Centaur‘s online marketing and media mag NMA, which already required a £99-a-year subscription for everything bar “lead” stories and opinion pieces, is now putting those stories from its print edition behind a paywall, too.
Editor Justin Pearse writes that, along with columnists, daily breaking news will remain free for seven days.
The story says NMA has a “phased strategy to introduce a range of premium content and services to add value to bundled subscriptions”.
There’s rarely a perfect paid content strategy to be had by a publisher. NMA’s mimics that of Economist.com, which continues to give away all the new news and its leading voices, while charging for the rest. NMA is placing faith in its bigger-hitting stories being the subscription drivers.
As we reported, Emap Inform is getting ready to throw the pay wall around its trade sites for readers who don’t come via Google.
The media and marketing titles have been amongst the best performing in Centaur’s stable, but the publisher has spent the last year figuring out what to do with them, axing staff from the Mad.co.uk site and turning it in to an sector aggregator for those titles.