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:End of paypal?

[Russ Nelson]

No. Paypal has screwed up a few times for a few people. That makes people fear that paypal is going to screw up for them. And so paypal suffers for their lack of care.
-russ

Re:True, people get bent about silly things on her

[CmdrTaco]

I agree with you on the Lone Gunman thing- I read a spoiler about it a few weeks ago so I already knew what was going to happen. But Chris blew it. He knows it. He got the shit flamed out of him. He deserved it. But he apologized, and you can't un-say things. It's not like we're posting headlines every day with shit like 'Vader is Lukes Father' or something. It's a rarity.