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Specs of Salons Subscription System 197

Posted by chrisd from the slashcode's-story-serving-cousins dept.
legLess writes "Scott Rosenburg, Salon's VP of operations, wrote an interesting article for Web Techniques about Salon's subscription system. It goes into a fair amount of technical detail (JavaBeans and JSP on Linux for login and authentication; Perl, HTML::Mason and MySQL (CD: and oracle) for content). He also talks about their subscription numbers, what drove them to do it, and their plans for the future (technical and operational). A little fluffy, but still a good read."
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Specs of Salons Subscription System More

Specs of Salons Subscription System

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  • I pay for Salon Premium service, so it was interesting reading about the technical details of running their site.

    Since I am playing with Tomcat and Cocoon myself right now, I was interested to read about how Salon is also gettin into XML publishing techniques.

    -Mark

  • In-house vs. outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DouglasA ( 31173 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @03:36PM (#2676265)
    I read this article when the mag arrived, and was mostly fascinated by their decision to build it all in-house. Two or three years ago, they most likely would have thrown a ton of money at another company to develop the whole system. They would have gotten something that was not exactly what they wanted, and no doubt three months late (at least). Companies finally seem to be realizing that they need to make better use of the staff they have, and that even adding a few programmers or other employees can be cheaper than hiring outside developers. That's what I'm seeing at my company now, anyway, and others I know.
    • Good points, every one. Sadly, most companies now have a hiring freeze. We're stuck with messes that the contractors scrambled to finish just before they were sent packing.

      Many of these "innovations" replaced decent, reliable (if a bit tempermental) systems. It's good to see one company prioritized pragmatism above glitz, buzzwords, and hype.

      To be fair, inhouse developments can also become big messes.

    • While I am a proponent of building it yourself, alot of times naive people look at something like an ecommerce billing system (for example) and decide it should be easy because they are inexperienced. This is the same mentality people use when they decide to re-write big sections of code to make it cleaner! Hello! All those "unclean" parts are bugfixes that someone had to figure out and apply.

      On the one hand, the VP of engineering (and apparently the only programmer at the place) had done something like this before. On the other hand, considering the problems they still need to deal with (handling foreign zip codes for AVN) kind of implies they have a long way to go... Obviously hiring someone else to do it does guarantee it will work well but a decent company will have solved all the problems you don't even know your going to have if you DIY.
      • Heh. You got that straight out of Stroustrup's book, didn't you? I'm reading his chapter on design right now.

        Well, here's a clue. Sometimes a mess is a bunch of bugfixes. And sometimes a mess is just a mess.

        If you start out with a bad design, and you fix the code instead of the design when problems arise, you get messes like that. I have no problem with rewriting large sections of my code once I have a better understanding, and hence, a better design.

        Or sometimes, I clean it up without changing how it works at all, by breaking one big function into several smaller ones, or replacing calculations with pre-calculated variables, or turning a function into an object.

        Sure, wanton "cleaning" is dangerous, but there is a time an a place for reprogramming. Especially when there's a payoff in reliability or flexibility.
    • Amen.

      My previous employer (Red Sky) couldn't have scheduled the interviews for the object model design phase in the time allowed.

      Most of the infrastructure would have been unacceptable - we couldn't spell Linux or Apache, Solaris/and an expensive ap server was OK but we were really an NT shop. MySQL wouldn't have passed muster. The rest of the mess...? Don't even mention it.

      A year later, Salon would have been out the better part of a million and still not have a system.

  • As a subscriber... (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @03:48PM (#2676299)
    I think Salon has done the right thing. They were doomed otherwise - their stock was getting throttled (why they ever went public is beyond me) and advertising was flopping. Salon has good content - in the past critics could rightly claim that it was simply a shill for the Democratic party, but it has taken on a much more even tone. The sex content and the other bonus material is worthless, so don't subscribe if you think you are going to see nude hotties.

    In terms of their technology, I think managing two page management technologies (JSP and Perl/Mason) would get a little tired, and is likely unnecessary. While JSP might not be fast enough to handle the Mason-generated pages, you can certainly use Perl to transact credit cards if you want.

