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Ars Technica Launches Paid “Premier” Service
Just over a year ago Conde Nast acquired the tech blog and community site Ars Technica for about $25 million. Yesterday Ars Technica launched a paid subscription option named “Premier”. This new paid service costs $50/year and includes a variety of features including ad-free browsing and premier-only content. Other features include:
- premier-only chats
- full-text feed RSS
- downloadable pdf option for longer stories and one-page reading
Could it be?? Is Ars the first major tech site to charge for full RSS feeds? Could my post about RSS for $1 finally be gaining some forward momentum? What does Dave Winer think about this?
It’s a good move for Ars to test the waters with a paid subscription option. When Ars was acquired I noted that they weren’t acquired for the blog component but rather for the very strong community. Most of the larger blogs are trying different options to increase revenue for their respective companies. Techcrunch and VentureBeat runs conferences, Readwriteweb sells reports, Gigaom sells a pro subscription and runs conferences, and Mashable holds events. Revenue diversification is nearly always a good thing — especially as online advertising continues to struggle.
Steven Hodson has more on the Ars Premier launch.
It’s not entirely new, Ars has had a paid subscription level for several years (the PDF download was a big reason I signed up for it a couple of years ago)
thanks epc – interesting that they have been using it for a few years – the pdf downloads sound great – wouldn’t work for most tech blogs as the posts aren’t that in-depth – most could be replaced with a 140 character sms :)
The nice thing with the PDF downloads is that they take the time to use a custom stylesheet so that the resulting document is worth keeping as a reference. They strip out all of the widget cruft for example. It would not be that difficult for sites to offer a print stylesheet that does the same thing but most don’t.
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins and I also discussed this whole idea of blog subscribtions in last night CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast just in case your interested Alan http://www.shootingatbubbles.com/index.php/2009/09/09/the-cobwebs-daily-edition-podcast-blog-subscription-model-will-they-work/
Very interesting, I don’t read Ars so I won’t be signing up – but I wonder what I will do if a website I read does something like this. Not sure any of them are worth $50/a to me though.