Why bloggers are good for profits

"...by allowing bloggers to choose their own daily free-to-access story, it's much more likely that they'll choose one that they have something interesting to say about. The WSJ will end up with even more positive links from Blogistan, which in turn will translate to more traffic, and therefore more paid subscribers. How can I be so sure? Because that's exactly what happened when we trialled just such a system on the Friday Thing a couple of weeks ago. The trial came about when we modified our site to allow Google news users to access one free article from our paid archive before they hit our subscription wall. The system worked brilliantly, and we realised very quickly that it could be modified to allow single-page access to visitors from any site we chose. We emailed a few of our blog buddies inviting them to try it out - and of course they were delighted to be able to link to content that was previously out of bounds. Since implementing the system, our traffic has gone up alarmingly and our weekly paid subscriptions have increased by 20%. And we're just small fry. If a site like the Wall Street Journal gave a few trusted blog buddies a key to their archive, the financial benefits would probably be much, much more impressive. Free content for bloggers and their visitors equals more traffic, profit and street cred for the paper. That's what I call a perfect partnership." - Guardian Unlimited, via the excellent observations at New Media Musings: When publications remove themselves from the conversation, via a trackback from the great insights of John Battelle's Searchblog: From Pull to Point: How to Save The Economist and The Journal from Irrelevance - and that blog trail itself illustrates the point and value of what they are all talking about! :-)