RFID Journal Makes 7 Figures By Mixing Paid Subscriptions, Live Events and Advertising

In this case study, Founder and Editor of RFID Journal, Mark Roberti, discusses how he played to his strength by creating a cornucopia of

Summary

In this case study, Founder and Editor of RFID Journal, Mark Roberti, discusses how he played to his strengths by creating a cornucopia of content around radio frequency identification (RFID) and then made more money by hosting industry-specific events. This is a great read for anyone interested in hybrid business models and managing multiple revenue streams. Of particular note is the journal’s ability to convince 25% of its paying members to commit to a three-year subscription, as well as the different options they offer advertisers.

Founded:  2002
No. of Publications: 2
Employees: 13 FT and 5-6 freelancers for content, design, coding.
Business Model: Hybrid (10% subscriptions, 50% events, 30% advertising, 10% other)
Subscribers: 7000 paying subscribers
Location: New York, NY
Website: www.rfidjournal.com; community site at www.rfidconnect.com

Target Market

RFID Journal targets business and technical professionals around the globe in a variety of industries (from healthcare to retail to defense) who are interested in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID uses a wireless radio system to transfer data from a tag attached to an object to a database, for the purposes of automatic identification and tracking. The market for this technology is rapidly growing.

Content & Benefits

RFID Journal is considered the industry “Bible.” It publishes a great deal of free content, such as articles, videos and a sampling of case studies. It also offers free, vendor-sponsored Webinars. Its premium membership content consists of:

  • Case Studies: Show how a company went about implementing RFID technology for their business and can include video case study presentations from recent events;
  • Feature Stories: Focus on specific adoption issues or reports from recent events highlighting trends.
  • Best Practices: Articles that focus on specific areas of RFIC deployment and contains many expert interviews;
  • How-to Guides: Deal with very specific aspects of RFID;
  • Bi-monthly print magazine: Ironically, RFID Journal found a demand for print content after launching as a digital-only product since readers often want to pass an article on to a co-worker;
  • Magazine Archives: Access to digital versions of older magazine issues and content;
  • Discounts on events, training products and reports;
  • Ability to post/respond to Member Discussions (viewing discussions is free).

Premium content is added on a weekly basis. Most of the content is written, but RFID Journal also has more than 700 videos on the site (both free and premium), most about 40 minutes in length. The videos are usually recorded at live events with software that lets them record the slide presentation as the speaker is giving it. Roberti does a little editing at the beginning and end. He then converts the video to .mp4 files, which is less likely to bog down the site than other formats. Occasionally, RFID Journal will employ outside videographers to record an event, such as a recent live demonstration.

The company also recently launched a separate site called RFID Connect. RFID Connect is supported through advertising revenue and free to join..

Revenue Streams

RFID Journal has multiple revenues streams:

  • Subscriptions (individual and group) are about 10%;
  • Events make up 50%;
  • Advertising is about a third;
  • Selling data to marketers and one-off sales account for about 10%.

1. Individual Subscriptions
RFID Journal has three individual subscription offers.

  • Print Only: A small percentage of subscribers prefer to only get the print magazine, priced at $69/year.
  • Print + Online: Individual subscriptions are available at $189 for one-year, $339 for two years, or $479 for three years. The one-year individual subscription is the most popular, accounting for 75% of subscribers, while 20-25% take the 3-year plan.
  • Advantage Membership: Priced at $5298, this subscription plan gives members full access to premium content, free admission to all live events, free access to published reports, and 10 hours of phone consultation with Editor Mark Roberti at no extra cost during the subscriptions period. Only 10 Advantage Memberships are offered each year.

Price testing has shown that RFID Journal that readers are either exceptionally interested in their content or not at all, so a 25% increase in price saw neither an uptick nor a drop in conversion rates.

2. Group Subscriptions
RFID has three group subscription packages:

  • A 5-Person Discount at $499/year that includes access to all premium content, 5 copies of RFID Journal Magazine (print), discounts on all events, reports and training, and 2 hours of free phone consultations .
  • A 10-Person Discount at $849/year, which includes the same benefits as above, but with 10 print copies of the magazine and 5 hours of free phone consultations.
  • Unlimited Corporate Site License that is priced on an individual basis. It gives unlimited access to all persons at a specific corporation or university, as well as 25 print copies of the magazine, discounts on events, reports and training, and 10 hours of phone consultation.

3. One-offs
RFID Journal will also allow visitors who hit the paywall to purchase a single article for $19.99 or a DVD of recorded case studies for $99.The revenue gained from this has been marginal.

4. Events
RFID runs 6-12 live, in-person events a year across the globe. Paid tickets cost $999 to $2499 for their annual big event and around $599 for one-day events. Past conferences have taken place in major cities in the US, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. This year’s big annual event will be held in Orlando, and their European event in Oslo, Norway. (Conference is Europe are priced according to the Euro and without the VAT charge: http://www.rfidjournalevents.com/europe2010/registration_options.php.

About 3000 people buy tickets to the big annual event, 200-300 for two- to three-day events, and about 100 for one-day events. Roberti estimates that about 40% of event attendees are also paid subscribers to RFID Journal.

Additional revenue is earned by selling vendor booths, which are priced at about $5000 for every 100 square feet, or $4600 for returning vendors.

5. Advertising
In addition, RFID Journal offers advertisers five different ways to buy ads:

  • CPM Display ads: Ad space on the site is priced between $15/cpm and $75/cpm. The site also has some innovative capabilities: ads can be shown on specific “channels” (i.e., retail or healthcare) or can be shown only to people who click on stories with specific keywords (such as “blood tracking solutions”). By customizing their open source ad server in such a manner, RFID Journal provides its advertisers with more qualified leads than a general search engine.

