Media Shift has a great write-up of the Toronto Star‘s new monthly e-book subscription, called Star Dispatches. I know I’ve mentioned the Star‘s e-book experiment before, but this particular article goes into a lot of detail about how the series was created, and how its unique subscription feature works.
From the article:
Sandy MacLeod, vice president of consumer marketing at the Toronto Star, said their market research showed it took an “incredible amount of marketing” to produce single-copy e-books that generally sold 100 to 300 downloads at $4.99 each. The math just didn’t work out to make a viable business case, he said.
“So we had the thought that, what if we turned this model around a little bit and turned it into a subscription model?”
The results? The conversion rate of people who sign up after the free trial has been unusually high, and one day saw them gain 100 new subscribers. I myself have contemplated a subscription. The subjects they’ve chosen for the series have been excellent, and they’ve been tying them in nicely to the articles in the paper.
Two that stuck out for me were the most recent: a profile of Justin Trudeau (who just won leadership of one of our national political parties, and whose father is one of our most beloved former prime ministers), and another following a little girl and her family over the course of a year as she battled cancer. The Trudeau book was on a timely subject, and surely attracted some traffic to the Star Dispatches website. And the other offered bonus content not found in the articles, which likely enhanced this poignant story.
What I like about the Star‘s approach to this series is that you can still enjoy the paper as is. You could read the series about that little girl and enjoy it in its own right. The e-book was an extra. And, since they seem to be playing this the right way, it was a compelling extra. I am thinking of subscribing. I may give the free trial a go and see what happens.
