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Hitting the headlines. (Strategic Play).

Article Excerpt
Le Monde was the first French broadsheet to start charging for its content online. Seeing the site largely as a way of attracting readers to the print edition, it's now planning to slim down how much it provides for free on lemonde.fr while boosting its subscription area.

Like all publishers, the executives at Le Monde had been putting the cases for and against charging for content online for quite some time before they decided, in April this year, that the site would become the first French general news daily to launch a subscription-based service.

It was a bold move that CEO Bruno Patino admits he never expected to be straightforward. But five months on, he claims it has been successful enough to forge a new online strategy at Le Monde that will evolve in stages as less of the site is given away for free while the subscription side is bolstered with unique content and value-added services.

Patino says the Interactif team had hoped to get around 5,000 subscribers, each paying [euro]5 ([pounds sterling]3.13) a month, by the end of the year. So far, he claims, 13,000 have signed up and renewal figures are "encouraging". Add to this Le Monde's claim that its 1.3m unique users are quadruple that of its more rightwing rival, Figaro, and nearly treble the business daily La Tribune's, and it's clear Patino is bullish that his team has got the mix right.

Anyone logging on to lemonde.fr can still get the day's main headlines and breaking news alerts for free. Those subscribing, via credit card, however, get access to the whole of the paper's stories, which each come with a thematic list of previous articles that might interest the reader. In fact, subscribers can search the Le Monde archives back to 1987.

"We've kept a free, basic site that we're using to encourage people to progress to the premium content part," sums up Patino. "We don't believe in big changes. We couldn't just turn round one day and tell people they'd have to pay for the newspaper, so we kept a good free site up and running.

"The next stage in our progression is to try to move more and more people to the paying part of the service so we can convert users into subscribers. This will be done by slimming down the free part of the service...