Website Manchester Confidential has just even more confidential. From now on certain content will only be accessible from behind a paywall. It's not expensive - £3 a month, but it's a brave move and one fraught with complexities.
Some people really don't like the new look, like blogger David Quinn, here, who describes it as "nauseating".
George Dearsley, commenting on David's blog has another concern: "I have serious doubt’s about Mark Garner’s business model, which turns traditional media on its head. How has this affected what advertisers pay him (or DO they pay?) now? The number of eyeballs falling on ManCon’s pages is fewer, so their ad revenues will surely shrink drastically. He needs a lot of subscriptions to pay for the content and I just don’t see it. I think it might be like watching an iceberg melt with time lapse camerawork. But then they probably told Christopher Columbus he was an idiot for trying to sail to the “New World”."
I don't think it's just about the numbers, or whether anyone wants to read my review of Pizza Express, by the way. It's also about the unique offers that membership can give to subscribers that they couldn't get elsewhere. That's going to be the hard part. But good luck to them.
2 comments:
George actually makes the point I was stumbling towards a lot more clearly than I did. I didn't mean to pick on your review of Pizza Express by the way (I've not been able to read it anyway) - it just stood out on the home page as the most obvious thing that was now "hidden".
Pick away David, it's fine!
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