Micropayments

While credit cards are popular, real-time and alternative payments are the wave of the future. Subscription companies that adopt real-time payments will improve revenues, reduce payment churn, and burdensome payment processes.

Weekly Subscription News, Apr. 4, 2020: AT&T and YouTube TV offer free content, 24 Hour Fitness faces backlash, and W magazine and BuzzFeed announce cuts.

Launching a marketing campaign to support an existing or new subscription business, membership, or product? You don't need a big marketing budget to get started, but you do need to market smart. In this Subscription Marketing guide, we outline in detail the 12 steps every subscription marketer needs to understand to kick-start their marketing program and drive profitable revenue, even with a small budget or even little experience.

We hope you and your families are all enjoying the holidays. We took the Christmas holiday off but are back at work to update you on the latest subscription news. This week, Apple has a (not so) secret team looking at satellites to bring data to mobile devices, Snopes is launching a membership program to upgrade its site and expand its staff, and Amazons Alexa is popular but not terribly profitable. Also this week, MeWe launches premium features, Forbes accepts payments via Ethereum cryptocurrency for its articles, and Hulu is offering a new ad format to reward binge watching.

Offering a subscription trial is often the most debated and discussed topic for subscription businesses. No matter how much experience your team has, the best course of action is to begin with a well-informed plan based on your answers to the questions here.

At Subscription Show 2019, we'll show you the latest on subscription-centric strategy, recurring payments, acquisition, retention, analytics and subscription technology. Get the industry connections you need, and actional information you can put into action, to grow your recurring revenue, membership or subscription business. Get the list of why you should attend here.

We are almost at the end of the first quarter, and it has been a big one in the world of subscriptions with launches, acquisitions and takeover bids. In this weeks edition of Five on Friday, well cover related subscription and membership topics, including micropayments as an alternative to subscriptions, profitability tips for 2019, the growing popularity of streaming video versus cable subscriptions, whether associations should offer subscription packages, and the email metrics your subscription company should be watching.

Learn subscription-specific payment trends that will eat into your profitability in 2019. The team at PLC, leading experts in "card-not-present recurring payments", will outline the key trends your business will need to stay on top of and the strategies you will need to implement in order to minimize their impact. What you will learn: Subscription payment trend data and impact on your profits from 2018. Understand how those trends translate moving forward in 2019. Tactics and best-practices subscription your business should employ to mitigate the negative impact on your profitability from these trends.

To help get your new year off to a good start, weve got some great information about subscriptions, payments and ad fraud for you. In this weeks Five on Friday, PaymentsJournal explores ways publishers can overcome objections to paying for media with micropayments, Pixalate shares its estimates about the potential for over-the-top TV ad fraud new year, Business2Community shares 2019 content marketing trends, Computerworld looks at what Microsoft could be looking at for Windows 10 subscriptions, and Your Story explains how focusing on subscribers, not products, will make for a better business model.

In this weeks edition of Five on Friday, Forbes Agency Council outlines strategies to overcome ad blocking, Winnipeg Free Press uses micropayments as a top-of-the-funnel strategy, Harvard Business Review explores how sales teams are impacted when companies transition to subscription models, Associations Now discusses the benefits of monthly subscriptions, and Hubspot shares customer service secrets from beauty brand Glossier.