    From previous postings on this site, it seems that Slashdot will be going to subscription route as well. I think its a good idea. The quality of posts will probably improve (the best posters appear to be the /. addicts who would likely subscribe), and there would be capital in place to provide extensive services on top of what is already here.

    • Re:As a subscriber... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by foobar104 ( 206452 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @04:37PM (#2676430) Journal
      From previous postings on this site, it seems that Slashdot will be going to subscription route as well. I think its a good idea.

      I'm all for improved discourse, and I'd be disappointed if Slashdot had trouble staying afloat, but I don't agree that a subscription-based revenue model would improve the quality of the site.

      Not too long ago, Salon's "Table Talk" message board was a great place to find reasonably intelligent talk. There were no trolls, and it seemed that most everybody could spell.

      Then, sometime in the past year but I'm not sure when, Salon took their message board to a subscription-only model. Anybody can read, but only paying subscribers can post. It's not expensive, either; something on the order of six bucks a month, I think?

      The result? The boards that I used to frequent on Table Talk are now ghost towns. Tumbleweeds and cow skulls, and Yul Brynner wandering around dressed all in black.

      I, too, used to think that taking Slashdot to a read-for-free, pay-for-post model would be a good thing, keeping some of the riffraff out. But I don't think so any more.
      • I agree with your complaints about TableTalk on Salon. Regardless of what people were saying, the message board system itself was always quite weak, even compared to early versions of slashcode.

        Now I believe they have merged with the Well, but unfortunately it doesn't appear that they have a community message board worth paying for. They would really benefit from using slashcode or another engine. What they have no is pitiful.

        • I agree with your complaints about TableTalk on Salon.

          I think you misunderstood my complaints. I have no complaint about the software that implements the message board, as it seems you do. Frankly, I never thought about it.

          I was just saying that I'm disappointed that evidently many of the smart, thoughtful people who used to post there have decided not to sign up for the new subscription thing.
          • Yes, indeed.... that "business decision" was boneheaded even by .com standards. There were a lot of great writers on TT who were providing them with content for free. "Hey, I know! We'll start charging the people who are providing the content, while allowing those who consume it to continue to freeload!".

            I never even considered subscribing once I heard the details of this "business model". It was pretty obvious that the regular posters would decamp en masse, which of course meant that the lurkers had nothing to read, which of course meant that the whole thing went into the toilet.

            What maroons.
            • I disagree. The TableTalk posters were providing marginal benefit to most Salon users - most of them never bothered with it. The TableTalk posters were mainly providing a service to each other.

              Frankly Salon never had a compelling forum community on its own, and in that sense it was smart to merge with The Well.

      • >> I, too, used to think that taking Slashdot to a read-for-free, pay-for-post model would be a good thing, keeping some of the riffraff out. But I don't think so any more.

        I really have to agree. I post about once every three months, and my posts get ignored anyhow. I'd just read. I'm sure it would be the same for a whole lot of people.

        Plus, who would pay to comment on how cool a beowulf cluster of cowboyneals would be?
      • keeping some of the riffraff out

        It's called economic discrimination and it doesn't work. Just because you have cash to pay for a subscription, doesn't mean you have a brain in your head.

        -Russ

        • what about the other kind of economic discrimination: advertising. Advertisors influence the content of a site. Also, if you're trying to peddle a product or spice up you're corporate image -- you don't exactly want your ad to appear next to an in-depth four part study on homelessness. Finally, ads are geared to a target market which is usually affluent, so there is economic discrimination built in, too. I think advertising is the number one cause of all of the superficial, feel good, smiling prattle in the big media. Subscription is a pretty good way to go in terms of avoiding bias and paying the bills.

    • I think Salon has done the right thing. They were doomed otherwise - their stock was getting throttled (why they ever went public is beyond me) and advertising was flopping.

      Actually, they're still doomed. The subscriptions don't even come close to covering there costs
    • I seriously dobut that many people would go for a /. subscription. It just isn't worth it, I mean, all the content is user generated. Salon, obviously, is a real magazine with paid reporters and all that and has a valid excuse to charge money for what they're doing. /. just links to other stories and lets people post about it.

