Do Teasers Work for Subscription Sites?

[rharri]

Let's take a site that offers expertise on widget selection. To get the site found by SEs, we must create pages of content. But, many people find the content sufficient and are not inclined to pay money for the "expert widget advice."

Some similar sites seem to provide only the first para of a content page and require the reader to "join" to read the rest. Is this an effective way of providing SE fodder and getting paying customers?

[maherphil]

I would say that your idea of a teaser is a good one. Give them some of the gold and the mine will cost you. What keeps you from doing this then? If others are doing this then why not try it yourself. Its kind of like the movie teasers you see out now. A bunch of sites have teasers for movies and then you pay to download or 'rent' the movie.

Watch out netflix, this will be the future, just a 20 minute download from a site and you have a near dvd quality movie in your living room.

[rogerd]

rharri, there's a tech support-type web site that has an interesting approach - they let you view only the question. This is often a highly detailed question involvine error codes, operating systems, etc. Plenty of keywords, and frequently well-indexed.

To see the answer and resulting discussion, you have to register. In this case, registration is free. I have to believe they collect a huge number of registrations this way. If you are trying to solve a problem and find this site with a similar or identical question, it's almost a no-brainer to fork over your e-mail address and set up an account.

Of course, if there was a hefty fee, I'm sure the signup rate would be much lower.

Back to the original question, a teaser approach can work - how well depends on how compelling the tease is and how much it costs to join.

[rogerdp]

What about detecting the GoogleBot and using <meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">?

In other words, give Google a full subscription.

If this catches on, you'll have to be more restrictive detecting the GoogleBot. Based on IP address, perhaps.

[rharri]

Thanks for the suggestions. At present we control access using Java servlets, jsp and cookies. I'll have to ask our "Java guy" if we can let a "bot" see the whole page but exclude un-registered human users.

[rogerdp]

Why do you use Java for that?