Audiobooks Switches From Unlimited Subscriptions to Pay-by-the-Book Plans

It’s easy to think that more is always better, especially when developing pricing plans for your subscribers. But today’s lesson from Audiobooks.com shows the

It’s easy to think that more is always better, especially when developing pricing plans for your subscribers. But today’s lesson from Audiobooks.com shows the exception to the rule.

Audiobooks launched a year ago, providing an unlimited number of streaming audiobooks to subscribers for $24.95/month. (We’ll analyze the wisdom of a streaming audio book service a little further down in this post.)

But this month, the site is switching to two pay-by-the-book plans:

  1. $14.95 for one audiobook a month; or
  2. $22.95 for two audiobooks a month.

The switch demonstrates how overloading your prospects with options can often work against converting them to paying subscribers. As some A/B tests have found (including this one from this week’s Case Study), simple messaging can convert more than smorgasbord offerings. In this example, offering 25,000 titles is just too overwhelming – this is why specific paywalls work so well for conversion.

But Audiobooks may have simplified too much. Booksfree, which rents out paperback books to subscribers, has a multi-tiered pricing plan to meet almost any subscriber’s needs.

Audiobooks might do well to adopt a more sophisticated pricing strategy such as this one. And while we’re recommending improvements, a streaming service is not ideal for audio or eBooks, which are often consumed during commutes and travel when wi-fi access is spotty, if not nonexistent.

Which is not to say that all long-form, data-heavy content should be downloadable (certainly, streaming video does well). Instead, think of how your subscribers consume your content and optimize its format for that experience.

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