ET Prime: A Product Review

So recently, I became a paid customer of ET Prime, The Premium Version of the beloved Economic Times.

Now, I am already a paid member for The Ken and Caravan, and had been resisting the interesting articles which ET Prime journos had been churning out in the recent months.

I finally gave in when I saw one of their stories on Ludo King.

While I was browsing through the articles, I was pleasantly surprised by the product and its features and how each feature was thought through before implementation.

Now, I am not going to be talking about the content as that is not my forte. Though, I would like to talk about the product and why I am impressed by the product management team in ET Prime.

It does not have an app of its own

( and thank god for that)

Given that there are so many news apps already, it did not make sense for ET Prime to have an app of its own. It not only saved the potential performance marketing spends for app downloads, it also helped them focus on their core offering — content.

Also, as it leveraged the complete user base of ET to spread its message, (each account gets 5 articles free) you could sample the content and then take a call on whether you wanted to pay for these content pieces.

However, this is a tried and tested model by many before them and there is no novelty in this. What makes it more interesting is the quarterly membership scheme.

Locking of content inventory

Their packaging is something pretty usual — A quarterly Package and an Annual package. The quarterly membership gives you access to 150 articles, while the annual one gives you unlimited access.

What is unusual is that you can only access inventory for a quarter if you have a quarterly membership. This means current month, the coming 2 months and the past 2 months.

This is pretty interesting, and has both pros and cons.

The pro being that the user can indulge in only recent articles and not waste his article count browsing through older articles which might have lost relevance.

The con is that you probably might not use your quarterly membership for research purposes. The articles are pretty detailed, and the data pointers might be useful for anyone doing an in-depth analysis of any sector. However, you would have to go for the annual membership for that.

Gift an Article

Much like sharing a link of a google drive file, you can share the link of an article with 5 of your friends. These people can get access to the complete article without paying.

Its a very good thought as it works as a sampler & marketing tool along with the fact that if you find the article relevant for someone in your network but they do not have a Prime membership, they can still read through it.

I myself have faced this problem multiple times when there are articles I want to share with someone but they do not have access to the platform. This leads to sharing of usernames and passwords, which leads to users getting access to articles without you knowing who they are. This also becomes your lead acquisition funnel for re-targeting and conversion

Also the fact that you are limiting the number of articles means you are not letting people mail your entire inventory to their friends, creating a controlled enviornment.

Cannot Copy/Print the complete article

If you try and save as PDF or try and print the complete article, you can’t. It redirects you to a preview version of the article.

I even tried to save the article offline as HTML and then try to print it offline. It still redirected to printing a preview version.

Neither can you copy the text and paste it as right click it also disabled and keyboard shortcuts also do not work.

No Pirating!

Cross Selling

You get a ET Lite ( Less ads) version of Economic Times along with ET Prime. A good way to cross sell, and get your other products sampled.

Finally, About the content:

Content of ET Prime is good, and given the relevance of topics it covers, it is worth buying a subscription for. If you are someone who loves to go in-depth into business trends and analysis, it definitely is worth having a subscription for.

In Conclusion:

A lot of thought has gone into the making of this platform, and it definitely is worth putting your money in — both from the Company and the audience’s end.

As for the product team, would love to know about the team behind it and give them a thumbs up! :-)