Whereas in old style publishing, you might have reviewed strategy annually and perhaps change tactics every couple of years, now the process of review was permanent. The other main result was a new found-obsession with the audience and their needs.įor New Scientist’s John MacFarlane, the main lessons of their paywall journey was the need to constantly keep everything under review. And marketing went from the old “spray and pray” to a much more segmented targeted approach. The previous focus on SEO had now shifted to developing their internal search functionality. What has UBM learnt from its early experiences of paywalls? Site traffic plummeted, but that was ok “losing one-time Google visitors did not bother us a great deal.” Quality not quantity was the new mantra. Sometimes, tricky decisions are easier to make when your back is against the wall. It probably helped that with the downturn in the building sector, they didn’t have much to lose. It was a leap of faith, but one “we felt we had to make”. They hadn’t really done much research, on the basis that asking people whether they would be prepared to pay for such and such a service, would only ever generate a lot of nos. He described the roller coaster ride of introducing a paywall. For UBM’s Phil Clark, talking about their built environment portfolio, it was data and lists that his customers found particularly valuable and were prepared to pay for. In our increasingly paywall focused world, knowing your audience intimately will help you determine where the value in your content lies, and what, if anything, you can build a paywall around.
Sound about right? No need to answer that, but the point Christie was trying to make was that we all put a great deal of effort into the early stages of a relationship, but little thereafter, and that, as publishers, we needed to focus as much on maintaining and developing relationships with our existing customers, as acquiring new ones.
Are you familiar with the Penny Jar Test? The theory goes, says Christie, that if a married couple were to put a penny into a jar every time they had sex in the first year of their marriage and then take a penny out of the jar every time they had sex after their first year, the jar would never be emptied.
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