Slate Wants You To Subscribe

My old friend and former colleague in the intern pit, Jake Weisberg, sent out an email the other day. He was pitching Slate‘s new subscription push: Slate+. But the reason the email caught my eye was the following paragraph:

We face one major impediment to future success: we’re too dependent on advertising. Don’t get me wrong — we love our sponsors. But we’ve long recognized that we’d be a healthier and more secure magazine if — like many of our favorite ancestors in the print world — we got a meaningful share of our revenue from readers as well as advertisers. The catch for Slate is that we don’t want to put up a paywall, which would shrink our big audience and make the site more of a hassle to access.

One other option would be a pay-meter, like the Dish’s, but they’re going the TPM route of a VIP membership of $50 a year or $5 a month, with some exclusive features for subscribers:

You’ll get Slate articles without pagination, Slate podcasts without ads, first-crack at tickets and discounts to our many live events, a special Members-only section of the site with extra content, privileged status for your comments, and more.

My own view is that pay-meters for repeat readers is a better way to do this. Yes, they do reduce traffic a bit. Our unique visitors now average around 800,000 a month compared with around a million with no meter. But we still have surges. Last October we were back up at 1.2 million and in February, more than 2 million unique visitors. My take-away is that the immense benefits of close to 30,000 subscribers, and freedom from intense advertizing pressure, far outweigh any minor downsides in pageviews. But every site is different, and what works here may not work for Slate.

And Jake’s point about being too dependent on advertising is the critical one. Editors who only have to please advertisers will make different choices than those who have to please advertisers and subscribers. If you want to assign one reason for the scourge of sponsored content, it is that when you have no source of income except ads, the advertisers have you over a barrel. So what Jake is proposing – and what Josh at TPM has also done (yes, I know their backing of sponsored content messes things up) – is the only real way to get out of these woods.

I guess we’re in some competition. But I think the general benefits to online journalism of a more robust subscription model are enormous and vital. And the one thing you can actually do to stop the rot is to subscribe to the sites you love and believe in. So, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the Dish here, to TPM here, and to Slate here. It matters.