Here’s a fish swimming against the tide – that tide being the voguish rush toward charging for online articles…
Bristol B2B publisher Sift Media‘s CEO Ben Heald says: “I can’t see us moving to a pay wall at all – but I can see us adding on some subscription products.
I can’t see us locking down the whole thing and saying ‘that’s £100 a year’. We would come down from 160,000 to 5,000 users in one go, which is terrible news if you’re trying to make money out of that audience … we’d like to keep our volume … I can’t see it just being a blanket pay-to-play..”
Sift publishes 27 editorial sites at small-biz, public-sector, IT and accounting sectors. In October, it acquired Publictechnology.net.
The company made £3 million revenue last year and broke even, Heald added, speaking at News:Rewired.