Slate, Microsoft Corp.’s online magazine, can now officially be designated Hamlet of the Web: To charge or not to charge, that is the question. On Friday, it changed its mind again and will stop charging–to see the magazine, anyway. Added services will come at a price.
Slate (www.slate.com), edited by former New Republic editor and “Cross-fire” co-host Michael Kinsley, launched in June 1996. It always planned to charge, and even announced its intentions to do so a couple times–but backed off. It finally went subscription-only in March 1998, at $19.95 a year.
But in a letter to subscribers on February 12, Scott Moore, the magazine’s new publisher, announced its decision “effective today, to make Slate’s Web site free again.”
Its special services, such as e-mail versions of daily summaries of the top newspaper stories and access to its archive and chat, will cost the same $19.95. Moore said the magazine is planning additional subscriber benefits.
In his letter, Moore said Slate reached its decision to go free again because Web advertising is taking off while it has become even harder to sell subscriptions to online publications.
In his editor’s column, “Readme,” the same day, Kinsley explained that, strangely, Web advertisers “don’t seem to place any special value on reaching paying subscribers,” as they do with paper magazines. He surmised that this was so because Web ads are paid on the basis of how many are served.
“If you buy an ad in a print magazine with a 500,000 circulation, you have no way of knowing how many of those readers actually saw your ad,” he explained. “But if they paid for the magazine, you at least have some assurance that they picked it up. On the Web, that assurance is unnecessary. If you buy 500,000 impressions on Slate you know that your ad has been put on someone’s computer screen 500,000 times. This is a great selling point for Web advertising, but it radically changes the economics of charging for subscriptions.”
Kinsley said that, despite its earlier hemming and hawing, Slate’s mistake may have been to charge before people were ready for it. But no one has yet figured out this medium, he said, adding, “Let him or her with a Webzine that’s breaking even cast the first stone.”
Slate’s subscription program was profiled in the May 15, 1998 issue of DIRECT.
