Building a paid membership sports channel

Pat Scanlon, Director of  Interactive at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com did not divulge numbers outright, but says his paid members-only sports channel is on track to deliver 4000 to 6000 members - that's about  $12,000 to $18,000 a month; see the new PG+ case study here. 

Some articles on the channel generate 400 to 500 comments. "They are not just commenting on articles, they are having a conversation with each other," he notes. "They know each other by reputation."  Here's the full interview:

How are memberships coming along; any numbers that you can share?

They are coming along very well. The industry standard for pay-walled
sites has been in the neighborhood of 3-5% of print circ for some time
now. (See the recent Belden Study.) Just prior to our (then) 6 month
anniversary of PG+, we undertook a big initiative to look at the
detailed Omniture stats to see what the most popular content areas
were - and for what wasn't.

In addition, we worked with a survey partner (www.civicscience.com) to
poll the community inside PG+ as to EXACTLY what they liked and
disliked about what was then V1 of PG+. More than 33% of the
community gave us their opinions!

It was no great surprise (this being Pittsburgh) that overwhelmingly
the response from the community was that they wanted more sports. But
not just sports in the sense of reportage, but sports in the sense of
blog posts from a select group of our writers and the ability to
interact with them and (just as importantly) each other via
commenting and live chat.

So in May we re-launched PG+ V2 with a new template that we had tested
as being more user-friendly and a revised set of content offerings
that reflect what the community told us they want.

Within a very short amount of time we doubled our membership base and
continue to grow.

What have been the most popular items in the premium content areas?

As per above... but in particular - Pirates (MLB) and of course now
that Steelers are in training camp we have seen a 45% increase in
traffic on the site from 4 weeks ago.

Any insights you can give about who premium subscribers are?

In our case... mostly male and living more than 100 miles from Pittsburgh.

The interface is really outstanding ... did you wind up tweaking anything?

Thanks! Yes - quite a bit. We made the template lighter so that it
loads faster and spent quite a bit of time tweaking the behind the
scenes to cut the load time of each page down by a full 3 seconds to
an average of 2-3 seconds. We moved the site to The Cloud which also
gave us some speed enhancements.

On the design side we pruned the menus down. Starting off with a very
general choice of "Sports Town" and "Around Town" or as we say here...
"Sports" or "NOT Sports."

In addition, we changed from an all or nothing pay wall to a freemium
based sampling solution. It allows users to sample more as well as
allowing outside sites and bloggers to still link direct to the story
without putting up a roadblock for the user and thus still sending
traffic to us.

Tell us about lessons learned.

Sampling/freemium drove our page views up and exposed the site to a
whole raft of users that otherwise would not have seen it. IF we were
to make one change in this it might be that we have advertising for
the non-paying users as they sample and then no advertising as an
additional benefit to the other experiences you get inside PG+
already. Maybe in V3. ;)

Do you consider this is an approach that other large media groups should follow?

Right from the start we believed (and still do) that people pay for
experiences online - not content alone. Whether that experience is
"greater access and socializing" with like minded sports fans or
simply the experience of "convenience" which people get with the
purchase our eEdition (pdf).

User driven revenue streams are crucial to any digital media company
who use to only have a newspaper. The more we can bring
opportunities to users that allow them to transact with us, our brand,
our content and Pittsburgh as a whole. The more we also have an
opportunity to present them with eCommerce and take some of that
revenue in addition to the traditional revenue stream of banner ads.

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