WSJ.com to offer free week to nonsubscribers
The Wall Street Journal Online, the largest paid subscription news site on the Web, will make the site free to nonsubscribers for a trial period in order to drive new subscriptions. The site plans to offer an Open House for a work week of five consecutive days, Nov. 8 to 12. During that time, nonsubscribers will be able to access the entire site and sample its features with no subscription or registration required. Several blue-chip advertisers will sponsor different days of the Open House.
Salon has been doing something similar for a while now -- offering people free daypasses paid for by sponsors. Salon's approach, and WSJ.com's week-long free trial move are great ideas other subscription sites should look to copy.
Oct 25, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)
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1 comments about 'WSJ.com to offer free week to nonsubscribers'The Salon Site Pass is actually the proprietary patents-pending invention of Ultramercial, LLC. The Ultramercial business model and ad unit allow publishers to generate new incremental revenue from their exisiting premium content such as editorial, VOD, music downloads and games. A bridge between “fee and free,” the Ultramercial model creates an on-going trial and usage program that has proven to increase paid subscriptions and advertising revenue, while not turning viewers away. Advertisers receive a guaranteed view of their full-screen interactive ad and good will spin through an explicit Quid Pro Quo relationship with the viewer. The viewer is granted free access to content they normally have to pay for via a completely opt-in and non-intrusive ad format. We believe it could be extremely successful for the WSJ as it has been on Salon.
Posted by Paul Grusche at September 16, 2005 7:44 PM
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