Is the subscription model dying? Hardly, if one believes this group of panelists, but certainly it's an evolving model. Jonathan Lewin of eMeta points out that the Online Publishers Association sees subscriptions representing about four-fifths of online revenues, but it's a more complex picture. Jonathan sees in their own client data that many people aren't aware of what it is that they are paying for a given subscription, which is complicated by sources such as The New York Times that made a decision early on to go ads-only with their online content. No surprise, then, that the NYT has reintroduced subscription content via their Times Select online package using eMeta technology. So even if you've gone free there are still ways to get back into the subscription model via tiered content offerings.

Andrea Broadbent of McGraw-Hill outlined how they went from a free to a subscription model on the Engineering News-Record site. ENR.com kicked off in the dot-com era as a brochure-ware marketing site, with a little teaser content to promote the magazine. Eventually all of the stories made it online, and as they did they were not aggressive initially in understanding how that content was being used, as opposed to sophisticated metrics available for the print publication. When the decision was made to get revenues from the online offering, they began to figure out how to turn "next-best" visitors into core customers to expand revenue. Making content freely available for thirteen days was one initial tool to encourage both subscriptions and pay-per-view access. Subscription models are varied, including monthly and annual. The juicier bait to make this happen were the "crown jewels" of data assets that had been unleashed in print only previously. By bringing these assets online there was key reference data added to encourage online subscription access. The other key effort was to work on search engine optimization via ECNext, so that freely accessible and premium content can be found more easily and encourage upgrades to premium services. With lots of new business from a 60 percent increase in traffic, lower renewal costs through online processing, lots of data on customers and much more paid content paying the bills, ENR.com has gone from an experimental cost center to a thriving profit center.

Adam Bernacki of Leadership Directories (recently moved over from Dun & Bradstreet) finds himself in a new setting, having been in the world of subscription databases for many years. D&B sold content on a one-off basis for more than a century, but then transitioned to an online database model. Subscription revenues tripled, becoming a major contributor to revenues. Leadership Directories by contrast is already heavily based in a subscription model, and has moved to start non-subscription revenue streams. Adam noted that there can be a lot of resistance to introducing new revenue models on either side of the subscription debate, which requires creativity in managing both the publisher culture and tailoring multiple revenue models to a publisher's infrastructure. Many of the bogies - channel conflict, cannibalization - are almost always offset by the move to new business models.

This theme of the fear factor was echoed by Andrea, who noted that "the freight train was coming" and that it was time to change the business model before the point of impact. It took nearly nine years to make that transition with the right partner, but the machine that is McGraw-Hill eventually came to bear on the problem. That said, the actual site development only took about 2-1/2 months via ECNext. Jonathan spoke about the fear factor with the Times Select model and other paid and registration models. He sees oftentimes that while there is oftentimes a drop in traffic initially in a registration model, but over an 18-month period it evens out. In the Times Select model, there was no dropoff, as most content in the package was new and represented only 5 percent of the site's content, but it has paid off effectively. Based on Jonathan's view expect 2-15 percent being willing to pay as an upgrade to premium.

All put in, subscription content is indeed alive and well, one level in increasingly sophisticated strategies to find, service and monetize audiences that are used to both freely available content and to paying for services that they value. Striking the right balance can be a challenge, but think of subscription as people saying that they value a long-term relationship that provides them with things that matter most to them. Focusing on the needs of these users is what publishing has always been about and only all the more so in an era in which audiences find content in any number of electronic venues.