Reader Debbie Weil writes in, “A survey last week in my e- newsletter WordBiz Brief reveals that 30 percent of respondents DO PAY for online subscriptions to e-newsletters or Web sites. The question was not, “WOULD YOU PAY” but “do you currently pay to subscribe.” Pubs and sites subscribed to included the Wall Street Journal Online, John Audette’s Adventive discussion lists and Hoovers.com. Whereas 70 percent do not pay for anything.
Respondents are from 3,500 subscribers to WBB, one-third from outside the U.S. (primarily UK, Australia, Canada).”
http://www.wordbiz.com
The Pew Internet Project recently released survey results on the free-to-paid content front. Of the 233 Americans they reached in a telephoned survey who said they had been asked to pay for access to a Web site that was previously free, 12% anted up and paid for it.
You’ll note that other media (noteably Reuters) who covered this news focused on the negative side — the 88% of consumers who didn’t pay (yet.) However, you can take it from me, this news is HAPPY DANCE TIME. The average conversion numbers we’ve been hearing from previously free online publishers have been in the range of .05%-10%. This is already higher than the average sales figures for content offers sent through direct mail (such as a direct mail offer for a magazine) that get from .02-2% generally, depending on pricing, demographics, marketing prowess, etc.
I’d also like to make a point – yet again – that you’re probably bored of hearing from me, because I tend to hammer it in. Online paid content marketing is in its INFANCY. And in general, the copywriting skills, offer tests, pricing tests and all-around marketing savvy I’ve seen exhibited by the average econtent marketer have not come up to par with their offline peers.
(Perhaps partly because there are far fewer proven marketing campaigns to steal ideas from.)
So, when Pew says 12% of 233 people they talked to have already paid for content online that used to be free, you should see this as the beginning of a real success story.
(You can download your own PDF of the 6-page report here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=48 )
I’m zipping off for Thanksgiving travel now, but wanted to first congratulate Judy Richardson of Unicast (the folks who make SUPERSTITIALS (TM) possible) for emailing me the Best Pitch this Month:
Judy noticed that I’m speaking at @d:tech (the big emarketing show coming up in two weeks) so she pitched me on mentioning her company in my speech. She even had ideas about an angle that would work for my speech, and offered backup data if I needed any.
I gotta say, that is super-clever. Get third party endorsement from show speakers — clever….
As I take off for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I give thanks I’m not a site doing price testing in a limited marketplace. One new-ish site — which shall remain nameless — is rapidly becoming infamous for “shady” behavior in publisher/content owner circles.
By traditional marketing rules, the site is not behaving shadily at all. You used to be able to price test, and cut different deals with different content owners and nobody would be the wiser. But in these days of industry email discussion groups, instant messaging, and everybody having worked with each other at some point in the past … when you offer different deal terms to different people, they find out. Ooops.
Hint to the unwise (you know who you are) — price and % test in large marketplaces where everybody doesn’t know each other and already commonly share info of this nature.
Sending out a special Sale offer email?? Consider staggered drops. About an hour ago clothier J Jill, sent its entire opt-in list of customers and site registrants, a 50% off sale email notice. Their Web site, never the fastest loading gun in the Web, slowed to a crawl and even started losing orders as the shopping cart system couldn’t cope. The customer service rep I called on the phone said, “Oh yes, a whole lot of people have called in complaining about the Web site over the past half hour. I wonder why?”
(Yes, the email marketing department had forgotten to warn customer service that a big campaign was going out. I can’t shake my finger too hard though, having been flogged on more than one occasion by my own CSRs for the same sin.)
B2B marketers who use direct marketing tactics to gather leads for their sales department have done staggered campaigns for years now, because the sales team can only handle a certain number of incoming leads per day. Now it’s time for B2C email marketers to copy that trick.
