Slashdot: Announcing Slashdot Subscriptions

“To understand why the system works like it does, you
need to first understand that Slashdot is about to start accepting
new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are
coming here. We really don’t have an option: these are what
advertisers want, and if we don’t provide them, we won’t be around
much longer. But we want to give you an option to see Slashdot
without these ads. Second, you need to understand that Slashdot
readers fall into a variety of types, and charging the same flat
fee just isn’t possible.

Slashdot subscriptions will essentially let you buy a thousand
pages to be viewed without banner ads. And you will have some
flexibility to decide what types of pages (Comments, Articles, The
Homepage) you want ads removed from, and what types of pages you
just want to see the ads.

The rates are currently set at $5 per 1000 pages. To put this
into perspective, $20 (typical magazine subscription) will be
enough pages for 82% of our readers to view Slashdot without ads
for a year. Another 15% will need to spend $5 a month to accomplish
the same thing. 3% of our readers would need to spend more than $5
a month- but they could choose to see ads on comments and in almost
every case, still pay around $5 a month. (As an aside, it’s also
worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into
this 3%)”

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