  • PPC: RFID Journal has its own pay-per-click system that asks advertisers for a minimum deposit of $500. Advertisers can then log in to the system and see how many impressions, clicks, etc. They cannot, however, upload their own ad or manage campaigns directly; RFID Journal wants to retain the ability to reject any inappropriate ads.
  • Webinar Sponsorships: RFID Journal charges $10,000 to sponsor a Webinar.
  • Lead Generation: When registering for any of RFID Journal’s products or services, their in-house or third party systems often require detailed information about a person’s profession and industry. RFID Journal will not sell this information directly, but if subscribers opt-in to receive notifications from advertisers, they will allow advertisers to email them. Prices are based on the size of the targeted audience and industry.
  • Print ads: This is not a popular option, but ads are priced at $5000 for a full-page, 4-color ad.

Marketing

RFID Journal primarily drives traffic to its site through organic search results. RFID Journal has the #3 ranking at this time, behind Ask.com and Wikipedia for “RFID”. Search bots likely love the amount of keyword-rich free content on the site.

When trying to get the site to be known in the industry, Roberti used to do about 40 trade show conferences a year, but he’s now scaled that down to about 12 of the most impactful ones. RFID Journal has a sizeable social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, Roberti says it’s hard to track conversions through these media. Therefore, they consider their social media presence as more of a brand-awareness strategy.

RFID Journal also gets a lot of traffic through its e-newsletters that link to articles. They issue one every two weeks for the manufacturing, healthcare and retail industry, as well as one about companies in Europe (also every two weeks). Every two months, they issue an email newsletter highlighting their premium content. They also have sizeable word-of-mouth marketing since they are considered “The Bible in the industry,” according to Roberti.

They issue some press releases and direct mail campaigns for events. They also do a little PPC marketing for events, not content, mainly because people pay more for events than content. They also try to upsell memberships at the time of event enrollment: http://www.rfidjournalevents.com/defense/registration_options.php.

Conversion
RFID Journal employs a number of best practices to get visitors to convert to paying subscribers. When you visit the site, an overlay pops up with a letter (and photo) of Roberti asking you to subscriber. They also have a well-produced site-tour in 4 bite-size parts.

Retention
Roberti states that RFID Journal has quite a bit of churn among registered users but subscribers are more stable. Some subscribers have been with the publication for 10 years; Roberti estimates that the average account lifetime is four years. To retain subscribers, RFID Journal issues a number of automatic emails when accounts are about to expire: two months before the expiration date, one month before, two weeks before. After the expiration email, they then send a “We want you back” email, which “does pretty well.”

Event Marketing
Roberti says they have not done extensive testing on subscription marketing because their event marketing and sales have yielded higher ROI and revenues. Therefore, to cross-sell members into live events, RFID Journal sends out numerous emails, more than they do about content updates. (The amount of revenue they garner from events is one of the reasons RFID Journal is comfortable making more of its content free — it affords them a bigger audience at which to market events.)

They have separate landing pages for each event. They also have a section on each page called “How to Justify Participation at Event to Management,” which is an ingenious way of getting members to make RFID’s pitch to superiors. Subscribers can opt-out of event marketing emails at any time.

About Mark Roberti

From 1992 to 2002, Mark Roberti covered the technology and business beat as a reporter. Two conferences he attended blew him away — the first on the Internet, the second on RFID technology. He then conducted about 100 interviews with RFID experts, and added to what little information was out there on the Internet. Finally, in 2002, he decided to start a website using the book “HTML for Dummies” and a $9.99 hosting plan. Because of Google, people found his site quickly and within a day of creating a paywall, he got subscribers.

He says the financial crisis really helped him learn how to run a business. Before that, he did some budgeting and financial analysis, but not in a deep, smart way as he does now.

“I was a content guy. There’s a huge benefit to that and huge downsides. I didn’t know anything about running a business. Or even about selling ads. […] I could create the product at no cost, so that’s relatively risk free. But the downside was there a lot to learn on the business side. …[The] Ideal situation would be to have a 50-50 partner who’s as good at the business side.”

His advice to others it to be passionate and trust your instinct: “You can probably be successful without doing events and some of the things we do.”

Vendors

Merchant Gateway — Authorize.net
www.authorize.net

Email marketing and Content Management — EZpublishing.com
www.ezpublishing.com

Webinars/Virtual Events — GoTo Webinars
www.gotomeeting.com/fec/webinar

Event Registration — Custom Registration, Inc.*
www.customreg.com
*They will be transitioning to their own system through RFID Connect soon because if members choose to attend five events in a year, they had to register separately for each one. This may not be an issue for other sites.

Video and PPT presentation editing — Jim Allen of JimBoco
jimboco.ca

Insider Analysis

RFID Journal is doing a great job of knowing and catering to their niche. Their content is well-respected by the industry, and their seamless Web design makes perusing their Website easy and enjoyable. They also have a very innovative and self-sufficient ad server, and a good mix of revenues.

We think their subscription marketing is very well done. We especially liked their four-part site tour that had clear audio and visuals. We would strongly suggest that RFID Journal keep its rather clear paywall.  While more free content may grow their audience, allowing them to market their events to more people, a confusing paywall is likely to decrease subscriptions. If case studies are made available for free, subscribers may think that they can just wait until the one they want to read is made available, or are likely to get frustrated by an arbitrary system. Also, since their Advantage Membership is so close to $5000 at $5287, we would suggest they drop their price to $4997.

We would also suggest they let subscribers opt-in to automatic renewals and do some retention testing to shore up their subscription base. They could also do some PPC advertising in order to counter their drop in search rankings. Speaking at vendor Webinars would get them visibility among vendor’s prospect lists. Lastly, given that their niche events are doing well, they could probably launch a series of niche eBooks to be sold across multiple platforms about industry-specific topics; this will also be great for SEO.

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