Slashdot Starts Charging For Ad Free Site
from the one-way-to-do-things dept
Well, it seems that Slashdot has decided to try a new business model. They’re letting people pay a yearly subscription fee to view the site without ads. At least they’re not making “premium content” available only to subscribers. It’ll be interesting to see how the Slashdot faithful respond. Not surprisingly, the discussion is quite busy over there. Would it be petty to remind everyone that Techdirt.com is free and has no ads at all? Yeah, it probably would.
Comments on “Slashdot Starts Charging For Ad Free Site”
And for 3 days in a row, the /dork stories tracked
about 1 week ago.
The ONLY reason I go back to /dork at this time it to read the user comments, because some of the readers actually share useful knowledge.
Others are just stupid. The one I spotted that was modded up claimed you need a full biohazard suit if you are an organic farmer. (dumb poster, and ever more moronic moderator)
If I find the new add scheme annoying, I’ll do exactly what I did with Yahoo and the pop up adds….I’ll stop going to /dork.
Har har
I tried this with WonkoSlice recently, and while we get far less traffic than Slashdot, I had expected more than three people to pay for the ad-free version of the site. Alas, out of over 1,000 regular daily visitors, only three thought it was worth it, so I recently gave up on it.
According to the poll on Slashdot, only 167 people (or 3% of those responding) have subscribed. Ouch.
Re: Har har
But the real question is not the subscriber rate; everyone expects that to be very low. The bigger change /. is making is to include larger, more intrusive ads. How much will their traffic decrease as a result?
Once that happens, I wonder whether /. will be relevant at all. I only read /. now because it saves me from reading every heavily ad-laden page on cnet, zdnet, etc. Once /. gets bogged down with ads, too, I’ll have to go to another level of meta-indexing like freshnews.org, which will mean I’ll only hit /. when it has a story that looks interesting, and if that is, in turn, just a link to a different news source, then why not cut out the middleman?