ESPN Tries Rebuilding the Pay Wall For Its Magazine
by Peter Kafka
Posted on June 5, 2009 at 8:50 AM PT
Here’s another big media player trying — very cautiously — to get people to pay for online media: Disney’s ESPN (DIS) is going to put the Website for its “ESPN the Magazine” title behind a paywall this summer.
BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine, who broke the story, has most of the relevant details, but here’s an important one I didn’t see: ESPN reps tell me that the magazine accounts for less than 10% of the content available on ESPN.com. So most of the stuff that people are used to getting for free at ESPN.com will remain free at ESPN.com.
That fits nicely with the free/pay thesis I’ve been chewing on for some time now — in the future, a relatively small number of people who are wealthy and/or passionate about something will pay to access some Web content, and the rest of us will be happy to settle for free stuff, which will need a very big audience to survive.
But I’m not sure how that will pan out with ESPN’s magazine, which seems to fall in the middle ground. I just picked up a copy last week — when I travel, I like to treat myself to a couple print magazines — and it’s nice read. But it doesn’t have the specialized stuff that allows, say, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to charge for its Green Bay Packers “Insider” site, or even the data-heavy stuff that ESPN’s Insider sells to fantasy sports nuts and/or gamblers. Or, for that matter, the fantasy sports stuff that ad-happy Yahoo (YHOO) still sells.
And if memory serves, this is actually a reversal back to an old strategy — several years ago, as I recall, only print subscribers had access to the magazine’s online pages. Be interesting to see if anyone’s more willing to pay for it now.
UPDATE: A little more nuance, via some people knowledgeable with ESPN’s thinking. Internally, the company thinks of the move as a way to bolster its paid Insider product, since anyone who ponies up for Insider will get the magazine for free. And the company and will end up shifting some resources from the magazine to the Insider.
Comments
I’m not sure this will work. Much of the content in ESPN the Magazine is featured in other ESPN platforms. Why buy the mag online if the same story will be featured on TV, the radio, etc…
Posted by Ken Okel at June 5th, 2009 at 9:23 amI think there is one thing you are overlooking. The top two columns on ESPN.com are ESPN the Mag columns – Rick Reilly and Bill Simmons. I would be interested to know whether you will still be able to get their columns for free on ESPN.com. ESPN may be subtly forcing all of their fans to pay a fee, which could be brilliant or cause a revolt since I suspect they drive a sizable percentage of the ESPN.com’s traffic.
Posted by Dominic Pannone at June 12th, 2009 at 3:29 pmSimmons has said (via Twitter) that his mag columns will remain free on ESPN.com. Assume same goes for Reilly.
Posted by Peter Kafka at June 14th, 2009 at 10:16 pm