There’s been a not wholly positive reaction to Manchester Confidential’s “redesign” today. It looks quite a lot like the old site although it’s somehow more grotesque. It’s cluttered, it’s dominated by an almost misanthropic shade of yellow and looks like it was conceived in about 1999. By a drunk. ManCon has unleashed the dogs of war – or, at least, a couple of bitchy @replies – to anyone who dared to mention it on Twitter.
This coincides with the launch of ManCon’s paywall structure. To read this review of Pizza Express, for example, you now have to pay a minimum of three pounds a month.
This blog was the first to reveal details of ManCon’s “heroes” pricing structure (it really was, honest), which is backed by a cheaper “friends” model. For this, you get access to various stuff including special offers and competitions, as well as restaurant reviews.
I’ve nothing against paywalls in principle. My view is that the marketplace will decide whether you can make money on the web using a paywall model (although all the evidence so far suggests that unless you’re delivering either pornography or very highly targeted, valuable information towards business users, you probably can’t). But I am curious about what ManCon loyalists think of being charged money for something that was previously valued at zero. Bizarrely, a review of Papa G’s in the Printworks from ten days ago is now trapped behind a paywall, although if I Google it, I can find the exact same review for free. It’s hardly going to have me reaching for the credit card, is it?
And while the reviews are very detailed and well written by proper journalists and all that, does anyone, when it comes down to it, really care? If I want an idea of whether a pizza place is any good, I can either use a free review site like ViewManchester, or I’ll possibly risk eight quid by, y’know, going in there and ordering a pizza.
ManCon has done a very good job of convincing people to part with their cash in advance of its relaunch, raising at least £60k from subscribers. The crunch will come in a year’s time when these people will be forced to consider whether renewal is worth it.
The Conversation {11 comments}
Mark Garner is a pioneer and a trier. Personally I only visited ManCon occasionally and only to read Sleuth. I’m not interested in being a paying customer. But I AM fascinated by the whole paywall experiment, especially in newspapers. I have serious doubt’s about Mark’s business model, which turns traditional media on its head. How has this affected what advertisers pay him (or DO they pay?) now? The number of eyeballs falling on ManCon’s pages is fewer, so their ad revenues will surely shrink drastically. He needs a lot of subscriptions to pay for the content and I just don’t see it. I think it might be like watching an iceberg melt with time lapse camerawork. But then they probably told Christopher Columbus he was an idiot for trying to sail to the “New World”.
My Dad’s review of Pizza Express is well worth reading – but probably only if you were thinking of taking some kids, David. And his bill was a bit more than £8 after we all had pizza, pasta, fizzy drinks and ice cream.
I just read this after leaving a comment on your dad’s blog. I’m sure the review is well worth reading, Elliot, but as I’m not a “hero” or “friend” of Manchester Confidential, I haven’t been able to look at it myself. My point was really about the monetary value of online restaurant reviews generally – Michael’s review just seemed to be the most obvious example of something on the front page that’s now suddenly trapped behind a paywall. Anyway, hope you enjoyed your pizza and ice cream.
From the horses mouth…. Seems the new site is doing what I wanted it to, that is start people talking about it. As for Twitter, if you are talking about by comments regarding Kate Feld, they were aimed at her highly unprofesional comments on Jonathan Schofield’s team and their writing. [Comment edited, could be construed as defamatory.] The site is different, my brief to the team is to make it stick out like a sore thumb. They have delivered.
Hi Mark – I’m unfamiliar with whatever beef you’ve got going on with Kate Feld. She was just one of at least half a dozen people (including me) who had noticed the new site design was a bit ropey, so your attack on her is over the top. By making the statements you’ve made above (which I’ve had to edit to avoid the possibility of getting sued) I’d suggest you’re the one who’s being unprofessional.
I’m intrigued by your suggestion that talkability and making the site “stick out like a sore thumb” is an end in itself. If you were getting paid for eyeballs on the site you could perhaps illustrate a direct link between talkability and revenue. But you’re not – you’re asking people to put their hand in their pocket and pay for something which quite a few people are saying is substandard. This is the new world you have entered. To put it another way, if you give someone a poor restaurant review it might generate talkability – but it certainly isn’t going to benefit the restaurant.
I’d suggest engagement might be a more useful tool for you at this point. Have you done anything to reassure the person who says he won’t be paying his £2 next month because he’s not impressed with the new site? Or the person who complains that the site won’t open after 50 seconds of waiting and then doesn’t work with their browser? The negative comments outweigh the positive ones by at least two to one by my reckoning. You could either engage with their concerns, or you could come back here and slag them off as well.
Either way, good luck with the site.
Remember when Facebook redesigned? Hundreds of thousands of people went crazy about how much they hated it. Then a week later they didn’t care any more and went back to using the site as normal.
Point is; people dislike change, whatever manchester confidential had done their readers would have complained about it. I’ve paid up and I’m a happy hero. I also followed the Kate Feld comments on twitter, her blog looks boring and has been updated once this year, I hardly think anyone needs to worry about anything she has to say about design or publishing.
But that’s bloggers for you, if they hate something they get attention, vitriol gets them readers, not good content
Kid Disco – Do you think that people would have gone back to Facebook after the redesign if they were told they had to pay £36 a year to use it? (Obvious answer: no.)
Very simple if you put up a paywall you need to have something that is worth paying for and is differentiated from the free Market -enough said?
On a personal basis, probably not. But what if they decided to charge corporates for access; would companies pay for their group/fan pages? – I think they would.
Why so? Because there’s value in having them and it’s worth paying for. I actually read what the Heroes get (unlike most) and it’s not just content. There’s a bunch of restaurants I’ll get 20% off in whenever I visit which is great, and a few other discounts. The 20% got me, see I dine out quite a lot, and 20% off is worth at least £20 a meal to me, maybe a £100 extra in my pocket each month. I like the sound of that.
Seems worth it to me.
I enjoy(ed) ManCon for what it was worth, a fleeting visit for a review or to see some offers… nothing more and nothing worth paying for. But I have used them in the past for advertising and last week I was sat with some marketing people who use ManCon a lot for advertising and this paywall has made them seriously consider whether it is worth putting money into them anymore. When you cull your readership like they have done into something more exclusive you really are putting off a lot of advertisers as the bottom line is there are many other mediums you can put your budget into.
Hats off for them to have the balls to try it but judging by how many emails they were sending over Christmas begging for people to join and the fact they have raised only 60k shows that its not such a big money making idea.
I just received yet another e-mail from ManCon, telling me of exclusive offers at a couple of restaurants; heroes and friends to have first refusal for bookings. I managed to book both restaurants, stopping short of entering CC details. I am not a friend, or a hero but if I was I’d be pissed off at having paid £10 per month for access to ‘exclusive’ offers which are clearly available to all
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