this will make a great HBS case study...

there’s probably considerable user overlap here with the group I’m about to mention: if you’re a car enthusiast, there are tons of online forums for every make and model; hell, car forums probably are responsible for the internet itself. Rennlist is the main Porsche forum and to my knowledge the only car forum that actually charges a membership fee. Now to be fair, free users can still use the site but paid members get an exclusive badge on their avatar. I confess I was one of them. But I think it was like $20 a year or something. Anyway, of course only a Porsche forum could get away with something like that.  I’m sure SA is thinking the same thing. 

I wonder what kind of group-think SA will fall victim to when it’s left with only folks willing to pay $250/yr for a chat forum. Perhaps they already have which led to the pay wall. 

Would really like to know if any current paid users find SA's proprietary ratings system/scorecard stuff useful at all.  It feels redundant since most people who have existing Etrade/TD/etc brokerage accounts already get enough of the "exclusive insight", ratings, and notifications.  Tugging at strings here.  Trying to find an argument that would make it compelling to subscribe.  Is there anyone who truly sees the value in the paid version willing to share their thoughts?  Otherwise I'd prefer a "lite" subscription that continues to hide all that junk and leave the articles available to read and comment.

Fully agree. Often times I read a headline and go straight to the comments first. Love the community that SA has created but there’s nothing “sticky” about the forum that warrants such a high cost. Facebook is free. Find a way to monetize ads better. This is the new game. Pay wall is an admission of failure by the Product Management team that they can’t create a mutually beneficial marketplace for both users and advertisers.

agree - I said $20 a year. Like, this isn’t NYT or the FT. I do enjoy reading the articles but it’s not worth $25 a month. Nor is the premium plan  “premium” when it still contains ads. Double whammy. 

I would happily pay <50/year for this and I imagine that’s also the edge for many many other readers.  Lower the cost and reward existing subscribers whilst attracting 100x more additional subscribers. 

What the current move shows is the existing advertising is not working at all for SA. So now they’ll push away both advertisers and subscribers since there’s no free version worth reading for unpaid users. And I find it hard to believe any paid subscriber would tolerate ads. 

The better strategy should have been to LOWER the subscription price to like $20/year and watch subscriptions grow 1000x.