Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry
LJN's Business Objectives Group (BOG) is for any Pro serious about building their business.
For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.
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They (HW) are chasing down old subscriber hard.
I was called twice during the early part of March informing my sub ran out (yes, it did over a year ago).
What's interesting is that the first call was in 'my name' and I haven't that subscription in over 4 years, the second and subsequent call was to the business (which I what we subscribed under until I cancelled).
They must be trawling their old lists quite hard - that's very 'telling'...
Phil might remember an old post on this as when I cancelled the HW we donated the renewal costs to LJN - farr better value - IMHO :0)
It must be very hard for them to change their business model and generate revenue, they called me last week to try and interest me in buying advertising.
The internet is dynamic and changing constantly, by the time they have arrived at a viable business model, I suspect it will be out of date.
My guess, for what it is worth, is that as the technology improves and broadband speeds increase a video laden website will be the way forward with links to print pages available to give depth and detail, in a way that a lecture or presentation does.
I think a free to view website using paid advertising as a revenue generator would be a better option. Advertisers are less likely to put their products in front of a small audience no matter how well targeted if they can place their products in front of a larger equally well targeted audience that results from a free to view site.
Around once a week I take a look at the HW website. Stopped buying copies of it years ago as it got very boring.
If I had to pay to view HW, I would not bother, after all LJN has much better industry relevant news and information.
I'd like to know how making HW a subscription site (and it may actually be a mixture of free/paid) will make it an "even more useful and effective professional tool"?
How will the content behind the firewall get found and if it cannot be found by search engines - unless First Click Free is implemented (meaning that the site has to allow full access to the page, or pages, access through a search result) then advertisers (as Phil alludes to) will be getting a raw deal.
It's also going to be interesting to see how HW attract paying users to take up the slack from falling print subscriptions in great enough volumes where digital revenues contribute adequate income. One only has to look at the rate of decline in Yell's traditional print revenues compared with the rise in their digital revenues to see that digital, whilst growing well and profitable, is nowhere near to a point of sustaining the business.
How could HW compete with the LJ open model and is this comment from T&S "LJN has much better industry relevant news and information" shared by many in the industry?
I wonder how we will consume our information in future.
Looking at communication, it is as far as news is concerned a circular proccess, word of mouth spread by town cryers and proclamation. Then with the advent of printing came newspapers, posters and pamphlets, pictures were added later with the use of engravings and woodcuts. Radio brought news disemination back to word of mouth, although telegraphy and teleprinters had kept the written word in the loop. The photo magazines such as Picture Post brought indepth reporting of the news with illustrations the news reel films and then television brought back pictorial reporting to overshadow radio reporting. The internet started off as a purely text oriented medium, graduated into a pictorial medium and looks to me now with the popularity of services such as Youtube about to shift again in another direction.
We got a free copy of HW in the mail this week - no doubt an attempt to persuade us that the new format is worth subscribing to. It's not really clear how the new system will work, and how much content will be pay-walled - but the wall appears to be a print subscription, ie, subscribe to the mag, and get a key to access the website.
But it's still way too expensive. Its trying to appeal to the whole industry (of course) but inevitiably that means that a good chunk of the magazine is irrelevent to most users because it's not addressing their industry segment. And £98 a year is too much for the few pages that you'll likely find useful.
And that's why free access to the web is so valuable because readers can read a blog here or an article there and effectively make up a subscription from a multitude of sources.