Thoughts on Prime Membership
After a Specified Time, I Think Green Building Advisor Prime Articles Should Be Open to the General Viewing Public
While I certainly understand that the authors of the Prime articles spend a lot of time researching and writing their articles and they deserve to be compensated for their efforts, not everyone wants (or can afford) a monthly paid membership.
Therefore, why not (after 6 months or so) release the Prime article to the general viewing public? I mean, within 6 months of its initial publication all the paid members will have already read it so what could it hurt to release it? A lot more people will benefit from the content and maybe some additional worthwhile comments can be added.
If you agree, please add your name below.
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Replies
rockies63,
I don't know the details of how Taunton finances the continued existence of GBA and its content, so I'm not comfortable getting a crowd together to tell them how to do it.
I'd rather they figure out how to make an affordable subscription to read only the articles...let the high cost subscription remain for those who need to see all the construction details library.
Or make the articles free. All these articles behind a paywall seems it just drives traffic to other sites, with two effects
1. opportunities for education and drawing more people into the GBA way of doing this are lost.
2. those already converted are turned off because they can't read the articles and can't afford the high subscription...
Not to mention the lack of discount for Finehomebuilding subscribers, who get something like half of the GBA articles through FHB. I’d pony up some more to do a combo subscription (and for just the GBA articles).
I recall about 7 or 8 years ago, without a subscription, for the longest time, If a person googled a GBA current article that was exclusive, access was granted thru the link. It always worked.
I often refer to older Prime articles. In fact I link to older articles in responses here almost daily.
Here's what I wrote a few months ago:
"Another way to look at it: GBA membership is $0.41/day or $2.88/wk. If you're not getting that much value from the site, you probably aren't spending much time here."
As a "prosumer" homeowner, and not a building industry member, I find it hard to justify the $0.41/day of an ongoing Prime membership. My solution is to register for a month here and there whenever I have a project that will benefit from specific articles. However, I'd definitely jump on a reduced membership that gave access to articles without the details library.
I'm happy to pay for things, but I really would like to see a combined membership option rather than things I need to renew separately.
Even my FHB print subscription and online access are separate because there is no [readily apparent to me] button to say "merge memberships" or similar.