Folio reporting:
Esquire made big news in the world of paid Web content in July,
putting one of its magazine features behind a paywall. “The Prophet”—for
sale on Esquire.com for $1.99—wasn’t the title’s first experience with a
paywall though.
Esquire has been testing paid content models for ebooks and
anthologies since last year. More recently, they’d solicited more than
100 stories for a similar project with the charity Narrative 4.
Tyler Cabot, articles editor for Esquire, has been behind each of the
recent paywall initiatives. He admits they’re still very much in the
experimentation stages, but they’re learning about models, distribution
and security with each step.
...
Cabot: We’re still tallying all that stuff up, but I can tell
you that our conversion rate is up to 5 percent. It’s still selling. And
somewhere around 42 percent of people who start purchasing it, end up
finishing [the purchase process].
FOLIO: One of the big arguments against
paywalls is that they hinder social sharing. What was the net impact of
the article on social media?
Cabot: This is something we thought about, but didn’t
understand exactly how it would work. If you have content behind a
paywall, how do you get people talking about it? How do you get people
writing about it?
There was a lot on social media, a ton on Twitter and so on. A lot of
people were linking to The Atlantic [Wire] article about our article
though [“The ‘Proof of Heaven’ Author Has Now Been Thoroughly Debunked
by Science” | 7.2.13].
One thing we did to help [mitigate that impact] was to partner with
Longreads and with Matter. They both have big sets of subscribers and
they said it was a piece that their subscribers would love, so they
wanted to make a deal. It seemed to us to make sense to do that—to sell
it in bulk. But also, there are a lot more readers there who are going
to be talking about it....
http://www.foliomag.com/2013/esquire-s-paywall-experiment#.UjnfJrxz_x4
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