How successful was The New Yorker’s Facebook experiment? For the past week, The New Yorker put the full text of one of the magazine’s articles behind a Facebook “Like” wall, meaning users who are not magazine’s subscribers had to “Like” The New Yorker’s page in order to see the story online.
The goal was to both increase the number of users who “Like” The New Yorker, as well as to increase online engagement. In the past week, more than 16,000 additional users have liked The New Yorker’s page. Many more, of course, may have read Jonathan Franzen’s story, “Farther Away,” as The New Yorker’s page already had about 200,000 fans who could also read it.
Getting 16,000 fans in one week is not bad, although considering the amount of publicity the experiment got, it’s not incredibly impressive. Doing this every week would be a smart move by The New Yorker and would help continue to grow the Facebook fan base, although likely not as many would join each week as in the initial week.
Still, offering additional content for “Liking” a Facebook page is a technique marketers, musicians and other publications have used to great success and definitely makes sense as a way to give loyal users more added value. People magazine, for example, regularly offers added features and sweepstakes and has more than 1 million followers.
