The Economics of Economist.com

Last week, when hunting for an article about geobrowsers, Stefan Geens discovered that the most recent issue of the Economist was available for free at economist.com. And this week, the same thing seems to be true. He emails me:

For the second week now, the Economist onlne edition appears to be entirely free. I haven't read anything about this, so I'm wondering if this isn't a stealth campaign to start building online credibility through linkability?

The Economist is in a sticky position, here. On the one hand, there are many people who have paid good money for online subscriptions – something which costs as much as $24.95 per month. On the other hand, the Economist is arguably the world's most genuinely international publication, which means that the opportunities of fully embracing the web are enormous. Of course, fully embracing the web means people linking to you, and people tend only to link to you if you're free – a problem the Wall Street Journal knows full well.

Over the past year or so I've noticed more and more of the Economist's material being free online. The problem is that being free is not enough: you also have to be known to be free. Many people don't visit economist.com because they think that it's for subscribers only. And bloggers will be hesitant about linking to economist.com articles if those articles can disappear behind a subscriber firewall at any moment, as happens at the Economist's sibling FT.com.

So should the Economist simply come out and announce with great fanfare that all of its articles will be availble for free on its website in perpetuity? Yes. Print subscriptions would not suffer too much: people really love the print product. And the website would become a much more highly-trafficked resource than it presently is.