An experiment with metered pay

Test: Ask out-of-market, non-subscribers to pay for reading more than seven obituary pages per month.

Lessons Learned: Traffic

1) Downside: In forecasting subscribers or revenue, analytic programs

can overestimate “unique” users.

Using Scout Analytics, we discovered that other widely-used analytics

programs, as well as user cookie deletion, had overstated our unique readers

by 10 times or more.

2) Upside: There was no loss of online readership with a metered model.

Because occasional readers – who account for the majority of page views –

never hit the pay wall, there has been no loss of readership. Surprisingly,

there has been a sustained gain of readership.

Lessons Learned: Traffic, cont.

• Traffic to obits.lancasteronline.com for the 9-week period, July 12 – Oct. 15,

compared to comparable period in 2009:

Metric 2009 2010 % increase

Pageviews 776,610 851,264 9.6%

Uniques 479,267 575,899 20.2%

Time/Page 1:04 1:07 4.7%

Lessons Learned: Reaction

3) Reader complaints were surprisingly small.

• For every five successful subscriptions, we received one complaint.

• Half of complaints were technical in nature and easily resolvable.

• The other half were annoyed or angry that we would charge for

content that had been free.

• We responded to each, explaining that we could not give away a

product that cost money to produce.

• That won over 9% of the complainers as subscribers.

Lessons Learned: Strategies

4) Don’t worry about trying to define your unique content.

Allow readers to define what is important content for themselves.

5) Find a way to avoid cookie-based identification of readers.

Contacts:

1) Ernie Schreiber eschreiber@Lnpnews.com

LancasterOnline.com 717-291-8750

2) Matt Skibinski Matthew.Skibinski@journalismonline.com

Press+ 212-332-6408

3) Greg Chagaris chagaris@outsellinc.comScout Analytics 650-342-7123