Wired starts $4,000/year membership program

Lucia Moses of Digiday writes about Wired magazine’s new $4,000-a-year membership program.

Moses writes, “Condé Nast’s Wired Media Group, consisting of Wired, Ars Technica and Backchannel, is going a step further. It’s launching a membership program for executives who want to stay on the cutting edge of technology. For $4,000 a year, members of the Emerging Technology Council (and up to four of their colleagues) get access to in-person and virtual events where they can hear presentations by tech startups; join a 24/7 online community; receive a newsletter (likely monthly) and other perks. The first event, set to take place in January, will be a virtual discussion on intelligence and machine learning with Ars Technica founder and editor in chief Ken Fisher.

“While other publishers’ efforts to generate money from readers tend to be aimed at the masses, the Wired Media Group program will have more limited appeal by design. The content is specifically geared to people in the C-suite, and there are only so many people who will be able to justify the program’s high price tag.

“The Wired Media Group’s partner on the program is Traction Technology Partners, a startup founded by Erick Schonfeld and Neal Silverman, who produced the tech conferences Demo and TechCrunch Disrupt. Schonfeld, also the former editor of TechCrunch, said he got the idea for the format when he saw that conferences didn’t do a great job at keeping people connected in between events.”

Read more here.