Thursday, November 15, 2007

Flavour of the month....free

I read with some interest yesterday Rex Hammock's post about the Wall Street Journal executive who appears to have contradicted to Dirty Digger's commitment to bring down the subscription walls around the wsj.com site. I trust he has his c.v. well polished.

Well, even before the Murdoch deal is consummated, it seems that a chink in the armour has appeared with the addition of Digg links which allow people to get around the subscriber wall.

Then, this morning I read on contentsutra.com that Business Today, one of the 'big three' business magazines in India has just relaunched its website and removed subscriber barriers. Nikhil Pahwa writes:

The new site incorporates social bookmarking features (del.icio.us, Newsvine, Technorati), RSS feeds, and displays content related to stories. B-T also has an emagazine, though I don’t quite see the point: epapers and emagazines require too many clicks to access content, have too many pages with ads (like magazines).
This approach certainly makes sense in India where subscription rates are anyway very low and collection complicated.

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