      Maybe if the subscriptions were like $5/$10 a year or something.

  • Premium only content - mark it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cowboy junkie ( 35926 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @03:50PM (#2676311) Homepage
    As I recall, when Salon first implemented their premium content, they didn't mark what content was premium, but instead when you viewed the story it would give you the first couple of paragraphs then say that you had to subscribe to read the rest. This is a big mistake, as it really makes non-subscribers resent the wasted click, and I'm glad they finally wised up and starting marking everything clearly as premium.

    I had no problem subscribing to Salon, though, because these guys are the real deal. While I love sites like /. that point to noteworthy stories on the web, Salon is one of the only true purveyors of Internet journalism that provides stories worth pointing to. They have top-notch folks reporting and provides commentary on the whole spectrum of news.
  • salon has always done a great job at covering things that most mainstream news services, and entertainment sources, tend to ignore. however, i'm still not convinced that paying for content is the way to go.... it reminds me of my experience subscribing to my favorite magazine and having it go through a complete overhaul and coming out at the other end as something completely different. there are no guarantees that the same thing couldn't happen to salon.

    my biggest point of annoyance with the site was when they took their news coverage out of the free portion of the site. they chose a moment when everyone around the world needed good, accurate reporting of the developing events after 9/11, and exploited that moment to expand their subscriber base. that should have been the moment when they kept everything open and freely available, perhaps soliciting for donations to keep the quality of coverage up. instead, they chose the greedy road and shut a lot of people off from a good information source.

    • Actually, I liked their partitioning during the 9/11 stories. I wasn't a subscriber at the time, and I could still read all the real news stories about everything. I'm not a subscriber, and I went back and read the stuff I couldn't read before, and it was mostly editorial stuff...still really interesting, because the salon writers are cool, but not actually necessary to know what's going on.
    • however, i'm still not convinced that paying for content is the way to go....

      Do you subscribe to magazines? Watch cable TV? You likely already pay for content in other mediums. Don't be fooled by the "freeness" of the web to date - most of the large web companies are already thinking beyond free content models. The biggest inhibitor to paid content so far in my opinion is the payment models. While I wouldn't pay for the NY Times on line on its own, I might pay to be a part of a network that includes the NY Times, Forbes, Atlantic Monthly, etc. (I am trying to list publications with similar demographics as an example).

      my biggest point of annoyance with the site was when they took their news coverage out of the free portion of the site. they chose a moment when everyone around the world needed good, accurate reporting of the developing events after 9/11, and exploited that moment to expand their subscriber base.

      At some point any subscriber site is going to have to yank to family jewels from free users. You can't build a subscription seriice when your most valuable assets are free. The ymade the right move.

      • no, i don't subscribe to magazines and i refuse to pay for television. i admit, i'm odd that way.

        from a business point of view, perhaps salon did the right thing by moving news coverage into the premium slot right when news was a hot ticket, but from a moral standpoint i think they were dead wrong. information should be free, especially when that information is news coverage of events that could change every aspect of the world we live in. a better way to go would be that of public radio... solicit donations but don't require them, and don't shut people off from important information if they choose not to or simply cannot pay.

        • Re:i'm still not convinced (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          a better way to go would be that of public radio... solicit donations but don't require them, and don't shut people off from important information if they choose not to or simply cannot pay.

          Salon isn't public radio, man. They don't get handouts from the government.

          Donations might work for a site like kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] where you're only paying for the banwidth and upkeep, but Salon has real writers to pay in addition to that.

          No matter what you say about news wanting to be free, that still doesn make news reporting free. That costs money, and if advertising won't pay for it, then something else is going to have to. Otherwise the aforementioned news coverage is just going to disappear, and I don't see how that benefits anyone.
        • but from a moral standpoint i think they were dead wrong. information should be free, especially when that information is news coverage of events that could change every aspect of the world we live in.

          But Salon isn't a news site, its a commentary site. They make no claim to bringing you the latest news.

