"Here’s the thing: if Slate were to make their existing experience better for people who don’t pay…by removing pagination and making the commenting system better, they would grow their audience faster and garner more readers. Easier access = more use."
The author is also assuming that the goal is _more readers_.
"Get all the readers and the money will come" is a formula that's been tried in online media for a decade now and generally doesn't work. My guess is that more pagination is almost directly correlated to more (short term) revenue in this case. I hate pagination too, but suggesting that it's an obviously bad idea ignores the business realities.
I'd like to see a test if 'killing pagination' is some killer feature that's keeping people off the site who would otherwise convert. Sadly, I doubt it.
*Disclaimer - I work for a sister company of Slate but have nothing to do with their tech decisions, other than respecting their killer tech staff.
Yeah, I was going to quote that same part. Getting more users is great, but you're still left with the question of how to monetize them.
I'm a pretty hardline user experience idealist, I hope to never host an ad on any site I run, but still, you have to be able to monetize to keep the business afloat. Whether Slate is doing just that, or actually being greedy, I don't know, but I understand the reasoning for enhancing the experience for paid users, which unfortunately inherently results in a somewhat gimped free plan.
Unlike the author, I'm really excited by this. Paying to remove ads (which this basically is) is one of my favorite business models as a consumer. Pandora and slashdot are two examples that come to mind.
I think this is an interesting move from a more mainstream outlet. It's miles ahead of my local newspaper and their stupid 5 articles a day paywall.
Also, the argument that nobody would make a product and then make it shittier for free customers seems silly. Companies do this all the time. All those pricing grids where feature X is in a higher tier, or nag screens, or limiting usage?
I'm with you. I'd be very curious to see what the internet would look like without large-scale advertising. I know that would kill significant chunk of "free" content, but would the world really be worse for that? As a tradeoff we wouldn't have the scary empire that is Google (and Facebook etc), we wouldn't have ubiquitous tracking, we wouldn't have artificial page view count inflation (via pagination etc), probably less ugly SEO, and much more.
But the cat is out of the bag, while ad-free internet might make fun thought experiment I don't see really the situation changing in the large anytime soon.
I simply filter them out on sites that get obnoxious about it. My filter preferences in adblock plus have fixed a great many sites. I have no problem with them using ads to pay for content, but when subscriptions or similar become required to view content not purposely made annoying to view is another thing. Either present it properly or lock me out. Don't go half way and make the experience annoying.
Annoying means I start playing with css and add ons to fix your site so I can view it if you even worth the time by then
I love the pay to remove ads business model as well. I've often wondered why the internet culturally seems so against it.
I read somewhere that the CPM for YouTube video ads is $7.60. I doubt I struggle through a couple thousand ads a year, so if they charged me a dollar a month it would be a win win: I'd get hours of my life back and they'd get more revenue and less overhead serving ads.
> I've often wondered why the internet culturally seems so against it.
Internet culturally is heavily inclined to "everything to me right now gratis" attitude. Non-commercial roots and long-lasting wide-spread piratism are probably the main contributing factors, amplified by the fact that most things have been traditionally gratis.
> It's miles ahead of my local newspaper and their stupid 5 articles a day paywall
That 'stupid' paywall is serving the same mechanism as Slate's new subcription mechanism - monetizing the site's content. Interesting how one is perceived as 'bad' (but probably offers more value for money) and the other is viewed as a 'favourite business model'. Why the difference?
Interesting article, but I think it's a bit of the UI person version of the "hammer/nail" issue.
From a marketing perspective it gives potential buyers a "reason" to pull out their credit card. As I understand it, Slate's ad-supported offering will continue to exist as-is, with pagination and a "view as single page" options. Logging in just makes single page viewing default.
The article gets at the tension publishers face. Rely exclusively on CPM ads and you get clickbait, but there doesn't seem to be winning approach on the paywall front. This seems like a really good way to test the process.
In a funny way, it's a great test of the value of UI. Is single page viewing by default worth $5 a month?
On the website I run, the readers which would be most likely to upgrade and pay for a 'happy reader' version of the website would actually be the same group of readers that advertisers would actually want interacting with advertisements.
I've tried to not bombard readers with a terrible experience and they appreciate it. Advertisers stick around and renew regularly, signaling that the real estate is still valuable enough to pay for. So in my experience, you don't have to sacrifice user experience to collect dollars from advertisers.
Definitely true, but could those visitors generate more value for you as direct subscribers than as eyeballs? If they're even moderately likely to subscribe, I'd expect the answer to be "yes".
Of course, there's no one size fits all solution for monetising a site - depending on your skill with ad sales (sounds like you're selling direct?), your demographic, and so on, different solutions will work better.
It probably doesn't even make a blip on their radar. I wonder if even browser-based adblockers are really an issue for them, and they most likely have couple orders of magnitude more users.
It is technically possible to block the IP ranges of reading/caching web apps, as well as refusing to show content to readers blocking ads, but few providers bother. Neither usage scenario is practiced widely enough to significantly impact ad income, except on sites that serve a very tech-proficient userbase.
You could alternatively click once or twice to get the print view of the article (all one page, usually no ads) and just clip that. A more sophisticated clipping program could even do that for you.
I've always appreciated the ability to choose between the subscription experience and the ad-supported one. But it also helps that even the free layouts are not that bad on Ars. (For example, they only do the multi-page thing on very long "feature" articles, which are a minority of their content.) So it feels like I'm getting a chance to support something I already like, rather than having to pay for basic usability.
FYI: Hitting the "print" button (the one built into the page, not the browser's print button) on almost all news sites gives you a single page, and a (usually) ad free article.
> If I have to use Greasemonkey to fix your design, your site is broken.
Your feeling of entitlement to free content in its most convenient form doesn't mean that anything's broken except your expectations relative to business realities.
I disagree. We pay with our eyes, time and willingness to put up with bullshit. All of which are valuable to businesses. A lot of companies/websites have decided to lower the cost of that 3rd category (less ads, better UI) in hopes they can get more of the first 2.
That isn't to say the company has any obligation to its readers but just don't feel bad when I have adblock and scripts that fix your broken site.
While I use lots of extensions/scripts for websites, I disagree. Just because YOU want a website in one way does not mean the website is broken by any stretch of the imagination.
On that note, I do prefer single page layouts as well.
There's two effects that can happen when you split revenue between ad and paid subscription.
Firstly, if you don't have enough value-add for subscribers, you make the ad version worse to artificially increase the perceived value of the subscription.
Secondly, because your most valuable eyeballs are not viewing ads anymore, the value of your ad space goes down. To make up the loss, you have to increase the amount of ad space.
I think keeping pagination for ad supported viewers is definitely a result of the first effect. It's difficult to tell if the second effect is in play here, or if the value of the ad space was low enough beforehand to require pagination to make up the cost.
You can do the same thing for free with various browser extensions, of course, but then again, you can filter ads with browser extensions, too, and that's the only or major benefit that a lot of sites offer you as a reward for subscribing.
One should think of this less as a sale of services and more as willing patronage of the arts.
The author is also assuming that the goal is _more readers_.
"Get all the readers and the money will come" is a formula that's been tried in online media for a decade now and generally doesn't work. My guess is that more pagination is almost directly correlated to more (short term) revenue in this case. I hate pagination too, but suggesting that it's an obviously bad idea ignores the business realities.
I'd like to see a test if 'killing pagination' is some killer feature that's keeping people off the site who would otherwise convert. Sadly, I doubt it.
*Disclaimer - I work for a sister company of Slate but have nothing to do with their tech decisions, other than respecting their killer tech staff.