Majority of Park Slope Parents Won't Pay to Play

I think those of you scoffing a people's reluctance to pay are being disingenuous or just don't understand how the web works.

The fee will kill the site. Period.

They will be very very lucky to get 20% of the users to convert to subscribers, and their annual growth will be very hard pressed to keep pace with attrition (people leaving the area, their kids grow up, lose interest, etc.).

Also, since the site depends on its users to develop content, the volume and quality of its content will decline as its userbase declines.

So the trajectory would be:

13,000 members when free
2,500 members 1st year of subscription
2,200 2nd year
1900 3rd year
1400 4th year
800 5th year

or something like that.

And if you assign a value of "100" to the content currently on the site, I think you'd see something like:

content value: 100 (now)
content value: 90 (1st year of subscription)
content value: 75 (2nd year)
content value: 60 (3rd year)
content value: 40
etc.

Much of the valuable information is very local and very time sensitive. If you want info on the local daycare places, you want information that is less than a year or two old. Anything older is unreliable as the staff at the daycare place will have likely completely turned over in the interim.

The rest of the information -- the information that is not local or time sensitive -- is generic parenting advice that you can get on 600 places on the web for free.

I'm not saying the site owners don't "deserve" money. I'm just saying they are going to kill the goose laying the golden eggs by trying to carve it up to get at those eggs.

If they want revenue, they should transfer to their own domain and start selling ad space to diapers.com (which can then have impartial reviews by the site users etc. etc.).

If they have some moral problem with "going commercial", then I hope their morals are a comfort to them when the site shuts down in 3 years (or goes back to being free...).

Posted by: northsloperenter at April 3, 2009 12:59 PM

"They've done fundraisers and nobody ponies up. They've solicited money and gotten a 4% response. There's a joke in here somewhere about the mind of the Park Slope parent."

If all they got was a 4% response, it will be a minor miracle if they get 20% of their current users to subscribe.

I think there is a joke in here somewhere about people trying to sell user created content to users.

Posted by: northsloperenter at April 3, 2009 1:02 PM

Complete list of community sites on the web that survive with a membership fee:

Will PSP be the first to succeed?

Posted by: northsloperenter at April 3, 2009 2:43 PM

I will grant you that. The people who support the Food Coop are very likely going to have a mind set that would support a subscription based PSP site.

But the Food Coop has more people to pull from as the number of people who eat is greater than the number of people looking for parenting advice and info.

I could be wrong, but many many popular web sites have tried to switch to a subscription model, and in the debates before they switched the arguments were always the same (not that much money, price of a cup of coffee, worth 10x as much to me, people who don't want to pay are freeloaders, blah blah blah).

This isn't a new idea, and it's pretty much failed every time in the past.

Brownstoner could not survive a membership fee. I believe fool.com almost killed itself several years ago by instituting a fee. I'm sure many other sites no one can think of killed themselves with fees. I stopped reading ESPN.com and nytimes.com when they restricted parts of their sites to subscribers only.

Perhaps PSP will be different.

I won't pay for it (I read the digests so infrequently I only found out about this through Brownstoner), but some people certainly will pay.

In any event, I'm sure the site owners will cash in for a year or two. The site seems to have enough momentum for that. After that, I think it will have so few members that maintaining the site will be much cheaper, which is a funny way to solve a problem.

Posted by: northsloperenter at April 3, 2009 3:24 PM

Yeah, I saw that. As is often the case, it seems the decision was made before the debate began.

Good luck to them...

Posted by: northsloperenter at April 3, 2009 4:07 PM

"unlike northsloperenter i can think of a couple websites that charge and that i even pay for personally:
zagats
consumerreports"

I specifically meant "community" sites. I know there are successful subscription online (I work for one and subscribe to another).

zagats is an interesting example though as their content is community derived, but they do a great deal of work in indexing and organizing that content, e.g., making sure all the restaurants are listed under the correct neighborhood and cuisine -- not to mention averaging the results of thousands of voters for hundreds of restaurants.

zagats is also building off a well established brand, but as places like Brownstoner, Curbed?, etc. start providing very very similar databases for free, I wonder how long zagats business model will survive. Brownstoner doesn't have enough restaurant reviews yet, but already is probably the resource I would check for Brooklyn restaurants first.

Likewise, I think PSP can succeed for a couple of years before other free sites reach a critical mass of users/content to challenge them.

In any event, it looks like the decision for PSP's owner has more to do with personal reasons than business reasons.

Posted by: northsloperenter at April 4, 2009 8:40 AM