    • Re:i'm still not convinced (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's not really correct. The majority of their news stories were always pay content (it was one of the first things to get switched to the Premium service). They actually stopped doing that and made all the news free for the first few weeks following 9/11. So they didn't really take the news content away; they just reverted to how it had been.

      I like Salon a lot. I don't think $30 is a lot of money for a "magazine" that's updated daily. And I have a hard time believing they would switch their focus and abandon the readers they've attracted over the last 6 years.
  • This month, Salon launched a monthly subscription program [salon.com] for 6$.

    Reading the article, I have to give credit to the way Salon deal with their readers.

    1. Even the free site is not overwhelmed by ads like those flash based ones that run around the page [slashdot.org] on wired, or those poping pages on yahoo.

    2. The price for the site is really low, compared to the price you would pay for a daily newspaper. They understood that internet users CAN pay for content but at a reasonable price.

    3. They give premium content [salon.com], not only ads-free stories.

    Thumbs up, Salon.
    • Salon writes "or if you prefer paying in smaller, spread-out amounts -- we hope this new option will fill the bill."

      six dollars a month equals 72 dollars a year. Why anybody would prefer to pay twice as much "in smaller, spread out ammounts" is beyond me.

      I wonder if they'll experiment with micropayments for individual stories.

      Yeah, premium content is good (and IMHO, worth it), but certain tactics of Salon-- holding political content for ransom, and adopting more and more obnoxious ad tactics in hopes that annoyed readers will pay for an ad-free version--while perhaps economically justified, aren't exactly "friendly".
      • Why anybody would prefer to pay twice as much "in smaller, spread out ammounts" is beyond me.


        One reason a person might sign up for the new plan and not the ordinary subscription is in order to try out being a subscriber without having to commit much money to it. If they like it, they can sign up for the longer term. If they don't like it, they're only out $6.


        As for why a person would continue to pay $6 month after month, I can't say.

        • As for why a person would continue to pay $6 month after month, I can't say.

          It is a standard model. I can pay $6 for a magazine on a news-stand or $30 for a subscription to the same magazine for a year.

          I have never subscribed to a magazine without buying several full price copies - or reading them in libraries etc.

          The different charge rates are justified by the overhead of cc charges chargebacks, gateway etc. - about 75 cents on a $6 charge, $1 on $30, so you save Salon $8 by going for the annual subscription.

          $6 is pretty much a disposable amount, I do not much bother if I buy a magazine at that price and find out afterwards it is not much good. $30 is not a disposable amount.

      • Easy ... so when the go down the crapper [techdirt.com] in 2 months, your only out $12.
      • I'm pretty irritated with their marketing too. I was considering subscribing to them, as I read them pretty much every day. Then they started with the popup ads. Then they started the intermediate ads that you have to click through to get to a story. Then they started doing all that premium content stuff.

        Screw em, I'll find another news source. The BBC website is pretty nice.

  • Salon != Slashdot... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by corky6921 ( 240602 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @04:05PM (#2676351) Homepage
    After reading this article, I begin to see why it will be doubly tough for Slashdot to make the jump to subscription-based revenue.

    The biggest problem I see with Slashdot is that Slashdot doesn't have a Cringely [pbs.org] or a Coursey [zdnet.com] or a Dvorak [zdnet.com]. Sure, Slashot has Jon Katz, but I just don't find his articles as readable as a Cringley column or a Dvorak rant.

    I see the real difference between Slashdot and Salon on a couple of other fronts as well. Besides not having several columns by intersting authors, most of Slashdot's content is made interesting by the readers, not by the story submitters. Personally, I am horrified by both the obvious lack of attention given to grammar, as well as the oft-biased one-liners added by the story submitters. Finally, although it has gotten better in recent times, Slashdot seems to crash a lot... even more than an overloaded MySQL database would suggest.

    For Slashdot to take a viable community and turn it profitable, the story editors do a lot more than Salon did. The fact remains that Salon's content is mostly unique, whereas Slashdot's content (in terms of story submissions) is mostly regurgitated. Salon's readers will pay because it's hard to find Salon-like articles anywhere else. On the other hand, I can honestly say that if ZDNet had a moderation system, I'd only rarely visit Slashdot. ZDNet's columnists keep me entertained, and their news is grammatically correct and up-to-date because they pay people to go out and write it.

