Publications Slowly Realizing That Freeing Up Archives Makes Sense
from the took-'em-long-enough dept
Here at Techdirt we have over ten years worth of content, all available for anyone to read, and as we certainly get a fair amount of traffic to those back archives. While we don't pay that much attention to ad revenues (our business isn't advertising), access to those archives (mainly from Google searches or links from other sites into a specific older story) represent a fair chunk of our page views and ad revenue. With that in mind, it's been quite surprising to see so many publications try to lock up their archives -- either (worst of all!) taking down old stories completely or trying to lock them up behind a pay wall. Luckily, it looks like more and more publications are recognizing that this is a bad business strategy. The article is in the NY Times, which only recognized this very issue a few months ago. Prior to that, it charged for access to its archives, but since opening it up has seen traffic shoot up and ad revenues appear to be following. The article also mentions how Newsweek has had a lot of success opening up its archive, and Sports Illustrated is getting set to make its own archive available later this week. For all of those publishers who worry that there isn't enough ad revenue online, it makes little sense to sit on so much inventory. These days, you need to work on using Google to help drive more traffic, not suing it to stop sending traffic. What better way to make money off your archive than getting a lot more people to look at it?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: advertising, archives, new york times, publications, sports illustrated
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Not everything has to be free
That said, I don't pay for the articles. I download them free through my university's library system, but the school pays a flat annual subscription fee to Proquest, the portal that manages several newspaper archives.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Free Archives, Pay for New Stories
For "breaking news" stories though, or at least new stories, say less than a month old, I can easily understand charging for that.
And then a month later, when it is "old news" archive it and let anyone access it.
Now if only they'll put it at a reasonable price...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Archives
It really does make sense to pay for new news and not old news if they think they 'need' the money so bad.
If LATimes opened their archives they will get money from ads and revenue so fast their servers will crash all the time, Mainly due to collage students doing research of LA history in since newspapers show things in a unique way.
Okay forget opening LA Times it will cause TOO MUCH popularity. :( (sighs)
[ link to this | view in thread ]