Monday, April 01, 2002

Lagardere: New Model Needed for Online Publishers' Survival: "[Hachette Filipacchi's Ben] Tatta does not hold much hope for a paid subscription model in the United States. "Only premium content, such as pornography, has the ability to generate paid content models," he said. "Unless value-add is very strong, paid models will fail. Users [in the United States] are already desensitized by free models. Migrating to a paid model is extremely difficult." Still, online publishers need to focus on a balanced composition of revenue versus advertising-centric models of the past."