    It all boils down to whether Slashdot can successfully differentiate itself from the hundreds of other "Cool Linux Stories" sites. In the end, what keeps Slashdot's readers coming back is the discussion and the attached moderation system. What remains to be seen is whether or not people will pay for that.
    • Salon and Slashdot are very different sites. If Slashdot had no comment system, I would not visit this site. On the other hand, I enjoy Salon-- and never use "Table Talk".

      If Slashdot went to a subscription system, it would probably drive off not only its "reader base", but also its "writer base."

    • /. Crash? (Score:2, Informative)

      by bstadil ( 7110 )
      Slashdot seems to crash a lot ?? What OS / Browser are you using? I have been "member" of /. for years ID 7110 and I can't remember having a slashdot Crash. (Currently using Opera 6.0 on SuSE 7.3)
      • Slashdot seems to crash a lot ?? What OS / Browser are you using? I have been "member" of /. for years ID 7110 and I can't remember having a slashdot Crash.

        That's not a "Slashdot made my browser crash" type of crash that corky6921 is referring to. It's a "!#%#!^ing Slashdot is down AGAIN!#?%" crash. Slashdot's servers go down far too frequently, although their stability seems to have improved somewhat.

        • Look Here [slashdot.org] The server has been up for 80 days and 20 hours. Not too shabby.
          • Server uptime and Server sending me the pages I want, with comments sorted in the order I set in my preferences and allowing me to contribute without sending me back to the front page when I hit reply are two different things.

            Slashdot hasn't been down so much as it just hasn't been working right lately. And its a myriad of browsers across several operating systems.

            • You are right, come to think of it, that happens fairly frequently. I go thru a NAT server then to Squid for my house network. I always thought it was a problem in my end. Thanks for info.
            • My understanding of the way slashdot is setup is that the main web server caches the frontpage and the story pages. This is to reduce load on the database as these are the most frequently accessed pages. They are updated periodically, like once a minute or so.

              When the database goes down, obviously slashdot can no longer do dynamic queries and so all you get are the cached pages. So you get into this situation, where most of the links don't work, you can't post, you can't moderate, and so forth. All you can do is view the cached main pages and the parent story pages.

              It's been mentioned various times by the slashdot folks that their MySQL database requires frequent rebooting. They've never gone into much detail as to why, but it appears to happen at least once a day from what I've seen of the frequence of the website "breaking" and only displaying the cached content.
            • I introduced static mode I think close to a year ago. Its used when the DB is down or a site update is occuring (like we put in bug features and such). We do the bug/feature additions probably twice a week now, and they normally happen around 1AM Eastern time as of late.

              During static mode you can only reach pages that are .shtml, everything else is disabled.

              Its certainly better then the old way which was to just to dish out zero content :)
          • Only problem is that uptime is probably for the web servers (which are likely to be fairly stable). The major problem seems to be their back-end DB servers going down, which can be seen whenever you hit ANY /. URL you are served the static "full" home page.

            In fact, for me, /. was doing this for about 3 hours yesterday afternoon (err, Australian time)
          • I would say that one out of every ten times I come to slashdot, it is in the non-user specific mode (meaning that the personalization server is down, from what taco said a while ago).

            So technically a server is running, but the site itself isn't really functional.

            Plenty of times I show up and the only page I can see is the main page -- clicking on the story link takes me back to the main page...
      • When /. crashes it goes into "static" mode - it rarely is completely down. However, the backend crashes quite a bit. I hit /. waaay too often (among other sites), and it definitely has the worst uptime.
    • Going forward it would behoove /. to bring more talented writers generating original content to the site.

      While I agree that there is something odd about users paying for a site where the users generate the content (via posts), its the network of users that one is paying for access to, not a particular user or set of posts.

