Specs of Salons Subscription System

legLess writes "Scott Rosenburg, Salon's VP of operations, wrote an interesting article for Web Techniques about Salon's subscription system. It goes into a fair amount of technical detail (JavaBeans and JSP on Linux for login and authentication; Perl, HTML::Mason and MySQL (CD: and oracle) for content). He also talks about their subscription numbers, what drove them to do it, and their plans for the future (technical and operational). A little fluffy, but still a good read."

Comments

In-house vs. outsourcing

[DouglasA]

I read this article when the mag arrived, and was mostly fascinated by their decision to build it all in-house. Two or three years ago, they most likely would have thrown a ton of money at another company to develop the whole system. They would have gotten something that was not exactly what they wanted, and no doubt three months late (at least). Companies finally seem to be realizing that they need to make better use of the staff they have, and that even adding a few programmers or other employees can be cheaper than hiring outside developers. That's what I'm seeing at my company now, anyway, and others I know.

Premium only content - mark it

[cowboy junkie]

As I recall, when Salon first implemented their premium content, they didn't mark what content was premium, but instead when you viewed the story it would give you the first couple of paragraphs then say that you had to subscribe to read the rest. This is a big mistake, as it really makes non-subscribers resent the wasted click, and I'm glad they finally wised up and starting marking everything clearly as premium.

I had no problem subscribing to Salon, though, because these guys are the real deal. While I love sites like /. that point to noteworthy stories on the web, Salon is one of the only true purveyors of Internet journalism that provides stories worth pointing to. They have top-notch folks reporting and provides commentary on the whole spectrum of news.

6$ a month, now, another good move from Salon.

[clarkie.mg]

This month, Salon launched a monthly subscription program for 6$.

Reading the article, I have to give credit to the way Salon deal with their readers.

1. Even the free site is not overwhelmed by ads like those flash based ones that run around the page on wired, or those poping pages on yahoo.

2. The price for the site is really low, compared to the price you would pay for a daily newspaper. They understood that internet users CAN pay for content but at a reasonable price.

3. They give premium content, not only ads-free stories.

Thumbs up, Salon.

The web isn't commercial only

[WiggyWack]

I'm so tired of the whole "The free web is over" rants. Why do so many people think the commercial part of the web is the only part of the web? People have created content for free for a long, long, long time. Whether it be music, art, comics, poetry, literature, editorials, films, TV shows (yay for public access cable!), books, whatever... Many people are driven by ideas or creativity they just want others to pay attention to, without getting paid for it.

So the "Soon you'll have to pay for all your web content" chant really means "Soon you'll have to pay for all the web content dished up by commercial organizations." Good. I don't need it anyway.

The Internet is cool because all the free content that was out there to begin with can now be put online by anyone and viewed by anyone. So your underground newspaper, or garage band, or your off-the-wall comic strip has the potential to be viewed by a lot more people than just those in your town or school.

I don't care if I have to pay for content owned by AOL Time Warner or whoever. There's plenty of people out there who want me to look at their stuff for free. (gee, kinda like how the Internet used to be)

Re:I pay for Salon

[bourne]

Agreed. I'm also a Salon subscriber, because during the heavy news burst after 9/11 I found their coverage to be more interesting, and to have more interesting points of view. I don't agree with all of the points of view but there's a lot more there than you can get off CNN, MSNBC, or any of the other news sites.

Porn, such-as-it-is, is under the "Sex" tab. I can't really imagine paying for what is there either, but there you have it.

Re:I pay for Salon

[thegrommit]

http://news.bbc.co.uk

You can read it in the bathroom

[Jeremy Erwin]

For you information, one of the benefits of "Premium" is that you can download the daily issue as a pdf. Good for reading on the commute, or on the commode, perhaps?

The main problem with the web subscription model.

[Ophion]

The main problem with the web subscription model at this point is that one must pay separately for one's internet access. Imagine having to pay fifty dollars per month for the possibility of watching cable or satellite television. To actually view any content, one would then be required to subscribe to each channel individually, at additional cost. Not many takers, eh?

One possible future model is actually a return to an old one: a model similar to that of CompuServe or America Online before the internet explosion--a package of access and (often exclusive) content.

$72 per year? For Salon?

[Animats]

That's a bit much. The online subscription to the Wall Street Journal is only $59 per year. And the WSJ has far more content, real content, created by reporters spread around the world. Salon is mostly columnists, and rather lightweight ones at that.

What might work is, say, a service that lets you buy topics, like "politics", "literature", or "entertainment industry news" for a flat fee, but covers a large number of publications. Like AdultCheck and PornoPass, but for people who read. The "adult verification systems" are commercially successful, unlike micropayment systems. As usual, the porno industry figures it out first.

Paid Sites

[JSkills]

I read this article in print a while ago and found it interesting for sure (and yes fluffy since the tech details never went quite deep enough).

It was particularly interesting to me since we at Goofball.com went through the exact same process a while back ourselves. We initially were a free site and at our peek were doing close to a million pageviews a day - not including the Apache requests for video downloads (that amount to like 500 GB per month in bandwidth). We were actually leasing 7 Linux boxes (3 running HTML::Mason dynamic content servers, 3 plain Apache image servers, and a MySQL DB server) and paying through the nose for them due to the bandwidth. However, back in the good old days of the CPM advertising model, we were making plenty to afford the costs.

We were of course f----d when the "new economy" came to bear and we suddenly had no income for close to a year. Good thing we saved all that money we made on ad banners. We were eventaully forced to either close it all down or move to a payment model. We polled our viewers and decided to try the payment model based on their feedback.

The site is now 80% pay / 20% free. We're not just charging for access to specfic areas of content, but for the actual utility provided for by the site's various personalization services. We also decided that micropayment were not feasible. Can you imagine the headache of tracking pennies for pageviews and the associated overhead of dealing with people's questions/complaints about charges to their credit cards? A yearly fee of $19.95 (or a nickel a day) was the way we went and you know what - it actually saved the site.

Granted, traffic is at 10% of what it was, but that allowed us to drop off a few machines from the server farm and thus reduce costs further - keeping us slightly in the black each month.

HTML::Mason is the key to the site's success for sure. We can provide dynamic content on the fly pulled from the database, but a key element of the delivery machanism is Mason's built in caching. Only the first page request for a given URL (that uses the DB) actually requests the data from the database - subsequent requests are pulled from a GDBM replica of the DB's content that was cached by the first request. Mason also provides us with the ability to maintain a persistent DB connection during the life of the Apache daemon. Additionally, the same Apache/mod_perl/Mason binary also listens for requests on port 80 and 443 for SSL requests. All credit card transactions are handled through a Mason enabled API gateway. All of our back-end tools are HTML::Mason as well.

I didn't really get the part about "needing Java/JSP" in the Salon.com story. It sounded to me more like the author was not really in touch with the particulars of the technology at hand and was just repating what reasons he may have been given by the development team (who may have been looking to learn something new for the sake of it). I just came from a job where a decision was made to "go with a Java solution" simply because of the name of the programming language more than any other factor. I have nothing againsts Java believe me, but I'm so tired of buzzwords being used to influence decisions that are actually in dire need of pure business and software logic instead.

I'd encourage everyone - if they haven't already - to have a look at HTML::Mason. And also, for a good diversion, take a look at Goofball.com.