Majority of Park Slope Parents Won't Pay to Play
We asked, you responded: If the survey we ran yesterday is to be believed, slightly more than half of the subscribers to the Park Slope Parents group are unwilling to pay anything for the service; only 20 percent are happy to pay the proposed $25 fee (or more). Yikes. That does not bode well. We…
We asked, you responded: If the survey we ran yesterday is to be believed, slightly more than half of the subscribers to the Park Slope Parents group are unwilling to pay anything for the service; only 20 percent are happy to pay the proposed $25 fee (or more). Yikes. That does not bode well. We suspect they’re going to have to back away from this idea.
Park Slope Parents to Start Charging for Membership [Brownstoner]
Excellent analysis by northsloperenter.
PSP will be DOA if they do this.
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.
Apples to oranges. You can’t click a few buttons and set up your own free coop.
You know, the Park Slope Food Coop is also a pretty unusual business model, no? Not only do you have to leave a deposit to join, but also work every month. I can imagine many places where such a model would not work, but in Park Slope, it’s thriving.
Complete list of community sites on the web that survive with a membership fee:
Will PSP be the first to succeed?
Also, regarding PSP’s past fundraising efforts – I can say from experience that their lack of funding success could be more about busy parents being forgetful/overwhelmed than “not wanting to pony up”. You can count me among those who didn’t pony up but would support the proposed fee now. I would forget to donate to public radio too if they didn’t do those in-your-face pledge drives. I used to find pledge annoying, but in a funny way, I’m grateful now since I really believe in supporting public radio, and I do want to give money but I just am too harried to think of when I last sent them my modest (but much-needed) contribution. Hell, I can barely get to dentist when I need to, so to me, putting in a system that requires me to do something I really want to do (i.e. supporting an important service) is something I’d be grateful for.
I think people who don’t use the PSP site/listserve may not fully get its service value to the community. Sure, there are some users who just peruse here and there, or poke fun, but many people I know find the PSP community a huge resource. And while I know paying for internet stuff is not the typical business model, PSP is not just a typical listserve.
The moderators and volunteers who run PSP do tons of work for free, not to mention float additional costs. $25/year equals about $2/month, or less than 50 cents a week. This seems a small amount to pay if the service is hugely useful to you, as it is for many. The biggest issue I’ve found tricky is how to not exclude those for whom $25 is a serious hardship, even broken up weekly and I realize for some people, esp in this economy, there is absolutely no penny left to spare. But the PSP community is working out ways to ensure there are mechanisms in place to allow those truly unable to pay to join nonetheless. That said, I do think many PSP users could forego the occasional cup of coffee (about 1x/month) or some other tiny discretionary item to support this valuable community service.
As someone who works in the internet specifically in the business of paid content, there’s no way they’re going to get this to work.
Getting people to pay for content online is HARD, especially when there are competing equivalent resources available for free. Just asking for it will inspire a few hard core fanatics to cough up cash, but community lovefest only takes you so far. They’d have to invest money in optimizing the site, improving the overall appearance and features and making the value proposition clearer.
As it is now, the site looks like a relic from 1998, has no personalization, and relies entirely on content contributions from members. Yes, it’s moderated, but without member content, there’s nothing to moderate. And as membership diminishes, so will usefulness of the site, so there’s a negative correlation between fees and usefulness. That’s not a business model — that’s a death spiral.
“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.