Categories: OLD Media Moves

ConsumerReports.org reaches 3 million subscribers

Dylan Stableford of Folio magazine writes Monday that ConsumerReports.org has now reached 3 million paid subscrivers.

Stableford wrote, “The print version of Consumer Reports has increased its circulation by 400,000 to 4.3 million over the last three years, including a healthy bump in newsstand sales (160,000 newsstand copies per month, up from 107,000 copies in 2004). But it’s the Web site that is enjoying the most success.

“ConsumerReports.org launched as a paid site in 1997 with 300,000 subscribers. This, the company is quick to point out, at a time when other large publishers, including the Wall Street Journal, are considering dropping their pay-for-play model on the Web or, in the case of the New York Times, abandoning it altogether.

“‘We have managed to fight the tide and expand paid readership in a way previously unknown on the Web,’ said John Sateja, senior vice president for information products.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.