The Economist.com is free

New subscribers to the Economist can get 12 issues of the magazine for £12, which is pretty darn good. However, for the real scroungers amongst us, even this is too much. It is good news then, that the content on the Economist.com is now free (only archive material and some other tit bits are restricted to paying customers). This happened kind of covertly, so thank to Felix Salmon for pointing it out. Ben Edwards, publisher of the Economist.com, comments:

For most of Economist.com's history, the site was a mix of paid and free content. In September 2006 we moved to making all content free on our homepage, with a mix of paid content in other parts of the site and all content moving behind the pay barrier within a month of publication. As of June 1, 2007, all content is now published as free on Economist.com initially and remains free for 365 days - a move which, as one of your readers points out, we have signalled clearly in our marketing.

After that, content transfers to the archive, which sits behind a pay barrier and requires an activated web or print subscription to view.

We introduced this change for two reasons:

Firstly, we rightly calculated it would raise traffic to Economist.com. Page views and uniques are growing at 50% year on year and growth continues to accelerate rapidly. This creates new advertising inventory, improves the quality and number of links to Economist.com, expands print sampling to potential new customers and increases the number of print subscriptions we sell through Economist.com. As you point out, customers who want a print-like experience continue to buy print - and in growing numbers. Our web publishing complements the print experience rather than competes with it: our customers use web and print very differently.

Secondly, the change replaces a pricing system that had become complex with a simple, clean rule that our customers find easy to understand. With this change, our premium product has become our archive. Other premium elements are still being introduced to the website - for example, our recent launch of the full audio edition of The Economist.