Anne Holland

If you type “Consumer Reports” into Google, you’ll see two links at the very top of the page. One is the PPC ad and the other the #1 organic search result. Although both are targeting the same audience, currently they have completely different landing pages.When you click on the organic (ie free results) link, you land on a homepage that looks very newsy and informative, with links to various then-paywalled pages. In short, what you…

Last week, 65 membership and subscription site executives from companies ranging from The Financial Times and Media Bistro toBriefings Media Group, gathered for our live Summit.  (BTW: Interested in attending next time? Click here for early-bird discount info.) Everyone made new friends (I saw Motley Fool and TheStreet.com whispering to each other in the back, while the publishers of Wire Jewelry Bootcamp and Jewelry Making Professor sat together at lunch); happily badgered the Case Study…

Mark Brooks, a PR guru serving the online dating and matchmaking industry who also blogs here, just emailed over to ask if we have any specific test data on the value of major media mentions.  As Mark knows, PR value measurement has always been fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy. One of his ideas is for sites to A/B test their homepages and paywalls to see if adding the media mention (ie, “as seen in…”) will bump conversions. Subscription…

Poynter Institute just published a fun memory-lane article on homepages of yore — or more specifically 1994. It made me remember the old Netflix homepage style, back when a million paying subscribers was an aggressive dream, let alone today’s 23.6 million.As seen via the Internet Wayback machine, in January 1999 Netflix’s home looked a lot like an ecommerce site homepage now, with lots of headlines and images plugging various movies on offer. Most paywall news and…

Back in the 1950s, the New Yorker offered a lifetime subscription for a few hundred bucks. My Dad promptly paid up and still gets his copy every week nearly 60 years later.  These days, I’ve noticed more and more paywall sites making the same offer. Initially, most were stock investing newsletters in PDF or email format with a companion site that’s mostly shovelware (little more than searchable back issues.) A lifetime subscription would be several thousand…