Is Slashdot's Ad Model Working?

Miscellaneous

from the yes,-no,-maybe dept

Business 2.0 takes a look at the Slashdot ad model as if it’s a work of genius. The plan (which has been debated endlessly) is that you pay $5 to get 1,000 ad free pages. Or… you don’t pay and you get ads. Of course, there’s an ingrained hatred for subscription models, and this sound curiously like a subscription model to many people. In the article they quote Rob, and it made me realize that they should have pitched the idea simply as a donation model. He says that many people have asked how they can donate money to keep the site going, and this is one way. If they’d simply pitched it as a donation model – and as a thank you, they’d remove the ads, it might have generated less controversy. Personally, I don’t have a problem with Slashdot offering such a plan, but at the same time, I’m wary of any business model that involves pissing off users to get them to pay.