The Internet is a wonderful medium that can provide you global reach in the most efficient and economic manner. It has been used to promote communication and interaction between people, companies and countries throughout the world. It has opened up several opportunities for innovative ideas of delivering value to customers. One idea that has been growing in leaps and bounds is offering information or content online through a paid subscription or “members only” website. Not only is the Internet the most cost effective way of providing valuable content to a selected audience, it also expands your reach beyond geographies. It means your paid subscription business does not just have to concentrate on local markets - nothing is impossible! If your business has a web site, this in itself means it is accessible by the global market, and it is vital that your business take advantage of this.
This guide provides comprehensive and wide-ranging information on the complete process of setting up a paid content subscription website right from scratch. It explains in detail all aspects - how to plan, create, launch, market and monitor a paid subscription website.
The dot com bubble is perhaps reflective of similar gold rush mania in the history of enterprise. Suddenly the established tenets of business were thrown to the wind and everyone would talk of the “new economy”. Having an internet presence and attracting visitors was considered success without any consideration to whether value was delivered and whether customers paid for the privilege. Eyeballs, and not cash, were the currency. Eventually sanity has returned to the Internet. Cash is king. Value has to be delivered. Having a visitor or even a sticky visitor is not enough, the visitor should become a buyer and should pay for the offering and should receive value for what he is paying.
Many websites in the past have offered free products and services to their customers. This trend is fast changing towards paid services and products. Smart entrepreneurs are now realizing that their hard-earned knowledge is valuable to others. They are moving content, which used to be available for free to anyone and everyone on the Internet, behind the turnstile and charging a toll from the information seeker. Resistance to paying for services is gradually melting away.
There are many reasons for this. First, only a few websites operated by big companies can afford to provide valuable content free. The rest of us can't afford this. Selling advertising on our websites has failed to pay the bills. Second, many people are now more than willing to pay to receive quality services and products even if they were offered for free earlier. Several paid content websites have already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values his/her time as also the quality of information or service and is willing to pay for it.
The Internet crunch has put to test the accepted practice of offering everything for free on the Web. Sites offering free information, free web sites, free shipping, and other Web freebies are shrinking in numbers, if not disappearing totally.
Both big and small online businesses have realized, some more painfully than others, that running a business by giving away free products is not workable. There are overhead expenses to pay -- salaries, rents, marketing costs, and others. Small online entrepreneurs, even the part-time hobbyists, are not spared from expenses: they need to pay for server or hosting fees to continue their operations.
As costs increase, advertising revenues have steeply declined making it difficult for a business to survive by displaying banner ads alone. To cope with the increasingly difficult market, dot-coms are cutting their budgets by laying off or reducing salaries of their staffs. Many have already closed their businesses altogether.
As a result, online businesses are experiencing a mad scramble to find other means to increase revenues. NetZero, a free Internet provider, has reduced its free offering to 40 hours and introduced paid subscriptions. Bizland now charges for Web hosting it used to provide for free to small businesses. Salon.com, the online magazine, will now carry fee-based premium content.
What used to be free is now slowly changing to fee-based. The low ad rates and poor affiliate returns have forced many small entrepreneurs to face two options: to charge or go under. The state of running a free site only to earn $1 for every 1,000-banner impression per month can only last so long. With the current slump in ad market rates, a site generating 100,000 page views a month can only expect to earn $100 - an amount that is not even enough to cover dedicated server fees.
Many sites are seriously considering charging for access to their content, either through a monthly subscription fee or a one-time access fee. The success of WSJ.com in creating a subscription-based model has inspired both small and big publishers to explore the same approach.
Some publishers are looking to combine free content with fee-based content. A significant level of content will remain free, while paying members can have access to the best content with no banner ads and other "special" features. Using this strategy, the site can still generate the same amount of traffic overall, while subscribers enjoy special treatment and publishers earn revenue to pay for the bills and time spent developing the site.
For this model to succeed, however, a small site with no strong brand must cater to a niche market with information that nobody else has. Users will not like to pay the subscription fees if the site offers information similar to a hundred other free sites.
The site has to be dynamic, comprehensive, and the data needs to be accurate. It must provide users with a sense that they belong to something special in order to increase the perceived value of the site.
Proponents of this model believe that having 100 paying visitors per day is still much better than 100,000 free ones.