ClickZ: Paid Subscription Blogging, Part 1

Publishing consultant Vin Crosbie, in his monthly "Publishing: Free or Fee?" column for ClickZ, tackles the question of whether or not blogs may be able to charge readers fees to read their material. In fact, most of the column is comprised of extensive quotes from other leading blog experts, including Patrick Phillips, publisher and editor of I Want Media, Rafat Ali, publisher and editor of PaidContent, both of whom are skeptical about the opportunity to charge for blogs, as well as yours truly, playing the role of the blog believer.

The column is actually so long (he sent me a copy of the original) that ClickZ decided to break it up across two months, with the next installment quoting Hylton Jolliffe, editor and publisher of Corante, Steve Outing, senior editor of the
not-for-profit Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits, Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds, and Nick Denton, president of Gawker Media.

My own analysis looks at a site with the traffic of Gawker (~20,000 unique visitors a day) and hypothesizes that if they could convert a small portion of that to pay a modest sum, not for all the content on the blog, but for access to some special features like an in-depth article each week, it could start to add up to worthwhile revenue. Certainly, only a few blogs would be able to pull this off, but in principal, I see no reason why paid access to premium blog content shouldn't be viable.