I’m with Jenny —asinine strategy! I read about it in the Editor’s Letter for the August issue of Business 2.0 and decided I won’t be reading this magazine in the future.
Good Thing It’s Not Called “Business .20”.
B2.0 Tries A 2-Minute Time Trick
“As Jonathan Dube mentioned yesterday, CNN.com continues to link to articles from family site Business 2.0, which has closed off its site completely to print subscribers recently. The stories linked from CNN.com appear to be free for non-subscribers…but wait. A source in Time Inc told me that the free links only work for two minutes…which is why all the B2.0 stories have now been broken into chunks and have multiple pages…if say you are on the second page of a 3 page story, and your two minutes are up, as soon as you click on the link for the third page, you will encounter a subscription wall…I tried it and its true…(on Opera, it seems they work for 4-5 minutes!)
The idea, according to the Time Inc source, is to catch the readers midway through the story when they are engaged enough in the story to pay up…” [PaidContent.org, via Lost Remote]
This has to be one of the most asinine strategies I’ve ever heard of. As if the pop-ups weren’t bad enough, now this. I wonder if not allowing cookies in the browser would let you return to the page later to finish the article. I wonder if I’ll ever read Business 2.0 again. No I don’t.
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