Subscription Sales
Initially, there was a great deal of fear, especially on the part of the circulation staff, that offering free newspaper content on the Internet would have a negative impact on subscription sales. After collecting extensive data comparing the readership of the website to the readership of the paper's print version, these fears subsided. The web readership was a substantively different audience-slightly younger, more affluent, and much more geographically dispersed. In addition, surveys and focus groups failed to support the fear that online registr were cannibalizing subscription sales. As a result, the websites were viewed as complementary assets rather than as competitors.