But Boston.com rallied and has played to its strengths as a lifestyle website. It eschewed the paywall model and branched into ecommerce by selling sports tickets online. Some journalists may call it a conflict of interest, but 21st century journalists know the difference between journalism and content curation.

And yet, while ecommerce cross-sales and upsales can work for a number of paywall and membership sites, it’s not always the best move. For example, Esquire just announced that it will be terminating its ecommerce venture with JC Penney. The main problem seem to be that the two brands had very different images with very different audiences.

So make sure your mission and audience is served by your ecommerce venture before jumping on the bandwagon.

However, the publishers claim the survey doesn’t account for growing digital subscriptions. The problem may be in the methodology, as MRI collects information through in-person surveys. The likelihood that digital readers, with their enjoyment of mobile- and tablet-friendly content, are going to sit through an in-person survey is unlikely. Furthermore, the fact that consumers “understood” the questions doesn’t mean they necessarily wanted to answer them.

The take-away? Methodology is key in market research. This is especially true when new technology comes on to the scene, as beautifully illustrated by the infamous Literary Digest Poll of 1939 that erroneously predicted Alfred Landon’s victory over Franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election. Why did they get it wrong? Their sample had a high percentage of Americans with telephones and cars (i.e., wealthy Americans during the Great Depression who were less likely to vote for Roosevelt).

Remember: A unrepresentative sample will always misrepresent the data.

A recent article on e-businessmoms.com tooted the advantages to busy moms about making your living with an online membership site. Of course, starting a subscription site is not as easy as starting a blog. The technology is more complex, not to mention the fact that you need to know how to market, convert, retain and process payments. (Incidentally, I once heard someone complain to a payment processing service rep that their “button” didn’t work. After the rep apologized profusely for the technical glitch, the person explained, “No, it works technically. It’s just that no one clicks on it.”)

But still, we’ve seen some interesting sites in the subscription circle recently, many of them headed by working moms — from Jessica Kim’s Babbabox, which provides parents with a kit of activities every month, to Caroline O’ Connor’s Plum Gear, which positions themselves as the “Netflix of baby clothes.” (Incidentally, men don’t seem to position themselves as working dads. Hopefully this will change — either working moms will just become women in business or working dads will get their say.)

But is every idea viable? What do you think are some of the best subscription/membership sites out there? And have you had an idea that either soared or plummeted? Paywall Times would love to know! (We might even feature you in our sister publication, Subscription Site Insider!)

The Financial Times (FT) just announced on Monday that it expects its subscription and cover price sales to overtake its print advertising revenue this year, according to Reuters.

Digital subscriptions currently make up only 30% of subscription sales at FT (I suspect it’s because financial types like to be seen with that pink paper in hand), but this is likely to change moving forward. Recently, FT was able to create an app for iPhone, iPad and Android platforms that bypasses Apple’s app store, thereby saving them the 30% gatekeeper charge from Apple — as well as preserving their access to their own subscriber’s data.

This knowledge helps FT sell better-targeted advertising for much higher rates despite a volatile advertising markets, and allows them to maintain a direct relationship with readers. In fact, their Web app was downloaded for the millionth time this month.

However, Apple tends not to like people who think outside the box (unless it’s them of course). So it remains to be seen if the newer iPhone versions don’t try to block such creative, money-saving solutions. After all, their secret police already raided a journalist’s home to prevent him from leaking information about the iPhone 4.

For example, last Friday Private Media Group launched a new softcore membership website Glamazones.com; and, this week lesbian content specialists Girlfriends Films noted for 2011 due in part to “the massive success of our membership site, we exceeded our own expectations.”

Aside from compelling content, what marketing tactic is responsible for this success? Adult sites rely far more heavily on affiliate marketing deals than any other membership site sector we’re aware of. Plus, in the adult world directly competing sites are highly likely to be each other’s affiliates. One common tactic, using overlays and exit pops to promote a competitor’s site to all traffic that bounces off your own site without converting to your own membership offer. This is an idea that could work well for mainstream sites as well… but we don’t know anyone who’s yet to try it.

