Paywalls are e-commerce for content. Yet, most paywall implementations today have not adapted the lessons learnt by their e-commerce brethren. Major innovations are needed in the media world to adapt the rapidly changing landscape of the digital economy.
1. Repeat customers are most interesting. Zappos reports that 75% of their customers are repeat customers, who spend 2.5x what new customers do and their average bill size is 30% higher. Compare that to WSJ that only has 10%-25% repeat customers. According to traffic stats about the Wall Street Journal, roughly 400,000 of their visitors visit their site at least once a day (see here). That is very similar to their oft-reported subscriber numbers. Whereas, their monthly unique visitors are in the 3-5 million range. That is, WSJ, the holy grail of selling of online content, only has 10% repeat customers.
2. Word of Mouth: Publishers have been used to the dictum, “Content is King”. That was so true a few short years ago. Welcome to the new dictum, “Customer is King”, that seems so obvious in the e-commerce world. And if that is true, publishers absolutely have to have the customers talking about the stories, whether they are pretty conversations or not. Customers talking about the political biases of media icons is a really good thing from a commerce perspective. Social media integration of the content is so vital to enable that. And social media is not really about “Facebook Connect”, or about “Tweet this Story”. It is truly about enabling conversations around publisher stories, between readers within their social networks.
3. Establishing a sales funnel: Selling anything requires the establishment of a sales funnel. Sales funnels are a mechanism where customers are corraled into an offer that is very appealing and gradually moved to the part of the funnel where they are willing to pay for what you are selling. For example, take a look at the GoGo Inflight internet offering below, where each circle is a progressively higher level of upsell.
a. Bring customers to your site by providing great content and a rich set of tools to enable conversations.
b. Once the customer is interested in your premium content (look at how Business Journals has created a premium content portlet here), make a really easy offer of purchasing that single article.
c. Provide the reader a choice of applying the purchase of the single article to a day pass.
d. Provide the reader a choice of applying the purchase of the day pass to a longer term annual subscription.
However, the current paywalls have not implemented this lesson. They take the reader from a totally free offering to a major commitment of dollars spanning a loooong commitment of subscription. It doesn’t work !
Of many ways to build a funnel, publishers may consider is a 4 part funnel as follows:
I’d love to hear your thoughts about these lessons or others that may help online publishers.
