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Paying for local on-line sports content

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by aztarheel, Jun 25, 2007.

  1. aztarheel

    aztarheel New Member

    I know rivals.com seems to be doing well selling subs to their college sites for $10 a month. I wonder, would readers pay $10 or $7 or $5 a month for on-line only local sports content if it were presented and packaged well (ie a nice-looking site with strong writing, insightful columns, good photography, message forums, blogs, etc.).

    If you could get 1,000 folks to pay $10 a month for PodunkCountySports.com, that's $10,000 a month right there, decent enough to pay for a couple of folks to go out and get your content for you (without tons of overhead, no printing costs, etc). Plus you could sell ads as well.

    Just curious - is anyone trying something like this and making it work? Can it work? I know I tend to avoid pay sites like Rivals stuff, but then again I don't have as much vested interest in college teams as I might if a local site were covering my kids' teams.
     
  2. chazp

    chazp Active Member

    Do you really think it's possible to get a 1,000 readers to pay for it at the PodunkCounty paper? If the PC paper has only 10 or 12,000 subscribers, do you think a 1,000 would pay for an on-line sports subscription.
     
  3. enigami

    enigami Member

    I would imagine it depends on the community. My uneducated guess is that you might get a sufficient number of subscribers if ...

    the community is willing to go to their computers to read the news (read: somewhat educated);
    there's no competing publication offering similar news content for free;
    the content is interactive (i.e., readers can report scores, submit their own photos, blogs, etc.);
    your publisher is willing to lose some money initially in order to gain down the road.
     
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