To mark their respective centennial celebrations, Aviation Week & Space Technology and Boeing have digitized 100 years of Aviation Week, reports Folio. The 100-year digital archive includes more than 4,500 issues totalling about half a million pages.

The digital archives will be free to registered users through the end of 2016, but are likely to become available by subscription-only starting next year. Aviation Week president Greg Hamilton confirmed this in an interview with Folio.

“This gives us a new content-based marketing vehicle. Next year we’ll gate this at various premium levels, but in addition to monetizing base subs or premium subs we also have an opportunity to do some enterprise-type sales of the content to corporations, government, and academia,” Hamilton told Folio.

Since making the archives accessible, they have been accessed by 45,000 unique visitors, and most who register are new to the Aviation Week site, so they could become potential subscribers. Boeing helped cover the costs of digitization.

“This is a pretty unique project,” Hamilton said. “If it was a bad thing I’d call it a perfect storm, but I’d call it more of something in which the planets were aligned perfectly.”

A visit to Aviation Week’s website shows that the archives are easy to find. Just click on the “100-Year Archive” selection in the top menu bar to access the archive. From there, visitors can browse issues in decade order, view Boeing features or use the search function to find something specific.

Aviation Week isn’t the first publisher to tackle a project of this size. In February 2015, Rolling Stone launched Rolling Stone Now, a free online and app archive of five decades of Rolling Stone magazine. At launch, Rolling Stone Now was free and included three to four stories from each archived issue, but it plans to expand this year to include multimedia content. [Note: Rolling Stone Now is not easy to find in the Google Play Store, and use of the online archives requires registration, but Rolling Stone doesn’t tell visitors how to register.]

Last September Esquire published 82 years of its archives online as well. The Esquire archives, called Esquire Classic, include more than 1,000 issues and 50,000 stories starting with the fall of 1933, when the magazine launched. Unlike Rolling Stone Now, which is supposed to be free, Esquire charges subscribers $4.99 for access to its archives, and it includes all of its past content – articles, images, covers and ads – rather than select stories. [Note: Esquire Classic is not easy to find by visiting Esquire’s main website. We couldn’t find a link on the home page. Suggestion: make the archives easy to find like Aviation Week has done.]

Insider Take:

While a huge undertaking, digitizing archives is a brilliant move for any magazine who is looking to increase its value to prospects and subscribers. The content already exists, so it is a question of utilizing technology – and time and money – to create an online history of a publisher’s work and then figuring out how to monetize it.

By finding a big name sponsor to cover the costs, Aviation Week has found a way to extend its brand, provide additional value to subscribers, and introduce itself to new audiences. After a year of testing, Aviation Week can then use what its learned to capitalize on the value of those archives, which includes using data gathered during the free year to market to prospective subscribers, boosting web traffic to attract advertisers, and building a new revenue stream to support Aviation Week’s long-term sustainability.

Aviation Week, Esquire and Rolling Stone have found a way to digitize the past in such a way that it supports the future for each company. While there are costs and risks involved, this is a smart tactic that other publishers can learn from and experiment with. We hope to see more of this.