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Culture

by Mike Masnick

Thu, May 26th 2005 11:48am





Does The Day Pass Solution Work?

from the maybe,-maybe-not... dept

Adam Penenberg's latest column about the online media world takes a look at the "balancing act" Salon has between fee-based and advertising-supported content. While most sites seem to decide to go with one or the other, Salon (for a while now) has the option of either paying a subscription fee for access, or forcing people to "watch" (er, have running in the background while you do something else) a commercial ad for a "day pass" to the site. The folks at Salon say it's working out quite well. The advertisers are happy with it (the ads apparently perform better than regular ads) and visitors who don't want to pay, don't have to. It's an interesting model, but as Penenberg points out towards the end of the article, the obstacles still make it more difficult for Salon to be a part of the conversation. However, since there's no full block on content, they're not taken entirely out of the conversation. The fact that their content is often unique certainly benefits them, but it's not clear if this is really a sustainable model either. Still, it seems better than some of the alternatives.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Day Pass

    identicon
    Hostile17, May 26th, 2005 @ 4:26pm

    I download Salon to my Palm every day, with a Perl script.

    I long ago figured out that some of their Day Pass ads are less annoying and time-consuming than others, and it doesn't seem necessary to use the particular one they serve up for you on any given day. Just find one that's quick and use that.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: Day Pass

    identicon
    Jojo, May 27th, 2005 @ 4:16am

    I'm doing just fine without Salon, ads or not. There is just so much good info for free available on the net that it doesn't make sense to me to put up with ads. I block them everywhere and I am not going to watch them to get a little more content which will just be more noise that blends together after a while. I've cut my RSS feeds down to 21 (and want to go lower) because it is just wasting too much time reading everything. Also, I no longer use a portal home page because of the time it takes to read everything. There is just too much information and not enough time to process it anymore!

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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