Last week, when hunting
for an article about geobrowsers, Stefan Geens discovered that the most
recent issue of the Economist was available for free at economist.com. And this
week, the same thing seems to be true. He emails me:
For the second week now, the Economist onlne edition appears to be entirely
free. I haven’t read anything about this, so I’m wondering if this isn’t a
stealth campaign to start building online credibility through linkability?
The Economist is in a sticky position, here. On the one hand, there are many
people who have paid good money for online subscriptions – something which
costs as much as $24.95 per month. On the other hand, the Economist is arguably
the world’s most genuinely international publication, which means that the opportunities
of fully embracing the web are enormous. Of course, fully embracing the web
means people linking to you, and people tend only to link to you if you’re free
– a problem the Wall Street Journal knows full well.
Over the past year or so I’ve noticed more and more of the Economist’s material
being free online. The problem is that being free is not enough: you also have
to be known to be free. Many people don’t visit economist.com because
they think that it’s for subscribers only. And bloggers will be hesitant about
linking to economist.com articles if those articles can disappear behind a subscriber
firewall at any moment, as happens at the Economist’s sibling FT.com.
So should the Economist simply come out and announce with great fanfare that
all of its articles will be availble for free on its website in perpetuity?
Yes. Print subscriptions would not suffer too much: people really love the print
product. And the website would become a much more highly-trafficked resource
than it presently is.