“Amazon has told publishers it is considering creating a digital-book library featuring older titles, people familiar with the talks said. The content would be available to customers of Amazon Prime, who currently pay the retailer $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and for access to a digital library of movies and TV shows.

Amazon would offer book publishers a substantial fee for participating in the program, people familiar with the proposal said. Some of these people said that Amazon would limit the amount of books that Amazon Prime customers could read for free every month,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Publishers would certainly prefer that readers purchase e-books and are likely to worried about such a subscription service cannibalizing their sales.

For example, according to our new Online Dating & Matchmaking Sites Benchmark Report, over the last six months the online dating industry has seen a frenzy of activity with major sites now accepting as many as 25 currencies and 38% of new site launches taking place outside of the United States.  Get your free copy of the executive summary of the report here.

Food for thought for your subscription site: Should you be expanding internationally?

But first we need your help, and we are prepared to bribe you for it .

If you are in or allied to this industry, please
take our quick two minute, anonymous survey: http://www.subscriptionsiteinsider.com/datingbenchmark.html
(quick & anonymous)

Everyone who participates will receive our Executive Summarywith 10 tables and charts of the latest business data, plus our exclusive analysis in exchange.

And also,  please do spread the word.  The more industry execs who are involved in this study, the more useful the resulting
data will be for everyone.  Tell your colleagues and partners to go to:
http://www.subscriptionsiteinsider.com/datingbenchmark.html

Initially, most were stock investing newsletters in PDF or email format with a companion site that’s mostly shovelware (little more than searchable back issues.)  A lifetime subscription would be several thousand dollars.  Most publishers who tested it did so for a quick cash hit.   But they learned that lifetime subscribers are also the easiest people to sell additional products to, such as seminars, cruises with celebrity advisers, and even additional sister-publications.  So, selling lifetime accounts takes a lot of risk out of launching additional products.

Now, several paywall sites have a new twist on the lifetime offer.  Instead of using it as an upsell for their most fervent fans, they make lifetime their *only* offer — no monthly or annual fees, lifetime only.  And the price is reasonable, what you might expect to pay for a one-year subscription.  Examples range from Arena Pwnage, a tips site for World of Warcraft players with a $37 lifetime membership, to Elite Parrots Club which gives you lifetime access to parrot training info for two payments of $47.77.

At first glance this seems counter-intuitive.  Consumers are increasingly gun-shy of online memberships and subscriptions because of the difficulties some have had with unscrupulous autorenew merchants.  So why not make your offer more attractive removing the word “membership” altogether and just saying it’s a one-time only charge — just like buying an ebook?

My take? In my experience, the split second a customer is no longer an active customer of yours, the likelihood you can sell them anything ever again takes a sharp dive.  For example, you’ll get a far higher conversion rate telemarketing expiring subscribers the week before their subscription ends than if you call them the day after.

But if you’re a member for life, then I can always market to you as a current member.  I suspect the conversions go up accordingly.

Sounds bad, right — more evidence that adding a paywall is a site killer? Except that one metric, whether it’s unique visits, pageviews, or video views, doesn’t tell the whole story.

In fact, Hulu’s revenues were up 90% in Q1 2011, according to a blog post by CEO Jason Kilar. Adding another revenue stream in the form of online subscriptions must have contributed to that growth.

And the site’s paywall hasn’t killed advertising revenues, either: Hulu was the top site on the Net for video ads viewed in March, also according to ComScore.

Obviously, I’m not privy to Hulu’s detailed financials so I don’t know the exact impact their subscription model is having on revenues, or whether the model will succeed in the long run. But I do know that it’s easy to latch onto one metric – like pageviews or site visits – and make broad conclusions about a site’s health or the viability of paywalls in general.

In reality, though, sites with a hybrid subscription/advertising model are always balancing the two revenue streams, and declines in one metric may be offset by improvements in others. You can’t get a complete picture just by looking at a single number.