  • The web isn't commercial only (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WiggyWack ( 88258 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @04:23PM (#2676402) Homepage
    I'm so tired of the whole "The free web is over" rants. Why do so many people think the commercial part of the web is the only part of the web? People have created content for free for a long, long, long time. Whether it be music, art, comics, poetry, literature, editorials, films, TV shows (yay for public access cable!), books, whatever... Many people are driven by ideas or creativity they just want others to pay attention to, without getting paid for it.

    So the "Soon you'll have to pay for all your web content" chant really means "Soon you'll have to pay for all the web content dished up by commercial organizations." Good. I don't need it anyway.

    The Internet is cool because all the free content that was out there to begin with can now be put online by anyone and viewed by anyone. So your underground newspaper, or garage band, or your off-the-wall comic strip has the potential to be viewed by a lot more people than just those in your town or school.

    I don't care if I have to pay for content owned by AOL Time Warner or whoever. There's plenty of people out there who want me to look at their stuff for free. (gee, kinda like how the Internet used to be)
    • I don't think the problem is lack of people willing to generate content, it's the fact that putting that content on the 'net requires bandwith, which, as has been pointed out, requires money. Bandwith has the further problem of not getting any cheaper.

      Take spinsanity.org... great site, great weekly e-mail and for a long time, fairly small time. Now they are getting popular and getting press time, and now they are getting strapped for cash. They had to open up the path ways for people to make donations to pay for bandwith. They were perfectly happy to make the content for free... it's providing the content that is getting to them.

      • Even so, I think a basic truism about the internet gets missed as commercial interests run around trying to find a way to make money solely on the web: the "killer app" for the internet is communication, in the form of email and increasingly in the form of instant messenger services. (And of course in the form of peer-to-peer file sharing systems.)

        The WWW wasn't originally conceived as a for-profit publishing service, and what's happening is simply that companies are finding that publishing models from the offline world don't always translate to the web. Companies that don't figure that out in time will go under. This doesn't just include online magazines, of course--it includes most "free" services whose cost is borne by advertisers. The companies who think the answer is to make ads more intrusive will just dig themselves in deeper. (As a Slashdot comment I saw earlier today said, "It's amazing the lengths some companies will go to in order to drive readers away from their site.")

        And you know--that's probably okay. The predictions of the end of the internet utterly miss what people by and large use the internet for. Most of the people using the internet are paying for their bandwidth (that $19.95 to $39.95 a month charge) and they're getting their email and IM, and they're happy.

        And the web? Companies that have sites up to tell you about their products and provide customer support will still have them. Companies that do online business of selling offline goods (i.e., Amazon, CD Connection) will still have them. Universities will still have them. Government agencies will still have them. Newspapers and magazines will still have them. People will still pay for "vanity publishing" webhosting out of their own pocket because they want to. And of course, groups that have information people are willing to pay for access to will have web sites.

        Really, it sounds kind of like the web just before the cusp of the "dotcom boom," doesn't it? After the internet had been opened up to commercial access but before the gold rush. A time frame when companies on the internet by and large had a reason to be there other than "because it is there."

        It won't be the end of the free web, it'll be the end of the advertiser web. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

  • Salon should look into selling/licensing their code to other content providers. Bandwidth is not getting any cheaper, and a cash strapped web company would probably love a chance to buy Salon's code as opposed to spending the money to do this themselves. I know that it is not Salon's MO, but they need money, and so does just about everybody else on the web.

  • Alas... (Score:2, Funny)

    by O2n ( 325189 )
    From the article:
    In the end, of course, our subscription plan has worked because a small but significant portion of our users feel that Salon is worth supporting with their cash.

    Alas, this happens when you get older: you start paying for support, news and, alas, women. :)

  • shut up (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by paulm ( 37073 )
    A little fluffy, but still a good read.

    Why do slashdot editors feel that they have to throw in their 2 cents. I'm glad you posted the article, thanks for the summary, but I don't want to hear your lame ass opinion. Especially when it is something as non-specific as a little fluffy. It's like you are afraid that all the slashdotters will be talking amongst themselves and saying "what's up with that fucking fluffy article that was posted", so you are attempting to protect yourself against that eventuality by saying - hey this is fluffy.

