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Digital Media
Rolling Stone relaunches website, puts up pay-wall
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 19 April 2010
US music mag Rolling Stone today launches a new website which will have one of those crazy pay-walls in place, meaning users will have to pay a four dollar per month subscription fee to get access to the full site. Online-only content will still be free, but users will have to pay to access articles from the print magazine. A subscription will also get users access to the music mag’s entire archive, which stretches back over 40 years.
Rolling Stone is unusual in the magazine world in that its print circulation is actually up, and its privately-owned publishers insist the title is still profitable. Still, it’s known all important ad sales were down last year, so the subscription-based online service is presumably a bid to secure new additional revenues.
Given publishers across the newspaper and magazine industries are pondering over whether a subscription-based model could work for their online titles (given most original attempts at online subscriptions back in the day did not), I think it’s fair to say a fair few media owner types will now be watching with interest how the all new Rolling Stone website fairs.
