Chastened, but unbowed in the quixotic search to make its proprietary online ambitions pay in the come-and-go-as-you-please of the Web, Time Warner has once again revamped its Pathfinder site with a free email service, new eye-grabbing graphics, and plans to charge for premium sites aimed at celebrity junkies and hard-core investors.
The history of the Time Warner site - founded in October, 1994, the early days of old media's embrace of the new medium - is littered with vain attempts to induce viewers to pay to read its magazines online, as part of a vision of a full-service Web site akin to America Online's proprietary online service business model.
In contrast, after several years of trying, The Wall Street Journal has begun to see success with its Interactive Edition over the past year, even as Time Warner shelved attempts to make viewers pay as little as US$4.95 per month for access to its wealth of content.
"Pathfinder has always been trying to replicate the proprietary online model of AOL, hoping people will never leave its site," said Peter Krasilovsky, an online industry analyst with Arlen Communications. "Free email is just the latest attempt."
Pathfinder's free messaging gambit joins the rush of me-too companies offering the feature, which may be of dubious use to the site's visitors, since Web connections come with existing email addresses. In addition to free email pioneers Hotmail, RocketMail, and Juno, search engine companies Yahoo and Excite offer email at no cost on their sites, and Lycos is said to be mulling the option. Other content sites seeking to instill a greater sense of community (read: site-loyalty) have also embraced free email, including StorkSite, which is devoted to the joys and pains of pregnancy.
"We're moving towards becoming a full-service access provider," Graham Cannon, Time New Media communications director, said of the move to giveaway email service alongside the content from its stable of high-profile magazine brands. "What we are doing increasingly is creating a community of users," he said.
To critics who snort that free-mail is a useless, value-free come-on, Cannon said that Pathfinder email will give travelers a way around the trap of having to make long-distance calls home to their local ISP. This presumes a computer user has some alternate method of gaining Web access on the road - and hasn't already been sated by the likes of Hotmail.
The media giant also is experimenting with an idea to create email addresses linked to the individual magazine names. You might want to be [email protected] when thinking about the gyrations of the stock market and then switch personas to [email protected] when in the mood for Hollywood gossip. Pathfinder is still toying with pricing for the alternate address option, which might run in the vicinity of $14.95.
"We are testing out some new ideas tied to the principle of how to best pull out our content to make it more readily accessible to readers," Cannon said of flashy new frames that greet the visitor to Pathfinder's new homepage, which places increased emphasis on Time Warner's big-name magazine titles, including Time, Money, People, Entertainment Weekly - plus a new section for The Rules.
Three premium services are due to be launched in the coming weeks and months. Money.com Plus will offer mutual fund investors access to its impartial ratings of fund performance. The service will be promoted through online brokerages.
A comprehensive Entertainment Weekly site, with a database of back issues every single film and music review published in the magazine over the past two years, is due to be launched in early December. Subscribers to the hard-copy edition will be able to enter the site for free by simply typing the subscription account number from the magazine cover. Non-subscribers will pay $25 for access to the Web service - and receive a subscription in the mail.
"The changes we are making are evolutionary," Cannon said in explaining why the latest changes failed to merit the fanfare of a formal re-launch of the granddaddy of big-media Web sites.
"We think people will pay for information that is unique," the Time Inc. New Media spokesman said of Pathfinder’s latest mantra. "That's the formula that will lead to success."
