This week I received a brand new magazine (very small) in the mail, with an offer for “community” at their web-site. The site wanted to charge $25 for membership! There are plenty of free communities in the blogosphere, It’s just plain insulting to be asked to pay.

The one exception is the last one you mentioned: Personal Coaching. And perhaps specialized forms and so-forth to go with it, but that probably falls more in to the category of e-books.

At our company, SubHub, we have built a platform to enable content experts to easily build and run a content website that generates money via subscriptions, or advertising, or e-commerce. I say this not to be self-promotional, but because this is exactly what we do. We built the company because we saw a need for it. My co-founder and I are long-time internet media professionals.

What is interesting about the discussion here is that most commenters view this from the blogging perspective — are you a blogger if you charge? Is it a blog? Is it consistent with the blogging ethos?

We now have roughly 35 websites on our platform, most charging a subscription fee. We know of dozens of other paid subscription websites using software solutions offered by competitors.

Without intending to be judgemental at all, it is interesting and somewhat curious to me that people who define themselves primarily as bloggers are still debating whether or not this can be done. It definitely can be done and is being done. Many individuals and small to mid-sized publishers are making good money with paid content websites.

I don’t think a single one of our clients views themselves as a blogger, or started as a blogger. They view themselves as experts in their categories and as being able to provide information that is of real value to their niche audiences.

There is plenty of information that people will pay for if they perceive it to be of actionable value. Our most prominent client is probably Jancis Robinson, the well-known UK-based wine expert. She has a worldwide reputation, and she has thousands of subscribers to her website each of whom is paying £69 per year for access.

For Jancis, this is a fantastic revenue stream. For her subscribers, it is a great deal because for roughly the cost of a case of wine they get expert advice regarding which wines to buy, which wines to watch, etc. This is well worth the modest subscription price. And while there is plenty of free wine info on the web, most of it is not at the level of expertise that Jancis can provide, and people who really care about wines recognize this.

We also have clients who have sites on fly fishing; landlord-tenant litigation; wealth creation for Christians; entrepreneurship; food and wine matching and numerous others. Each may attract a paying audience of dozens to maybe thousands, but this is a very healthy income stream to an individual content creator.

The characteristics of success for creating a successful paid content website are:

1. Real expertise in a niche subject
2. Ability to frequently create high-quality content about the subject
3. A brand or personal reputation in the niche
4. Ability to market to the niche — via a mailing list, newspaper column, personal appearances or whatever works

Some bloggers may possess these characteristics and therefore may have a good shot at implementing a successful paid model. Other bloggers may not bring all of these attributes to the table and therefore may be better off keeping it free and open and perhaps generating revenues via advertising, e-commerce or something similar.

A paid content website definitely needs to still give a lot of content away for free, as others here have pointed out. This keeps visitors coming back frequently and establishes a reputation for the site. Eventually, some visitors will convert to paid subscribers if they value the free content and see there is even more on offer behind the paid firewall.

I am not sure what the official definition of a “blogger” is but this is arguably not blogging at all. It is content publishing. Our feeling is that this no longer needs to be owned solely by the big media companies. Why can’t individual content creators reach and market to their audiences directly, and keep the majority of revenues for themselves rather than depending on a middleman? To us this is well within the ethos of what the web, and blogging, is all about. It is personal publishing and personal empowerment. In this case it just puts revenues in those individuals’ pockets too.

Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski
SubHub

Not a very good comparison but how many people who are new into SEO know WMW and about membership. They would only find out via forums etc. and probably not by searching on Google etc.

Basically, the latest 2 weeks worth of articles were free. A paid subscription was required for any archives older than that. However, those pages were still available in the search engine caches so search visitors could still find the site through older articles. There was nothing stopping somebody from seeing an old article if they knew the URL, they just couldn’t browse the archives or search the archives from the site. Using the search engines it was still possible to do those things, but they didn’t really worry about that since the niche they were targetting were people that needed info fast and would have the budgets to pay for the privelidge and probably wouldn’t waste their time on SE tricks.

I personally don’t think it would be called a blog if access was so limited. It would be more like a “membership site”

OK now the topic at hand…

I personally would not pay for a blog and if for instince you started charging? I would not stay on board, nothing against you (seeing I dont know you) BUT the thing with the Internet is that there is always a FREE service around the corner and so why spend my money on something when I can have it for free???

I think this is what makes the Internet so powerful and thats because you can get a lot for free were in the non-Internet world, you couldn’t…

my 2c

That said, I think a pay site can work but it might be better suited as a forum rather than a blog. Quadszilla has a great business model for his site which is a free blog with a paid access forum. I haven’t joined it, but I can see how an area of “specialized knowledge” and the opportunity to network with others of a high calibre in a forum setting could appeal to people.

Additionally, many bloggers attach a donate button to their feeds. Essentially they let the readers decide to pay for the content or not. And plenty of readers donate.

Examples:

- Jakob Nielsen’s articles/reports.
- Stephen Covey’s webinars and newsletters.

Unless you are as good as these two in your niche, I won’t pay you.

Personally, the only blog that I might pay a small fee to read would be Seth Godin’s blog. Why? It is updated at least two times a day, the content is always fresh, insightful, and unique, and his blog is essentially an online book released on tiny nuggets of information. (Note that his latest book, Small is the New Big, is actually a collection of his best blog posts—highly recommend that book, by the way.)

There are many ways to make money from your blog. Obviously there is advertising and affiliate links. But beyond that, if you are, for example, a web developer, the blog could go a long way in promoting your work or services, especially if you’re a well-respected blogger. Just look at 37Signals, the guys behind Basecamp. They have generated a massive following, mostly because of their interaction with the community (especially with the contribution of the open-source Ruby on Rails framework). If you aren’t a web developer, you can still promote your work. For example, you could publish a few ebooks (which, of course, relate to the topic of your blog) and promote those.

I doubt that there would be more than a handful of blogs that could successfully charge users to read. In fact, if you are currently making money off of advertisements, removing those and going to a subscription-based model would probably bring your revenue down drastically.

http://daringfireball.net/members/

Might want to read that post, especially the part about “its” vs. “it’s”, which you stil haven’t understood. Someone earns a LIVING by writing and can’t use proper English.

However, as I became increasingly aware of the need to duplicate my efforts without duplicating the time it took me to help people, blogging and product creation immediately become larger priorities.

I have considered several “pay for content” models, but in the end, Darren’s “culture of free” has kept me from ever seriously pursuing it. There is very little brand-new information in any given niche, and I think the human filter that was also mentioned is already in place in the form of the blog author(s).

I don’t see an easy entrance model for premium blogging, and as long as other ways to monetize a blog or a website exist, I doubt the motivation will be there to build a large community of premium blogs.

Or, I could be eating these words 6 months from now. :)