Salon's successful Site Pass

Wired's Adam L. Penenberg looks at how Salon has survived, in part, due to its unique Site Pass approach -- which requires users to click through a series of ads before viewing content -- and wonders whether other sites will follow:

While Salon has only about 85,000 paid subscribers, between 175,000 and 200,000 users visit each day using the Site Pass. According to Melissa Barron, Salon's senior vice president of sales, these ads receive a clickthrough rate between 5 percent for a typical campaign and 20 percent for a movie release -- with one spot inducing an astounding 40 percent of visitors to click on it during the presidential election. (The industry standard clickthrough is about 1 percent). What's more, 85 percent of users who start an ad watch it until the end.

Since it cuts through all the advertising clutter online, it is conceivable the Site Pass will catch on. The Economist recently adopted a similar model, and it's only a matter of time before more sites tear down their content walls and let in news-addicted cheapskates like me, provided we consent to sample an ad or two.

Jun 01, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)

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1 comments about 'Salon's successful Site Pass'

The Salon Site Pass is 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.

Posted by Paul Grusche at September 16, 2005 7:37 PM

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