Since we first did a Case Study on the then-ground breaking Ford Explorer rich media ad on Yahoo six months ago (little birds flew across the screen to eat bird seed and then an actual truck appeared to burst out of the your screen at you), the grand experiment has become almost situation normal. Late this evening when I popped into Yahoo’s home page, a giant lemon floated across my screen to splash in a button ad full of “diet coke”. I don’t know if it made a sound doing so, because hardened by various Flash-based ad agency sites, I turned down my speakers to “silent” weeks ago.
Is it spam when somebody sends a unasked for commercial message to your eFax account??? eFax, once a favored investment of the UK’s Prince Charles, has been sending a new unsolicited commercial message to me, from people who obviously rented their list, about once a week for the past few months. The latest installment duplicated the look of an old Rhode Island newspaper, but strangely all stories on its’ front page all seemed to recommend the same hardly-known stock. Hey, even if there are a few old ladies and pensioners who are naive enough to be taken in by a scam like this, what are the chances that they would also be savvy enough to have an eFax account instead of a fax machine?
[Update: Please see my December 3rd update on this story!]
SherpaBlog reader Elizabeth Karolczak of Oskar Consulting
< http://www.oskar.com > just got back from the eContent 2001 show which was held in Northern California earlier this week. She called up with some notes, which I paraphrase here:
– More than 200 attendees went to sessions, the majority of which were paid. This is a great sign for the content industry, because similar shows earlier this year had a hard time cracking 50 paids! The folks who made it were mainly veteran content licensing and syndication execs, many of whom go way back. So there was a lot of reminiscing in the hallways.
– The trend I (Anne) noticed earlier this year of classic content distributors and syndicators, from Factiva to Screaming Media, focusing more on themselves as technology providers than being in the content biz, is definitely continuing. One speaker reportedly acknowledged, “Content really is the thing that pulls the whole chain along.” But even they admitted the point these days is to sell software and technology to corporate intranet folks who want help organizing internal content … and then integrating their current external feeds in … and then maybe a year or two from now getting around to adding in new feeds.
– Folks from hugely trafficked Web sites (such as MSN) were bullish on the online ad market supporting them. Others mentioned selling subscriptions, but it wasn’t a huge topic.
– Bad news for content entrepreneurs who base their biz models on selling content to other sites and media companies — the dot-com bust compounded with today’s economy has made licensed content buyers very wary of new companies. You need a “pedigree” of at least several years in business for them to feel safe doing biz with you.
– Joe Cappo, Senior Vice President-International & Licensing, Crain Communications Inc., was named the Best Speaker, winning his peers’ hearts with his speech, “No I will not sell you my content for five cents!
I hear “sponsored links” mentioned a lot as being a great, low-cost/high-impact, alternative to banner ads. But I rarely see examples of sponsored links on a site that are, well, clickworthy (or even noticeable.) Then I was playing, eerrm, doing research on gURL.com and was very impressed with how positively the sponsored links are included in the site.
In fact the links feel valuable, partly because the sponsor’s copywriting is generally excellent (with benefits-based headlines), and also because marketers using them have targeted the exact section of the gURL site they want to sponsor. For example, after you finish playing (errm, researching) gURL’s “Make Your Own Reality TV Show Game”, a pop-up box appears with three tv-related offers. And, as you scroll through the offerings in the “Looks aren’t everything: a love/hate look at beauty culture” site area, there’s a whole cool-black area for “Sponsored Fashion Links” which you can’t help but read over. You can buy gURL.com links via About’s Sprinks system.
If you plan to buy any other Sprinks links, I suggest you check out copywriting at gURL.com’s links to get ideas first. It’s those little, tiny copy blocks that are always the hardest to write!
Online marketer laugh of the day — check out the fun quiz “Are you an e-bore?”to see how much of a typical e-biz person you’ve become. (I was at 80%, compared to the average person at 55% — think I lost points unfairly because there was no Diet Pepsi option, just coffee vs. tea. Note to self: complain to quiz maker.)
Even if you don’t like silly quizzes, you’ll probably enjoy the fun handwritten fix-it notes on each page that are so familiar to marketers and art directors everywhere. “Get a better picture” “Make our logo bigger!” etc.
