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Minal Bopaiah

3 Tips for Mobile Optimized Emails for Subscription Sites

News, Subscriber Acquisition, Subscription Apps /

I learned some new tips today regarding mobile email via Marketo’s Webinar on “The Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing — Part 1: How to Grow Your List, Break the Rules, and Win.” While the speakers generally assumed that the audience was using email to market products, these tips for mobile email optimization apply to subscription content just as much as eCommerce sites. #1. Design for small screens. That means that not only should the buttons…

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How One Magazine Is Skewing iPad Subscription Numbers

FInance, News, Subscription Apps /

This year, magazines reported 10.2 million subscribers to their digital editions, according to the Alliance for Audited Media — but apparently one magazine accounts for 3 million of those subscribers. Game Informer — a print and digital magazine that previews and reviews videogames — is the top circulating digital edition magazine for the iPad (we assume this excludes iPad apps). But the magazine isn’t actually sold independently — it’s part of a loyalty program by parent…

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Netflix Has 1.5M UK Subscribers, But Binge-Viewing May Hurt Bottom-Line Profits

Entertainment and Streaming, FInance, News, Subscriber Retention /

Netflix has 1.5 million paying subscribers in the UK, according to Q2 reports released by the company, and may be edging closer to 2 million soon. The company has not been very public with its UK numbers, but overall has 38 million customers worldwide, with only a little more than 7 million in its 40 international markets. Yet, the release of new original series like “House of Cards” and “Orange in the New Black” seemed to…

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Case Study Lessons: How to Get New Visitors When You Have a Hard Paywall

News, Subscriber Acquisition /

While hard paywalls are the best way to protect your content and maximize revenues from paid content, they are particularly difficult for discovery and sampling, which almost every potential subscriber wants. World Politics Review (WPR) — a subscription site that puts every original article behind its paywall — was able to get around this conundrum by “white listing” certain domains. In this week’s Members-Only Case Study, Publisher Hampton Stephens told Subscription Site Insider how World Politics…

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Conde Nast Partners with Amazon to Sell Digital + Print Subscriptions

News, Subscriber Acquisition, Subscription Apps, Technology /

Amazon and Conde Nast announced a major partnership on Tuesday that lets consumers subscribe to bundled print + digital subscriptions to a number of Conde Nast titles, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired, Bon Appétit, and Golf Digest. While the partnership only supports certain titles (The New Yorker, with its great iPad app, is conspicuously missing), a bundled subscription through Amazon lets consumers immediately access the digital edition through any one of many devices, including the Kindle,…

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Metrics for Measuring Social Impact for Paid Content Sites

Business Strategy, News, Technology /

Gary Knell announced this week that he’s leaving his position as CEO of NPR to become the new CEO of National Geographic. I had the privilege of working under Knell’s tenure at his previous employer, Sesame Workshop, where I once heard him talk about the importance of the “double bottom line” in media, an idea that still fascinates me. So in honor of his news-making departure, I wanted to share some research I discovered on…

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Why You Need to Distinguish Between Mobile and Tablet Audiences to Sell Content

News /

At the many conferences I’ve attended, publishers and marketers sometimes use the word “mobile” to imply tablet and mobile platforms for content. However, recent research from the mobile ad firm Flurry makes it clear why we all must delineate a clear line between these two types of devices, especially when it comes to audience demographics and content consumption. Flurry analyzed usage data from more than 44,000 iPad and iPhone devices in May and found a stark…

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Paywall Round-Up: NYT Falters, WSJ Pounces, SF Chronicle Tumbles, Toronto Star Launches + More

FInance, Industry Announcements, News /

A lot of news for paywalls and metered news sites this week! For starters, The New York Times (along with CNN and TIME) was hacked this week by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, through, of all things, paid discovery platform and third-party vendor Outbrain. (Hackers re-directed links to the aforementioned sites to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army.) To Outbrain’s credit, they noticed the problem in 11 minutes and resolved it in seven hours…

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Why Subscription Sites Should Optimize for Facebook Shares and Ignore Brand Pages

News, Subscriber Acquisition /

Social media, while ubiquitously written about, is actually not that great for conversions for subscription and paid content sites, according to 128 subscription site executives surveyed for our 2013 Online Subscription Benchmark Report. In fact, social media ranked 7th out of 15 possible acquisition sources, below email marketing, search and direct traffic, and even online ads. But social media can be effective for building audiences and re-targeting, especially for B2C sites. In my Tuesday Webinar for Subscription…

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Leveraging Facebook for Paid Content

On-Demand Webinars, Subscriber Acquisition, Subscriber Only /

Discover how you can use Facebook to drive traffic to your site, capture emails, re-target unsubscribed customers, and sell digital content in this 20-minute tactic-filled video, hosted by Subscription Site Insider Editor Minal Bopaiah. This is a must-watch for any B2C site, and B2B sites will pick up a few great tips, too. Covers best practices for posting, custom tabs, Power Editor, Graph Search and useful Facebook APIs.

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