    Just post the fucking thing.

    Thank you.

    • Re:shut up (Score:2, Redundant)

      by reverius ( 471142 )
      That was not a comment by a slashdot editor.

      It was part of the submission by the user.

      Just thought I'd clarify that for the people who can't take the five seconds to see whether it's included in quotes, and is in italics.

  • Pay-for-content fragments the audience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by YouAreFatMan ( 470882 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @06:28PM (#2676714) Homepage
    I like Salon. I used to read Salon all the time. But they started putting 2/3 of their good articles on Salon Premium. I almost subscribed, but after a couple of weeks without it, I found I could live in a Salon-free world. Now I hardly ever visit it.

    I used to use Encyclopedia Britannica [britannica.com] once in a while. But now, I can't use it at all because it's a pay site. I can't justify paying a subscription when I might use it once or twice a month.

    I currently pay to subscribe to one on-line content provider : Cooks Illustrated [cooksillustrated.com]. Its worth it to me. Salon might be worth it to me, too, but I don't buy it. As more and more sites go pay-for-play, I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of sites. 1) I am only a casual reader, and 2) even if I thought it was worth it, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with all the sites I visit.

    And here's where it starts to break down: the (commercial) web can end up just like print media. Sure, any print publication could be subscribed to by everyone, but everyone is not going to subscribe to everything, or even one thing. So you have your subscribers, and you don't reach anyone else.

    I know that Salon Premium pretty much drove me away from Salon. I accept that in the future, I will be much more limited web site availability. I'm willing to pay that price because all that casual content isn't worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to maintain subscriptions.

    Micropayments, anyone?

  • more detailed interview on the subscription model (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kraft ( 253059 ) on Saturday December 08, 2001 @08:02PM (#2676872) Homepage
    here [contentbiz.com]. Interview with COO Patrick Hurley from August this year. The interview is very "content provider" oriented and is a good read.
  • The article doesn't address whether all of the premium content becomes free once archived. I certainly hope it does. I think it's important for Salon's influential content to be widely available for reference use (linking) in other on-line content.

    It would be a shame if other authors on the Web could not link to an important Salon article. Linking is practically the definition of influence on the Web (ask Google). Influence makes Salon more attractive to subscribers, and so on.

  • Does this mean I can get a free subscription if I just edit the cookie file of a friend and grab the cookie?
  • The main problem with the web subscription model at this point is that one must pay separately for one's internet access. Imagine having to pay fifty dollars per month for the possibility of watching cable or satellite television. To actually view any content, one would then be required to subscribe to each channel individually, at additional cost. Not many takers, eh?

    One possible future model is actually a return to an old one: a model similar to that of CompuServe or America Online before the internet explosion--a package of access and (often exclusive) content.

    • HBO seems to be doing fairly well, these days, and has been since the early days.

      Note: "Early days" in this context is defined as the time when "basic cable" meant paying a sum of money every month to a company which would deliver to your home via coaxial cable a handful of local television stations which could easily be recieved -for free- with an antenna, with the possibility of paying an additional monthly sum for HBO.
  • Here's a new poll for your marketing research. Would you pay for /. if...

    - /. had more original news pieces
    - Jon Katz wrote something worth reading
    - Paying members could turn off all ThinkGeek ads (et. all)
    - The moderators were fair [troll]
    - Paying users could turn OFF the Cowboyneil option in polls

  • $72 per year? For Salon? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday December 09, 2001 @12:54AM (#2677713) Homepage
    That's a bit much. The online subscription to the Wall Street Journal is only $59 per year. And the WSJ has far more content, real content, created by reporters spread around the world. Salon is mostly columnists, and rather lightweight ones at that.

    What might work is, say, a service that lets you buy topics, like "politics", "literature", or "entertainment industry news" for a flat fee, but covers a large number of publications. Like AdultCheck and PornoPass, but for people who read. The "adult verification systems" are commercially successful, unlike micropayment systems. As usual, the porno industry figures it out first.

