PAID SUBSCRIPTION
At a time when paid online sub- scriptions are
held up as the holy grail of
most websites, Chemical
Week has been able to stem
a 35-year decline in its paid-subscription levels. Content revenue across the
Chemical Week brand is
around $2 million, said Don
Pazour, CEO of parent com-pany Access Intelligence.
Step one on the path to
this achievement was a
site redesign in 2008. “We
made our content the most
prominent part of the
website,” said John Rockwell, VP-marketing and
e-media of Access Intelligence. “This created an
environment where our
loyal readers could easily find and explore the news and analysis
we’ve built our brand on.”
CHEMICAL
WEEK
URL: www.chemweek.com
Company: Access Intelligence
Average monthly unique
visitors: 41,000
Source: Google Analytics
Paid subscribers: 8,000-8,500
Step two was to stick to a single marketing message: “Our
news, analysis and data are the best in the industry, and you must
pay to read it and use it,” Rockwell said. “This simple message
permeated every breaking news e-mail message, every trial sub-
scription offer and all manner of lead-gen efforts. We stopped
begging for people to subscribe via discount offers and started
raising prices across all classes of customers.”
Subscription prices start at $195.97. Bundled packages are avail-
able with print and digital magazine subscriptions and/or high-val-
ue data/information services. ;
Thepremisebehind Focus.com is that it’s a platform for
creating and widely distributing business expertise in the form of user-gen-erated research, peer-to-peer questions and answers, open discussions,
Web events and white papers. The site is free to
users and content creators;
revenue comes from a mix
of advertising and lead
generation.
Focus Inc., a private
company formed in 2005,
debuted the site in June
2009 and began to build
up the Focus Expert Network. By the time of its official launch in May, Focus.com had more than
1,000 experts; by early
June, it had amassed
750,000 registered users.
“Focus experts have contributed more than 50,000 pieces of
research and analysis to Focus.com and, in so doing, have helped
millions of businesses make better decisions,” said Focus Inc. CEO
Scott Albro.
Why do businesspeople provide this content for free? “Many
experts contribute to Focus.com simply because they believe in
the power of democratizing business expertise—expertise that’s
been traditionally reserved for the Fortune 500,” Albro said. “
Others find Focus.com to be the most effective third-party platform
for promoting their capabilities and expertise.” ;
LAUNCH
FOCUS.COM
URL: www. focus.com
Company: Focus Inc.
Average monthly unique
visitors: 550,000
Source: Google Analytics
RELAUNCH
GREENBIZ.COM
URL: www.greenbiz.com
Company: Greener World Media
Average monthly unique visitors:
302,000
Source: Google Analytics
Since the relaunch of GreenBiz.com was completed in March, Greener World Media has seen double-digit
growth in monthly unique visitors and
page views. The site was migrated to the
Drupal open-source content management
platform two years ago, and the recent redesign provides a more dynamic visual presentation, improved topic-driven navigation and a stronger search function powered by Solr.
“We changed the look and feel of the site
quite a bit, presenting content in a more
compelling format and streamlining naviga-
tion to help users get what they wanted
more quickly and easily,” said Hugh Byrne,
senior VP-product and audience develop-
ment at Greener World Media. “The new
design enables GreenBiz.com to quickly
add new products and business lines to the
site, including a consultants directory and
subscription management tools.”
With the infrastructure now in place to
support subscriptions, Greener World Me-
dia “can contemplate expanding offerings
... as part of a broader initiative to diversify
revenue streams,” Byrne added.
