Corrigendum: We incorrectly reported in this interview that MoneyLife Smart Savers is a financial advisory service. Our apologies for the error. The interview below has been updated with corrections. MoneyLife is a financial magazine that provides information on personal finance. Recently, the digital edition of the magazine went behind a pay wall following the launch of a financial information service called MoneyLife Smart Savers. In our interaction with Debashis Basu, Editor & Co-Founder of MoneyLife, he speaks about the reasons behind their decision to go behind a pay wall, archival content, monetisation on the web, Smart Savers, among other things. On Going Behind a Pay Wall Medianama: What all has been put behind a pay wall? What led to you taking this decision? Basu: Everything that is in the magazine is totally behind the paywall. Anything that was digital including daily stories are still available on the website. We prefer to keep our digital (only) content free for more people to know about us and branding. Frankly, I wanted to do this a long time ago. I don’t believe in the current architecture of Twitter, Facebook, that are free. Only big companies which are handful can take this bet of providing free content to build a customer base and user experience. Smaller companies cannot give their service for free. It is more advisable and strategic to charge especially when you are a single publication dependent on physical distribution and limited reach. With the internet, the reach is endless. I have subscribers…
