Slashdot Subscription Update

A few things have changed in the Slashdot Subscription System since we originally announced it a few months ago. Most important to many of you is that we now can directly accept Credit Cards in addition to paypal. We also added some control to allow subscriptions to be time based instead of page view based. Read on to see how.

By far the biggest complaint that we heard was from users who either hate paypal, or simply don't want to mess with it. I'm not going to go into the politics of that issue here, but it's a valid complaint. As we've explained countless times, we picked paypal first because it was simple and quick and planned to support credit cards directly as soon as we worked the kinks out of the system. And now that's happened. I'm still interested in other payment mechanisms and I'm open to suggestions as to what they might be.

Complaint number two was from people who didn't like the metered subscriptions. Again, this is a very valid complaint. I've already explained why it was essential that we impose some sort of limits, so what we've implemented is a new option called Max Ads. What it does is limit the number of pages you choose to view ad free on any given day. By default, that is 10. So even if you view slashdot 20 times a day, your $5 subscription will still last 100 days with the default setting of 10 Max Ads. Of course, you can up that number too.

Subscribers still have the ability to choose what page classes you suppress ads on. Simply hiding ads on Articles and Index, but seeing them on Comments is enough for the vast majority of readers to never hit the default Max Ads settings. At those settings, the subscription fee for a year on Slashdot would be on par with a typical magazine.

So far we've been really pleased with the turnout: 2% of our logged in users have chosen to subscribe, and we really hope that number will increase since such a huge number of readers expressed support for the subscription system, but distaste for paypal.

As we explained earlier, a large part of our decision to suppress banner ads was so that we could start accepting other ad formats, but give users an option to support Slashdot, without seeing these new ad formats. These other ad formats are highly desirable and should allow our sales folks to get contracts that we would otherwise be ineligible for. Web Advertising is a highly competitive field, and these ad formats make it possible for us to compete.

The last thing I'm mentioning here is Subscriber Plums. We have a variety of things that subscribers will eventually have access to. We're certainly open to reasonable suggestions, and we'll announce them as they come online. As I've said before, we won't be taking away things from non-subscribers, just rewarding those who are throwing quarters into the guitar case. More on these plums at a later date.

Thanks to the subscribers, as well as to those who click on our ads and support us by supporting our advertisers. You guys are helping to ensure that Slashdot sticks around for a long time.

Comments

Re:Interesting Concept, but

[Etcetera]

I think one of the main things that attracts people to slashdot is that it is not commercial and there is a sense of community (a very twisted one at that). Slashdot is a great FREE site and thats as far as it goes. I wish you guys all the success but I really don't think it will make much money. Slashdot is never consistent (which is a terrible business model) , so how can you expect to make a business out of it? Business involves planning and consistency. I for one don't want to pay for a service that at is heart is free and should always be free.

At it's "heart" Slashdot may be free, but they live in a world of non-free bandwidth.

Think of it this way: The Church is not supposed to be worldly, but the priest still has to go to VONS for food, the janitor has to live somewhere, and the church must still (sometimes) pay rent on the land the church is on. Yes a Church shouldn't have to deal with prosaic issues like that, they do. Therefore, it's important that the community is willing to pay their tithing when the plate goes around.

It'd be great if they didn't have to pay bandwidth fees because they're a "free-at-heart public open source discussion forum" or something, but they do.

So click an ad or fork over $5 - don't just pass the plate every week.

Wow

[cswan]

Man Taco, that was some pretty decent writing there. I didn't notice any glaring misspellings or improper use of grammar. I'm impressed.

Is that one of the plums that will come to subscribers of the New Slashdot? ;)

Re:Here's an even better "plum" idea

[gosand]

I wouldn't subscribe until there are no Katz articles posted. Now before I get modded down as flamebait, realize that EVERY time something is posted by Katz, the same replies are generated:
- he doesn't say anything new (valid)
- he doesn't make a point (valid)
- he just uses buzz word and catch phrases (valid)
- his stories are generally not liked around here.

The last one is my personal opinion, and the opinion of soooo many other people. It is insulting to me that he is allowed to continue posting. For a free service, I'll make my opinion known, and leave it at that. But I won't subscribe as long as he posts. You may say "don't read it then!" but that isn't the point. The point is that I consider it an insult to the readers. If this were truly a community where people were heard, his reign of globalism internet paradigm riddled stories would have been piped to /dev/null long ago.

Re:Terrible Business Model

[bdigit]

Maybe you should of asked for the features before implementing the system? And once you had all the features setup then you could go and offer a subscription based service. As for features to offer I cannot think of any right now but i am sure a bunch of people out there can. But if you did have features before offering the service you would see alot more than 2% of the community subscribing.

Here's my CC number

[jazman]

Go to your phone keypad and type in:

SHOVE IT SLASHDOTT

It corresponds exactly to my CC number!!!