IS YOUR WEB SITE Stealing YOUR READERS?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 15, 2000 by R.J. Lehmann

Fine-tuning The Overlap

Yet other titles take pains to safeguard against cannibalization. At Spin.com, one of the more popular Web sites among the 14- to 25-year old demographic coveted by advertisers, only a handful of stories from the print version are posted on the Web each month.

"We have a large overlap in that our [print] subscribers also visit our Web site, though there are many who visit the site who never subscribe," says Adrienne D'Amato, a spokesperson for Spin/Vibe Ventures. "They seem to appreciate the original content we produce for the site, and we're certainly happy with the business our site does. But if we posted all of the magazine's content to the site, would they still buy the magazine? It's hard to say, but this is the MP3 generation, so I think it would be a legitimate concern.

One way magazines avoid cannibalization is by limiting site archives to current subscribers. "We want people to visit our site, but we also want them to subscribe to the magazine, and of course to patronize the advertisers from both," says Business Week's Masterson. "So by offering our Web archives only to subscribers, we continue to maintain a greater incentive to become a subscriber. It's not meant to be a penalty for Web suffers who don't subscribe, but it does cost time, money and space to maintain an archive, and we look at it as a reward to our subscribers who've shown loyalty to us by providing them this service."

Tracking Readers

Another frequent safeguard has been the use of various sorts of e-mail registration systems to both track who is using the site, and to build the amount of information they have about existing or potential readers.

"One of the most popular features of our site is our message boards and interactive communities, and we ask users to register with an e-mail address before they log in," said Bill Stutzman, director of Entertainment Weekly's EW.com.

"The way things have evolved, having that e-mail address means we've obtained consumer information, which has real value," Stutzman says. "In the end, then, if that means that some of our users find they prefer our site to the print version, we still can say we haven't really lost anything at all in the exchange."