Time, Inc. has quietly decided to yank its online offerings, making websites for its numerous publications unavilable to anyone except AOL users, subscribers, and purchasers of single issues who will be given a special code that will get them onto the publication's site.
How stupid.
Evidence:
John Squires, Time Inc.'s executive vice president overseeing the transition, paints the move in opportunistic terms for the magazine giant. "Our hope is to put ourselves in a position where we get paid for [online] content in the future," either through increased magazine sales, or distribution via AOL or other online sites. (Neither unit knows how many of AOL's 35 million members subscribe to any of the 14 magazines going behind the wall.)
How backward. There are already at least a quarter million weblogs ultimately more interesting than Time's mainstream pubs, which include People and Entertainment Weekly.
What's more, what if journalists who write for these publications already blog or decide to blog? Does Time have a hissy fit because suddenly the value of their cherished content is diluted?
ish.
Teen People will begin restricting access today. SI for Kids, Real Simple and In Style follow on April 21; Sunset on April 22; Time for Kids, Coastal Living, Cooking Light and Southern Accents on April 29; Southern Living on May 7; and Parenting on May 20. A date for Health is not yet set.
No one is batting an eye at the move, which in my mind will narrow the audience for Time's publications down to AOL users almost exclusively. Others--like, normal people--will get pissed off when they find these sites restricted and go elsewhere. People will still sell at grocery checkouts, but I doubt many will bother to logon with their single-use code.
"It's not a very high-risk decision for the magazines," said David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix. "AOL drives a lot of EW.com's traffic already. Whenever AOL does an aggressive move with a Time Inc. property, the traffic increases pretty dramatically."
Did he just say that this was an "aggressive" move? OYE! The only thing less aggressive would be if the AOL users wrote the magazines themselves, wrote strictly about AOL, and only shared them only inside the AOL cult. Wait, I think that would be more innovative.
BTW, Traffic is another word for eyeballs. And eyeballs don't stare at you just for yucks over the long haul.
With all of its publications and vast online reach, Time is in the position to do something innovative, to reach across venues and audiences, to draw from and contribute to the conversations taking place online through blogs and other sites. Instead, they're doing the opposite, tucking their content inside the AOL vest.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