  • cost of subscription (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Utopia ( 149375 )
    May be a little unrelated but can't stop myself from offering my own comments on the cost associated with subscription

    Slate.com [slate.com] which competes for the same market as Salon ran a subscription experiment couple of years back. They ended up signing about 26000 subscribers. They were charging only $19.95/year, which is a pretty low price point considering that it was costing several times that much, even on the very best campaign, to acquire a subscriber. The cost of acquisition was averaging between $50 and $100, so obviously Slate was losing money on every subscriber we signed up.

    Eventually, they decided to go free again.

    Slate has only 40 employees while Salon has double the number - I therefore except their costs to much more.

    I think even with the $72/year that Salon is charging
    they are losing money. I would be suprised if they switch back to being a free ad-based site.

  • Paid Sites (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JSkills ( 69686 )
    I read this article in print a while ago and found it interesting for sure (and yes fluffy since the tech details never went quite deep enough).

    It was particularly interesting to me since we at Goofball.com went through the exact same process a while back ourselves. We initially were a free site and at our peek were doing close to a million pageviews a day - not including the Apache requests for video downloads (that amount to like 500 GB per month in bandwidth). We were actually leasing 7 Linux boxes (3 running HTML::Mason dynamic content servers, 3 plain Apache image servers, and a MySQL DB server) and paying through the nose for them due to the bandwidth. However, back in the good old days of the CPM advertising model, we were making plenty to afford the costs.

    We were of course f----d when the "new economy" came to bear and we suddenly had no income for close to a year. Good thing we saved all that money we made on ad banners. We were eventaully forced to either close it all down or move to a payment model. We polled our viewers and decided to try the payment model based on their feedback.

    The site is now 80% pay / 20% free. We're not just charging for access to specfic areas of content, but for the actual utility provided for by the site's various personalization services. We also decided that micropayment were not feasible. Can you imagine the headache of tracking pennies for pageviews and the associated overhead of dealing with people's questions/complaints about charges to their credit cards? A yearly fee of $19.95 (or a nickel a day) was the way we went and you know what - it actually saved the site.

    Granted, traffic is at 10% of what it was, but that allowed us to drop off a few machines from the server farm and thus reduce costs further - keeping us slightly in the black each month.

    HTML::Mason is the key to the site's success for sure. We can provide dynamic content on the fly pulled from the database, but a key element of the delivery machanism is Mason's built in caching. Only the first page request for a given URL (that uses the DB) actually requests the data from the database - subsequent requests are pulled from a GDBM replica of the DB's content that was cached by the first request. Mason also provides us with the ability to maintain a persistent DB connection during the life of the Apache daemon. Additionally, the same Apache/mod_perl/Mason binary also listens for requests on port 80 and 443 for SSL requests. All credit card transactions are handled through a Mason enabled API gateway. All of our back-end tools are HTML::Mason as well.

    I didn't really get the part about "needing Java/JSP" in the Salon.com story. It sounded to me more like the author was not really in touch with the particulars of the technology at hand and was just repating what reasons he may have been given by the development team (who may have been looking to learn something new for the sake of it). I just came from a job where a decision was made to "go with a Java solution" simply because of the name of the programming language more than any other factor. I have nothing againsts Java believe me, but I'm so tired of buzzwords being used to influence decisions that are actually in dire need of pure business and software logic instead.

    I'd encourage everyone - if they haven't already - to have a look at HTML::Mason [masonhq.com]. And also, for a good diversion, take a look at Goofball.com [goofball.com].

  • As someone else pointed out, paying $72/year for any online amature news site is completely outrageous.

    I can get magazine subscriptions (PCMag, et al) for like $40/year... I can get a HUGE newspaper at my door *every day* for $60/year, and I can *guarantee* you that it has a lot more coverate and stories and information than any online news site around will have, and it will be a lot better written too. Plus I'm not tied to my computer to read it, which as of right now is a nice thing. Sure, the wireless internet is great, but during a 45min commute to work in a carpool it's great to just flip open a newspaper.

    I'd pay for salon if it was $30/year, but I think that's the magic number for me. Any more than that and there is a lot better places to go to get the information that I want.

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