Site Subscriptions! July 21st, 2006 11:44 pm

A discussion has been ongoing on our forums lately about the introduction of a subscription charge to access a particular website. The charge is £2.95 a year and offers subscribers the opportunity to access exclusive competitions and get offers. The general consensus is that most people would not be happy about paying such a charge and concerns were also raised about whether other sites would follow suit.

Would we charge? With the internet as it is, a lot of things can be found for free - especially competitions. Therefore it’s very difficult for a site like ourselves to implement subscriptions. However, as we’ve told our users we have no plans to charge. Firstly not many people would pay (some kindly said they would though!) so it’s not going to help revenue wise, plus it would also require extra admin and we’re just too busy to do extra work.

Subscriptions should be handled carefully in my opinion, after all no matter what the cost people will require something extra for the money, you may be forced to show fewer adverts or affiliate links, and perhaps subscriptions may even incur additional administration costs. Also any cost introduction will result in the loss of some users who just won’t pay, so your costs need to compensate for that too. In this case the £2.95 fee does seem strangely low and does seem to be in place perhaps as a contribution towards admin as opposed to a way to generate significant revenue.

It will be interesting to see how things go for the subscription site. Will it survive? Will other sites follow suit? Would subscription work for your site? If you were a user would you pay to subscribe to your site? How many sites do you use that you’d actually pay to use?

Developing sites and established sites are always looking for new revenue streams and with affiliate marketing not always a guarantee of financial success, subscriptions may be a road some sites decide to head down. Unfortunately I think they may be in for a bumpy ride.

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