Salon.com Editor Looks Back At Paywalls

Techdirt pointed out an interesting retrospective by Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com, about their experiments with paywalls and how repercussions can last a lot longer than some might expect. "More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is 'closed' to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out."

Comments

Sshhh!

[dswensen]

Keep it to yourself, will you? If Rupert Murdoch gets wind of this, he might change his mind about cordoning Fox News off from the rest of the Internet!

Actually, probably not.

Try me

[fulldecent]

let the paywalls go up.

i'll be the one to write a firefox extension that double underlines all paywall sites. And we all know by now... you don't dare even mouseover double underlined text.

What?

[mutube]

There was an article? News to me. I haven't looked at an article for at least a couple of years.