Summary: Micropayments are a good idea in principle, but they haven’t caught on. Why? This article identifies three top reasons: (1) The hassle of lots of little charges. (2) The hassle of signing up. (3) The lack of a clear industry leader. Amazon could solve this. I don’t like platforms, but this seems like the … Read more
Summary: Consider three models for monetizing a website: ad-supported, registration walls, and paywalls. Ad-supported models face ad blocker issues, while registration walls can be bypassed with junk emails. The author suggests improving registration walls by ensuring collected emails are legitimate and engaged, using integration with email service providers and customer data platforms, and offers assistance … Read more
Summary: Publishers don’t have a paywall problem, they have a value problem. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that AI will result in an explosion of content on the internet. But Bo Sacks recently distributed an article by Matt D’Cruz that makes the opposite claim. “There’s going to be a lot less free content around.” … Read more
ELLE and Poool have optimized ELLE’s paywall to increase conversions. It’s an interesting story that publishers should know. ELLE’s paywall strategy came out of three strategic challenges. Diversify revenue Enlarge the audience Make them younger I’m very interested in how they made people younger. ELLE worked with Poool, which is a French startup that focuses … Read more
When advertising revenue gets disappointing, publishers often wonder if they can charge for access to their content, and the most common way they do that is with a paywall. Paywalls raise a lot of interesting questions, and as a consequence, there are a lot of different strategies. One strategy is to show a little of … Read more
Summary: An ad-supported internet allows free access to content, but it makes that content worse. “Digital transformation” includes several components: business models, content creation, revenue innovation, analytics, new technologies, and a few other things. It’s all fun stuff. But one aspect of digital transformation seems to have been neglected. We have not considerably improved the … Read more
A couple newspapers have. Noozhawk and Cap Times prove that for-profits can have strong membership programs. (Thanks to Bo Sacks for the link.) Most of Noozhawk’s revenue comes from advertising and sponsorships, but reader contributions have been a growing source of income since soon after the site’s launch. In 2008, after a handful of readers … Read more
Publishers erred when they relied on ad revenue and put their content on the internet for free. That revenue model isn’t stable, and (worse) it created an assumption that digital content should be free. Now that ads aren’t providing enough revenue, publishers have to push back against consumer expectations of being entitled to free content. … Read more
Democracy dies behind paywalls by Cosmin Ene encourages people to read outside their own news bubble. Which is a good thing. In his case, he couldn’t find certain stories in The New York Times (“all the news that fits our agenda”), so he looked to other sites and hit their paywalls. First, good on you, … Read more