In the summer of 2012, Liz Cadman knew she had a problem. She was addicted to subscription boxes, and she wanted more. She couldn't find the information she wanted online, however, to make smart buying decisions, so she started a blog to talk about subscription boxes. The blog grew into My Subscription Addiction, a full-fledged website dedicated to the discussion of subscription boxes. In four years, the site has exploded in popularity, and she has added additional features including swaps, a discussion forum and more. Learn how My Subscription Addiction started and grew into what it is today.

How can you combine a wholesale book business and a passion for children's literacy to get more books in the hands of kids? With the subscription box model. That's how founder Eric Shmuely made his dream become a reality -- by creating a subscription book service for children.

Last year the publishing industry was abuzz with the news that the Winnipeg Free Press was experimenting with a Read Now Pay Later micropayment platform, where readers pay $0.27 (Canadian) per article they have read. Dana Neuts explores how well the first seven months of the strategy has gone.

At just three years old, Readly has experienced rapid growth and is defining success in the digital magazine publishing space. Now offering nearly 1,100 magazines and more than 17,000 issues in 49 countries, learn more about Readly in this exclusive INSIDER Case Study.

One simply needs to look around to see retail, publishing, transportation and other sectors thrown into a transformative change as digital and data penetrate every element of a business. Like content, data is currency and technology is now the enabler and source of both. Data is in many ways the new currency. Content is still king, but the definition of content is evolving to include data. Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital and Subscription Insider Guide to Leveraging Technology, explores benefits of data and its transformative impact for media and information-based businesses.

In this week’s Five on Friday, Ad Week reveals that Facebook Live will soon have a stand-alone app, Media Post and PostUp share how email newsletters can help publishers woo prospects, The New York Times monetizes NYT Cooking, an IAB study predicts podcast ad revenue will top $220 million in 2017, an 85 percent increase over 2016, and HuffPost offers four types of e-commerce business models for entrepreneurs to consider.

With the Fourth of July on Tuesday, this was a short week, but we’re still bringing you a full week’s worth of subscription content. In this week’s Five on Friday, Multichannel Merchant explains four steps to manage voluntary customer churn, AllBusiness recommends business podcasts every entrepreneur should listen to, Facebook is working with publishers to create an in-app subscription option by year end, Venmo is testing a physical debit card for payments, and Inc. offers its top tips for successful meetings (hint: 10 AM is the golden hour for meetings).

In this week’s Five on Friday, we share Bill Gates' 2017 summer reading list, Search Engine Watch offers advice on optimizing for voice assistants, the Wall Street Journal and Google are at odds with each other over paywalls and search engine results, we learn more about Fullscreen's social media strategy from Tubefilter, and employers post top subscription jobs to LinkedIn including jobs from Amazon, Apple, Red Hat, the Philadelphia Media Network and New Relic, Inc.

Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part seven of Organic Search for Publishers, he explains where and how to use the keywords and phrases that are important for your business in your content and meta information. Kevin also goes deeper and explains what structured metadata is as well as why and how you should be leveraging that in your publication to more effectively communicate and provide context about your content for search engines.

Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part six of Organic Search for Publishers, he explains and demonstrates the tools every editorial, marketing, and audience development team should use when determining what keywords will be used as part of their organic search strategy.

Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part five of Organic Search for Publishers, he discusses the big mistake publishers make in their metadata, walks through how to choose the right long- and short-tail keywords for your business, shows examples of how a publisher should use keyword discovery tools and his favorite keyword discovery tools that publishers should use.

In part four of Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak begins his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. He discusses the one big thing content publishers miss when optimizing their content for organic search: Contextualization. It’s not enough to publish an article, provide some metadata and links. TODAY content publishers need to provide contextualization for that article. That is, what will a reader achieve or get by acting with the content?

Last Tuesday Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) held its third annual Prime Day with 30 hours of special deals exclusively for Amazon Prime members. Amazon reports that it was the biggest day ever in Amazon history, surpassing previous records set by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Tens of millions of Prime members made purchases on Prime Day, more than a 50 percent increase over the 2016 event. In addition, Prime Day 2017 grew 60 percent over last year’s event, and more members joined on July 11 than on any single day previously.

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) released its second quarter financials yesterday, reporting total revenue of $2.79 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 32.3 percent. This includes Netflix DVD sales. Total streaming revenue was $2.67 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 35.8 percent. From a membership perspective, Netflix membership grew from 99 million members to 104 million with international members now accounting for 50.1 percent of total membership.

Last week Digiday reported that Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is testing paid subscriptions for publishers through Instant Articles. While details have not been released publicly by Facebook, Digiday said that the paid subscriptions will likely support publishers who use metered paywalls or freemium models. The goal would be to support publishers like The New York Times, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal who would offer some content for free, and put the rest behind a paywall, requiring a subscription to access. According to Digiday, publishers will be able to control the pricing, and they will get access to subscriber data available in Facebook.

In this week’s subscription news, news outlets are trying to negotiate with Google and Facebook over ads, Jump launches a subscription service for indie games, and the number of Amazon's U.S. Prime members could surpass total pay TV households next year. Also this week, PostUp is launching a dynamic paywall solution for publishers, Stripe is adding support for digital payment services in China, and the White House threatens that critical coverage by CNN might cost them the Time Warner merger.

