In a world where consumers are accustomed to getting many digital goods for free—from apps to podcasts to instant facts online—convincing them to fork over funds for content remains a tough sell. And hanging on to those hard won customers is a challenge unto itself....
Advertising and subscriptions are two of the main focal points when it comes to driving revenue as a publisher. If you, like many publishers, are looking to driving subscriptions as a way to bolster revenue and not be so reliant on ad revenue, you may...
Bibblio and Sovrn brought the Future of Media and Publishing meetup back to New York City last month. They invited a group of future-oriented publishers to discuss how the industry is changing and what they’re doing to adapt and thrive. Below are the key takeaways...
It’s something all publishers are grappling with: how to best optimize your paywall strategy? After all, 47% of new subscribers report that running out of free articles prompted them to subscribe. This week we have lessons from three innovative publishers*: The Times & The Sunday Times, Mittmedia, and Le Monde....
(Part One, ideas 1-12: Paywalls and Subscriptions) Publishers, both large and small, are constantly innovating in their efforts to ensure financial viability. Whether you’re a non-profit weekly newspaper in a small town, or a large-for profit Fortune 500 company, you cannot rest on your revenue...
For news publishers around the world, consumer revenue continues to be a pressing issue. With ad revenue falling year after year and usage of ad blockers on the rise, more and more publishers are employing a host of reader revenue strategies— including membership, subscriptions, paywalls...
Can you give us some background about your company? Transact.io is operated by xsact, inc., which was founded in 2016 in Santa Barbara, CA USA, by Ken Goldsholl and Karl Hiramoto. Transact was launched in January 2017. It is privately held by the founders and...
The Times of London and Sunday Times' Head of Digital, Alan Hunter, is the special guest for this latest Media Voices episode. The Times is infamous for pioneering the hard paywall, a strategy which when introduced in 2010 was dismissed as commercial insanity. Indeed, in 2010,...
Adopting a membership orientation can be a simple and powerful way for media companies to reinvent their business models. In fact, membership can make them practically disruption proof. Over the past decade or more, publishers have had to deal with two related transformations that are...
The New Statesman is an iconic British magazine focusing on an intricate blend of politics and culture, albeit with a liberal, sceptical stance. Founded over 100 years ago, the title is a print-digital hybrid and whilst its circulation peaked in the mid-Sixties, it has witnessed...
Ever since the digital shift, publishers are actively looking for alternate sources of revenue, with membership and subscription fees becoming an increasingly more attractive source of revenue for publishers. The Daily Beast, an American news, politics and culture publication, is launching a paid membership service for the...
In an effort to cast light on the success media are enjoying in the digital subscription arena, FIPP has created the first Global Digital Subscription Snapshot. Covering nearly 10 million digital subscriptions by title, the report finds that paid content success requires investment, intelligent application of...
GDPR is finally here (enforced from Friday 25th May 2018). For publishers the challenge isn't over. In fact, it's barely begun. In order to cut through the noise and provide clarity to publishers, WNIP has compiled what we believe to be the definitive GDPR Publishers'...
The Times of London was the first general interest newspaper in Britain to go behind a paywall, making the move to a paid content model in 2010. The model, which many industry commentators had criticised at the time, delivered a profit – the newspaper's books...
If reports originating from Bloomberg are true, Apple is making a renewed foray into the world of publishing with the launch of a news and magazine subscription service. The reports aren’t entirely surprising, coming just over a month since Apple bought Next Issue Media the...
Why are so many news publishers pivoting back to subs & paywalls? After all, they didn’t work for most of them before. We all know why. It’s because so many legacy media executives are like migratory birds. They tend to fly in one direction, following...
The New Yorker belongs to a rare club of publications whose revenue from readers exceeds that of advertisers. Total paid circulation for the highbrow weekly rose 12.3 percent last year to 1.2 million, even as the subscription price grew 20 percent to $120 for the...
Publishers are pinning their hopes on paywalls as the primary means of supporting the journalism they produce. Last week the UK’s current affairs title The New Statesman was the latest publisher to announce its own metered paywall model, a move that prompted the editor of...
Metered paywalls are the most popular income idea to arise since the newspaper industry was flooded with low-budget competitors. It’s also a fundamentally flawed business model that goes against the best interests of journalists and their readers, and it’s doomed to fail. Why? The paywall is...
Developing video strategies for their own platforms is more important than ever for publishers in the wake of Facebook’s latest news-feed algorithm purge. Welt is testing new video features and products designed to keep people on site. In the past few weeks, the publisher made the link...
