According to wikipedia (a ‘reliable’ source I know but hey what ya gonna do!) Newsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island.
As of 2009, its weekday circulation of 377,500 was the 11th-highest in the United States, and the highest among suburban newspapers.
Now about 3 months ago Newsday made their online news site NewsDay.com a paid subscription. So if you wanted access to Newsdays articles online you have to pay 5 bucks a week.
Now this may not seem like a lot but Newsday is one of the first non-business newspapers to charge for their content online. And how successful was it? It was and is a CATASTROPHIC failure. 35 people have subscribed to their service!
The revamp of the site reportedly cost 4 Million & their 35 customers should bring in about $9000 a year. This site is the perfect example of a business with massive web traffic but just terrible sales funnel, a product that can easily be sourced for free, a major failure in understanding their market & what I can only assume is absolutely no communication with it’s website visitors.
I mean the site gets over 1,500,000 million unique visitors a month. I’m not even going to attempt to calculate the sales conversion rate but I’m sure there’s a lot of zero’s after the decimal point. ( If you like your maths leave the conversion rate in the comments below)
The lesson to take from this?
It can be very easy to become bogged down focusing all your time on generating traffic and tweaking your website and that’s all well and good but if you don’t understand and interact with your audience, know what they want & develop a relationship with them, no matter how much you spend on a fancy website & traffic you’re not going to succeed online.
Got any input on this story? Are you one of Newsdays 35 Subscribers! Leave Your Comments Below.
P.S. I went to their to site to check out their sales funnel, do the same & let me know what you think.
Click Here To Be Successful At Marketing Online.
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There’s been a lot of talk about how out of touch the media is with the people… I think this just proves to be another example.
Hi Arvada,
Ya that’s very true. I know they like scaring people but with results like that I think they’ve given themselves a fright!
Mark
Brilliant idea, let’s charge $5 a week for news that is available everywhere online for free. Pure genius!
Wouldn’t a better business model be to provide free news and sell local online ads?
They could even do it in an interactive blog format so people could comment, imagine how much traffic that would bring!
Oh well, as Arvada pointed out more proof of how out of touch the media is with the people these days…
Great Info Mark!
WOW!! I happen to live on Long Island and have been a Newsday reader my entire life.
How sad that they would even dare to charge for their content.
And even sadder that they suck at marketing online.
I find it amusing though.
Thanks for reporting this Mark!!
Jason Dinner
Hi Pat, ya the standard business model for the news sites is to just charge for adverting. But the ‘big boys’ don’t want any of that, they want people to pay for it.
Here’s a report where Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/09/murdoch-google
Mark
The New York Times will be doing something very close as well in 2011. After you have read a few articles online, you will have to pay to keep reading or wait until the next day. I do not see this working out for any major newspaper as their are others sites that will give it out for free.
Steve
@helpmeranknow
Getting the traffic is not great without the sales.
The big guys are not satisfied with uncertain sales numbers they want people hooked up.
Thanks for great comments
This just illustrates the value we as internet marketers have and how much money is on the table when it comes to offering our services to offline businesses.
Cool article,thanks!
Serves them right.
Great post.Thanks for sharing such a useful information with us.