Before you can generate new subscribers you've got to implement systems to stop your members from quitting. This on-demand seminar is focused on delivering actionable tactics to reduce subscriber churn and increase member lifetime value. Robert Skrob, our Insider Guide to Membership Retention, will walk you through 14 tactics to improve your subscriber and member retention. With all that Robert will discuss, there will be at least one strategy revealed that could be a quick, easy win for you, which could improve your renewal rate within two weeks or less.

Learn how to maximize SaaS and software retention rates. During this on-demand seminar, Adriana Iordan—expert in global eCommerce and payments and Chief Product Officer at Avangate—will teach attendees why SaaS subscription businesses face unique customer retention challenges and how to handle them. This session includes benchmark data, best practice tactics, and three separate case studies to help you learn how to overcome the unique challenges SaaS recurring businesses face.

Revenue signals go way beyond renewal and churn KPIs. In order to maximize potential revenue, you need to get under the hood of your subscription product or service to understand revenue-related data.  These “revenue signals” are in your billing, product, and customer data and they show where your subscription business is at risk for lower revenue or where you losing potential revenue opportunities.  In this on-demand seminar, you will learn what to look at in your own data and analytics, what learnings you can glean from each revenue signal, what actions your subscription business should think about taking, and most importantly, the revenue impact of acting or not acting on each signal.

Have you seen a rise in declines or a rise in chargebacks or fraud? Are your renewals taking longer to successfully process? Do you understand why? Paul Larsen, Subscription Insider Guide to Payment Processing, leading expert in card-not-present recurring payments, and Managing Partner of the Paul Larsen Group, in this on-demand version of our January 2017 online seminar, will outline key payment processing trends every subscription company should be aware of, and be on top of, for 2017.

Console makers are seeking long-term control of the seller/customer relationship, and they see subscription services as a way to lock in brand loyalty. Mobile game publishers are realizing that gamer patience for in-app ads and “freemium upgrades” is wearing thin. So there are strong incentives for both ends of the video game market to look at the Netflix model with envy. However, the analogy between games and filmed entertainment is not perfect, so game publishers face hurdles particular to their industry.

The market for devices that connect to the Internet is huge and growing. Someday soon, car tires will text when they are wearing out, refrigerators will announce the last yogurt, and pacemakers will call an ambulance. And consumers will sign up to pay monthly for all this to work.

Net neutrality has been a hot topic of conversation for at least the last three years when President Obama urged regulators to protect net neutrality. Things quieted down in 2015 after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did just that, but there were opponents to the regulations. Now, under President Trump’s administration, the topic is back in the spotlight, and it is an important one that impacts consumers and businesses alike, particularly subscription businesses who do most of their business via the Internet.

When you look at user demand for news on mobile devices, you find hunger and satisfaction. Well, you find some hunger and a lot of satisfaction. In a landscape of free online news, the news app business model that succeeds will be the one that sells something special. The good news is that there is a (small) market for online subscription news, and publishers can make a living serving that market based on features such as excellence, highly valued content, and community.

Are you receiving more alerts notifying you of expiring cards? We have and frankly, it’s no surprise with the increase in the volume of payment cards that been reissued. Without that updated payment information, subscribers and members will not get renewed successfully. In this sample, we show you real examples of payment card update notices from three separate companies, with three very different approaches to getting their subscribers to update their payment information. Plus, a bonus, Subscription Insider’s own notice!

ABC Mouse Early Learning Academy is an award-winning, subscription-based site/mobile app that uses email promotions to acquire subscribers. In this Sample, we walk through their promotional email campaign and offers. Are they sending too many promotions? Are they effective? You be the judge.

You may not be a sports fan, per se, but everyone plays games, whether it's chess, checkers or Thursday nights down at the local bridge club. We took a look at three sports-themed businesses offering subscriptions to see how well (or not) they are converting visitors into subscribers.

Many subscription sites are using some lighthearted copy that borders on passive-aggression. Is this an effective tactic? What do you think?

Understanding the difference between your most valuable customers and those that will not renew, is like separating out the wheat seeds from all the wheat chaff at harvest time. It will take the right tools and tactics to maximize renewal rates. Subscription Insider's Retention Workbook (Excel) will help you track the retention performance by key drivers in your business, turning your data into both a summary and a detailed retention report that you can use to manage your retention.

Does your subscription management or billing platform connect you to Account Updater — a service offered by Visa, MasterCard, Discover and more recently, American Express — that provides updated payment card information to help merchants manage involuntary churn issues? With this directory of 25 subscription management and billing platforms that support account updater services, you'll be able to create a short list of vendor contenders for your subscription business based on applicable industry experience, existing customers, payment gateways and processors supported, as well as pricing.

This extremely detailed subscription & membership financial model was developed as a tool for would-be subscription businesses who either are planning a new launch or an acquisition. It may also be useful for current publishers who are doing a minimum of marketing and who want to see how their cash flow might change if they ramp up marketing and/or ancillary product offers. Its purpose is educational and inspirational rather than strictly predictive . Everyone's business is slightly different, so it was impossible for us to create an easy-to-use model that would work with enormous accuracy for all. However, if you've not modelled this type of business extensively before, you'll learn a great deal from it!

Effective monitoring of subscriber retention is the result of understanding retention opportunities and trends, tracking attrition patterns, developing a tracking methodology, and applying those metrics in order to manage your retention business more effectively. Use this excel workbook to track and manage your subscribers and members.