B2B heads for the paywall
Jinfo Blog

3rd November 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Plenty of publishers have been talking about it but few have actually done it yet – charge for virtually all their content, that is. But now the business to business publisher Emap has taken the plunge, raising the stakes for all information managers who are dependent on the specialist press for their current awareness. Having tried the ‘free to air’ approach, Emap’s chief executive David Gilbertson has told paidContent:UK that all websites in its Inform division – incorporating 19 business magazines – will stop giving away their news free and start bundling web access with subscriptions. The process begins with Retail Week magazine on November 13; however there’s no exact timeframe thereafter, and individual stories visited via Google’s First Click Free scheme will remain free (http://digbig.com/5bapcf). With specialist content and a captive audience, Emap will presumably charge what the market will bear – but Gilbertson justifies charging by pointing out that high value content will aid decision making and make money for those who choose to buy it. Just how high that value turns out to be is something that information managers will have to judge for themselves. Like many B2B publishers, Emap is feeling the pinch and the Sunday Times reports that it has asked its lenders to relax next year’s loan covenants to give it greater headroom to invest in the business (http://digbig.com/5bapcg). And, although Emap is not specifically covered in Outsell’s latest B2B Trade Publishing & Company Information report (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bapch), it’s probably caught by the finding that, for legacy data companies with significant data creation costs, an ‘explosion’ of web scraping and user-generated content competitors is ‘stealing customers, share of mind and revenue’. Should information managers worry? Since they’re likely to be subscribing to the equivalent print publications relevant to their industry already, the initial cost impact may be marginal – although it does presumably mean that they will no longer be able to rely on free access to content from crucial trade journals being available on all their users’ desktops. Tim Weller, chief executive of another B2B publisher, Incisive Media, has also said that he expects his company to be charging for all its content in due course (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e20022). So it’s probably fair to assume that, if the pioneers demonstrate that the all paid content model is viable, the general move to B2B charging will come sooner rather than later.

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