Like so many others, we’re moving away from the practice of pumping our print content online for free.
We’re now in the last stages of developing a Drupal-based CMS that (we hope) will help us to differentiate our online publishing activities from our print publications and also make it possible for us to begin charging for access.
Just don’t call it a pay wall.
A wall blocks. A wall is fixed. Those are not good characteristics of a paid strategy.
I don’t want to block potential customers, to have them banging their browsers against an arbitrary wall. I want to entice them. I want to lure them into the wonderful world of content, offers, tools and interactivity we’re building for them.
In recognition of the need to entice paying customers, some, like Steve Outing, talk of a porous pay wall. That’s an improvement in terminology. But it still implies rigidity.
We need flexibility.
I start from the basic premise that nobody really knows what will work. We are going to need to adjust our offerings and incentives as we go.
So at the Monitor I try to talk about a pay curtain rather than a wall. Something we can raise or lower as we gauge the audience response, something we can pull aside to offer a peek behind.
More specifically, we’re looking at a metered approach, and we expect that we’ll need to adjust the free-article count over time. We expect to make some number of articles free to all, regardless of meter counts, but we don’t know the right number. And I’m sure we’ll experiment with what sorts of features and benefits belong behind the curtain to begin with.
At a certain level, of course, this is all just semantics. But words have a way of shaping actions, and I want to make sure we approach this change with the clear understanding that we will have to work hard to entice paying customers and with the humility to recognize that we’re probably not going to get it all right at the start.
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