MO Launches Subscription Service?

[SilverSurfer]

There's one fundamental part of this equation that has yet to be mentioned (or maybe I missed it). When you subscribe to, or buy, a printed magazine, you have something to hold and keep. When you subscribe to an online magazine the product is not really yours, is it?

I still have old Motorcyclist, Cycle World, and Cycle magazines laying about, but how long would I be able to keep my copy of MO?

When you think about it in this framework, what you're really talking about here is a rental or leasing opportunity.

Unless you plan on keeping a user database full of every page, or "volume/issue", purchased then I don't see the buyer's value in this model.

[blip]

Two excellent comments, indeed. And one not lost on MO, or me -- back when MO was just me in 1994, MO had the first use of onboard MPEG video at an "e-zine," possibly the first anywhere. Coded them by hand, frame-by-frame with the Berkeley MPEG encoder. Did the same, line-by-line, with the VRMLs I did for a manufacturer back then, and plopping bikes around 16X3 times for QuicktimeVRs wasn't much fun without an automatic dias...



But I digress. Today, we've served terabytes of video data, and it's extremely costly. I'm not sure if many netizens realize the cost of multiple, redundant, load-balanced connections and the server farm behind it, but it's significant. Hence, yes, there hasn't been an increase in frequency of multimedia aspects @MO since we first launched videos some six years ago. We severely limit the amount of users at our FTP site (60 max) because we'd be at max bandwidth 24x7, and slow as heck for the HTML story reading that is our bread and butter.



So, the question remains: How do we capitolize on this large and (despite the flames we see here from a very vocal subset of whiners) highly loyal readership we maintain? MO remains the largest motorcycling site on the 'Net, and according to MM, the "stickiest" of all automotive sites. A good accomplishment, except that it's about midnight and I'm still working. A short day, actually, and that reaches to the heart of the problem.