Do you want more users or the right users?

I'm a big fan of the Wall Street Journal. I became addicted to the paper while studying at the University of Northern Colorado. The college of business received a large supply of WSJ's every day and students were encouraged to grab one. I did. Every day. Towards the end of my time at UNC the paper became a talking point at the beginning of most of my classes. Professors were encouraged to use the WSJ as sort of a real-time textbook of sorts to augment what we were learning.

After graduating I was left with a conundrum: how to feed my addiction to the WSJ's reporting without breaking the bank. Subscriptions to the WSJ are prohibitively expensive for someone graduating into a recession with uncertain at best job prospects. So I did what most of my generation does: I went online. That was until I realized that many of the articles I wanted to read required a paid subscription.

Over the next several months I learned to get my info elsewhere--from sources that were free. Then I got an iPhone and installed the WSJ app. I was in love again. That was until earlier this week.

Upon opening the app for my several-times-a-day check of what's happening in the world, I was greeted by a message telling me that the WSJ app was going to a paid subscription model as well.

All of this got me thinking about the relationship between users and a service. Is it better to have more users or the right users? (this statement assumes that those users willing to pay for your service are the right users and that you can't have it both ways, i.e. having lots of users means having many that aren't your ideal user)

Services like the WSJ that have chosen to make users pay for content have seemingly determined that it is better to have the right users...or have they? Perhaps they've simply decided to generate more revenue regardless of whether the people they want reading their content are or not.

On the flip side there are a lot of examples of sources of content that are simply happy to have lots of users. In fact, many major blogs derive part of their value from having such a large and engaged following that is adding comments and interacting with their content.

I'm not sure that either way is right or wrong but I do feel that companies need to be thinking about questions like this when they decide to go to a subscription based model or when they likewise go to a free model. The old method of merely thinking about profits and losses is less applicable today. Today it's about users, engagement and content creation.

So what do you want? More users or the right ones?