Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

paid registration at the la times

Last week, the Los Angeles Times’s Web site walled off its CalendarLive entertainment section, making its content available only to 7-day print subscribers and to paying online-only subscribers ($4.95/month or $39.95/year).

In a post to the online-news e-mail list, Elaine Zinngrabe of latimes.com/calendarlive.com wrote:

We know that the public’s reception of paid sites (other than porn) has been less than enthusiastic. Still, we feel the need to explore this business model; we need to place a value on our content and evaluate the relationships between print and online subscriptions. As someone from another paid newspaper site put it, “If you want to drink the milk, you’re going to have to start paying to feed the cow.”

We’ll be making a number of improvements to the site to make it more valuable to consumers, including a redesign that makes it easier to search for events and venues and adds a few new online-only features. Most notably, we’ll also be adding a discount program that offers savings on movies, dining and other recreational activities. We think this makes a nice complement to the reviews and listings, and hopefully helps online-only subscribers see their way clear to a relatively low subscription price.

For their sake, hopefully the added-value features will make it worth it to readers to pay the subscription fee to access the site. However, Steve Outing points out in E-Media Tidbits that the approach might be particularly counterproductive for attracting traffic from potential Los Angeles visitors/tourists. Zinngrabe responded that the 14-day free trial might ease some of the inconveience, and that the organization is thinking of offering Salon-style ad treatments for special packages.

Outing also makes the interesting point that offering free CalendarLive access to 7-day subscribers to the print edition of the L.A. Times provides an added value for print subscribers (and could be intended to help stave off subscription attrition, as people have been forsaking print subscriptions in favor of getting their news for free online).

Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser weighs in on CalendarLive in his most recent column. An interesting factoid from his column:

When registration was implemented at the site, LATimes.com lost 25 percent of traffic, and it took a year to recover to earlier levels, [says Joe Russin, assistant managing editor for multimedia at the Times]. But the occasional reader who stops by the Times site through, say, Google News, isn’t worth much to the business. A smaller set of regular visitors — and especially those in the local area — are worth more monetarily to the Times.

Certainly, offerings like coupons and enhanced local entertainment listings probably aren’t of much interest to readers outside the Los Angeles area.

When it comes down to it, I think the key to CalendarLive’s success as a paid site will be differentiating itself and its content/services from what’s available from other content providers. If registration (even for just the free trial) is too much of a hassle, and the content/services offered not seen as worth the trouble (and money), people might visit other (free) L.A.-oriented sites for entertainment- and tourism-related information, and other (free) entertainment sites for major entertainment industry news and features.

Plus, on the subject of paid subscriptions in general, I think it’s unreasonable to expect that consumers are willing to pay subscription fees for each site they like to visit. It adds up — $5 a month here, $10 a month there.