themselves, the website is mum on $260, but prominently displays the $5.
That's the one thing they did right, if they had put $260 up front you'd be looking at 3 in stead of 35 subscribers :)
No doubt the author made the connection himself. It's sensible for him to have calculated the best-case since the gist of the piece is that even the best-case annual revenue is abysmal.
Oops, deleted my similar comment I submitted simultaneously. But yes, that $9000 figure is lazy math. It would be $9100 for a full year of 35 subscribers. Considerably less for 3 months (like $2100), and that's assuming all 35 subscribers signed up on day one.
As a resident locally "served" by Newsday I can only ask: what were those 35 people thinking!
Comparing Newsday to the NY Times does a disservice to the Times. Since being taken over by Cablevision, Newsday can best be described as the New York Knicks of media. It has become a throwaway add-on for Cablevision in its competition with Verizon Fios.
In Newsday's geographic target area (Long Island, NY), if a news consumer is the type of reader who mainly reads news online, they'll go with the Times, or even the NY Post or Daily News online, rather than Newsday. Newsday's print readers (even before the Cablevision takeover) are the readers most likely to be still consuming print -- they skew older, less affluent, and less educated.
Newsday's only competitive advantage content-wise, relative
to the other NY papers, are hyper-local Long Island politics, culture listings, and classifieds. There just isn't any overlap between people interested in these things and people who consume most of their news online (AND are willing to pay for it).
the headline is a bit misleading. that is 35 paid online subscriptions from people who don't already have a print subscription (who get online access for free), and/or who don't already have a cablevision account (who get a free account).
i'd be interested in knowing the number of people who are new subs for the print version in that same timeframe, and/or new subs from the cable deal.
Agreed. The article is almost pointless. The online edition was meant to be a freebie, while the title makes it sound like the business is failing because of the web version.
Granted, sounds like they're struggling as a whole and wasted a good chunk of cash on the site. But they couldn't have any had any serious exceptions if 75% of their market was going to get it for free.
"The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million"
I didn't realise people still spent $4M on what is basically a CMS. They could have bought a news focus and proven CMS like Ellington for less than a fraction of a percent of that. Leaving plenty of change to play for design.
Maybe there's never a "good" time to put up a pay wall, but it seems pretty dumb or naive to try to do it now, while so many people are still eliminating recurring expenses and generally trying to save money. If money is tight, switching to a free alternative when one of the sites you hit online puts up a pay wall seems like a no-brainer.
Reminds me of "the penny gap" (see http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html). This is especially true with discretionary items and items that have many competitors and substitutes, especially free ones. That's the situation with newspapers. Sure, some might say each newspaper and writer is unique, which is true, but...
...maybe people aren't looking for "the best" newspaper or writer or web app, maybe they're looking for "the best free" newspaper, writer, or web app. NOTE: "Free" in this case means "ad supported," or at least "no subscription required."
I think they probably captured everyone that makes reading Newday's website a regular part of their day. I can't imagine ever doing that personally but I guess it's possible. I hope that they just refund those people their money and move on and try something else.
Here's my lame idea: Just link to international and national news articles, since it's easy enough to search Google. Might as well link to Craig's List too. What's harder is local news, so charge subscribers to get access local news now. Articles older than a month become free (since in many cases, news is worth more now than later) so you can still serve up articles from the various search engines. Also, allow several subscription plans---let people buy an article, or maybe a week's access, or a full year. And don't be so invasive with the sign-up form.
Also, don't be afraid of linking out of the site. Link to sources. Link to the laws (it's avaiable). Link to previous articles you've written! (I think that would be a no brainer, but apparently newspapers have negative brains or something).
Serve up local ads to local residents (easy with GeoIP), and use something like Google AdSense for anyone non-local. That way, you have an advertising advantage over Google for local businesses and you aren't wasting their advertising money showing ads to someone 3000 miles away (unless they want to---that's always an option).
Dump the presses. The money you save there can be used to hire reporters (who will hopefully refrain from just pasting up press releases).
Dumb? Smart? I don't know. But it's certainly a plan and one that might get you more than 35 subscribers.
This is their hail-Mary pass, if the subscription model does not work what are they supposed to do next?
Put someone competent in charge of the paper and removing quality articles and placing ads in the paper instead. Also, go back to a format that resembles a newspaper that has news in it, rather then tabloid newspapers. I used to read Newsday on a daily basis.
It took approximately a month under the Dolans (current owners) for my subscription to be canceled due to the reasons above. If the problems were fixed, I'd gladly go back to reading Newsday instead of switching between the Times and the Daily News.
Because currently, this isn't a story of a newspaper dying. Its a story of the tabloids dying. And good riddance; perez hilton and the ilk don't need syndication.
If I were a local paper/news-source, I'd try offering business subscriptions to SMEs that included online access for employees, coverage/feature/advertorial for products and services, and a general online advertising component.
Right now, the advertising presented on local news sites in Australia seems to be a mixture of random AdWords junk and larger-budget stuff (big auto sites, etc) but not much in the way of really localised small-business advertising.
With more information on readers (down to postcode and age-group), I think they could definitely do more to sell small businesses on online advertising; I'm talking about butchers, school enrolments, tradespeople, restaurants, etc. The concept I mentioned would both collect info on readers and bring small businesses into the newspaper's community.
Print pub management is never going to be able to figure out this web thing.
Their egos are too big and they are totally incapable of dragging themselves away from the "Ad Block" business model.
They are never going to be able to see readers as anything but numbers that they deliver to advertisers. I think the whole business will be pretty much gone by 2020 and, in my opinion, all I can say is "Good Riddance".
There are so many Internet business models but why is it that the subscription model is the only one they can think of.
Newspaper industry clearly needs a new business model. But the bigger problem is really the management who are incapable of coming up with one, or incapable of executing.
So out of the 700,000 uniques that stopped reading, they only converted 35 to paying.