For anyone who uses Duotrope and hasn't seen yet, they're switching many of their features over to pay-only on 1 January. According to their announcement, they've been trying to keep the site completely free, supported by voluntary donations, but the fact is they haven't made any of their monthly goals since 2007. They've been saying for some time (at least as long as I've been using the site, almost three years now) that if they couldn't fund the site through donations, they'd have to switch to charging a fee, and that's what's finally happened.
On another page, they talk about how the change will affect their statistics collection, and it sounds like they won't be taking much of a hit there.
After our subscription model was agreed upon, we went back to those numbers and determined that while a significant drop in the user base was fully expected, we should be able to retain somewhere between 75% to 80% of the submission reports we normally receive.
Equally important is the fact that we will also decrease the amount of unreliable data. On average every year, 28,000 submission reports get ignored in the statistics for a large variety of reasons. Once again, looking at the type of user submitting this information, we predict the unreliable data could decrease by as much as 90%.
It sounds like they were getting most of their good data from people who were voluntarily donating money anyway, so that shouldn't change.
I love Duotrope. I use it as a major source of my anthology listing posts, and I also use it to track my own submissions, and to find markets for my work. I've signed up for a year's subscription, which cost $50 if paid all at once; paid month-by-month, a subscription is $5/month.
I encourage anyone writing, particularly anyone submitting short fiction to magazines and anthologies and webzines, to support Duotrope. They're an awesome resource for writers, and I look forward to using their services for many years.
Angie
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