The Economist banks on Web subs - subscription-based Web publishing - Brief Article

* As most online publishers try to tap into Web advertising revenue streams, London-based The Economist took the other path in June when it launched a subscription-based site at www.economist.com. For $48 instead of $125 for the print version, subscribers will receive the online magazine at a savings of 60 percent. The full text of The Economist will be available on the Web as much as two days before the print title hits newsstands, and online users will also have access, at one dollar per article, to a two-year archive of the 600,000-circulation weekly.

Though few have made a success of the subscription-based model online (The Wall Street Journal currently charges $49 annually, but Microsoft abandoned its plan to charge readers $19.95 for Slate last January), The Economist chief operating officer Beth O'Rorke is banking on the "tremendous research value" of the publication to secure online subscriptions. "Entertainment-oriented magazines have already gone down that rosy path of giving away information for free," she says, "and it's very hard to pull back. Once you give things away, consumers come to expect it. However, in-depth information is more difficult to obtain, so we stand a better chance of producing revenue with our retrieval service. So far, very few have made money, but we think we can."

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