illustration of the number five, representing the five subscription business topics for this column, Five-on-Friday

Five on Friday: Free Trials, Reader Comments and Online Dating

Featuring Washington Post, Nieman Lab and Whats New In Publishing

Five on Friday: Free Trials

Source: Bigstock Photo

Before we head into the Memorial Day weekend, we want to take a moment to honor the service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to serve our country. Thank you. Now onto subscription topics. In this edition of Five on Friday, we look at some of the pitfalls of using free trials, Washington Post’s Arc Publishing’s new subscription tools, the latest thinking about reader comments, the exploding online dating market and Adobe’s path from $200 million to $5 billion in recurring revenue.

 

 

A Few Pitfalls of Using Free Trials

 Reader Comments and Online Dating

Source: Bigstock Photo

If you ask Janis Thomas, free trials for subscription businesses are not necessarily a good thing. Why? Because customers often aren’t willing to pay for something they once got for free, even if that free trial was just a week long. Thomas outlines three reasons why, in “3 Reasons Why Free Trial Is a Vanity Metric in a Subscription Business“:

  1. When subscription companies make it too easy to sign up for a free trial (e.g., not requiring a credit card at sign-up), free trial users don’t always try the service. They have no skin in the game and no incentive to continue. There is also no penalty for not trying it, such as automatic renewal, when you haven’t provided a credit card up front.
  2. Free trials treat every customer the same, when different customers are on a different point in their relationship with the company. First-time visitors, for example, are less likely to convert to paying customers, Thomas says. The more time they visit, however, the more likely they may stick around.
  3. Using free trials can make it harder to make accurate revenue projections.

In a 2017 article, Ken Valledy agreed that free trials don’t work.

“As a startup, if you do something for free, you risk creating a mismatch of expectations between you and the buyer,” Valledy wrote for Tech2Brand. “Nobody likes doing something for free, especially if it ends up costing you money. Starting with free can lead to a strained relationship down the line.”

Free trials can also get companies, especially subscription companies in trouble, when they aren’t handled correctly. To warn consumers about this potential, the FTC has a topic devoted to the dangers (to consumers) of free trials on its website, especially when free trials result in automatic renewal or enrollment into a subscription, membership or club. 

Free trials can work if handled correctly and strategically, but there are risks involved. Subscription companies need to examine all of their options to make thoughtful decisions before implementing a free trial program – and of course, test, adapt, test again, repeat.

Washington Post Adds Arc Subscriptions to Publishing Platform

The Washington Post is making its three-year-old Arc Publishing platform even better – adding subscription tools with a suite of products it calls Arc Subscriptions. The commerce platform, available to newsrooms, advertisers, marketers, brands and other digital businesses, can be used to build businesses and grow subscription revenue with new subscription features:

  • Site registration that lets users easily login or sign in to a publisher’s site using their social sign-ins
  • An intuitive customer service portal to assist customers, process refunds, troubleshoot access problems and update subscriptions
  • Metered and hard paywall capabilities
  • Landing pages created through a plug-and-play PageBuilder

“In the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic shift on the web with consumers becoming increasingly willing to pay for great content. The Washington Post’s digital subscriber base, which has more than tripled in the last three years and added well over a million new, exclusively digital subscribers in that time frame, is a testament to that change,” said Scot Gillespie, Chief Technology Officer at The Washington Post.

“We’ve infused Arc Subscriptions with the deep expertise and learnings we’ve gathered from that growth, giving publishers and other content creators a powerful platform that aligns with their business goals and allows them to capitalize on this flight to quality,” Gillespie added.

These new features are in addition to the platforms video, web, app and ad monetization capabilities.

Arc is the publishing platform for approximately 175 different websites with total readership of 600 million unique global visitors, a 100 million increase over last year. Clients include Tribune Publishing, The Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe Media Partners, Apple Daily, Graham Media Group, Willamette Week, and Alaska Dispatch News.

The first publisher to implement Arc Subscriptions is New Zealand Media and Entertainment, who launched a premium subscription service. In less than two weeks after launch, the organization’s subscription numbers exceed initial projections.

“It was a huge leap of faith for us to launch a subscription service on a news website in New Zealand. Our collaboration with Arc ensured we launched this new business with a world-class platform that would deliver the best experience for readers who want to subscribe to our journalism,” said Tracey Bond, Senior Product Manager for New Zealand Media and Entertainment. “We are thrilled with the reception from customers and we’re excited to roll out other features on the road map as they become available.”

Learn more about Arc Subscriptions here.

Five on Friday: Free Trials

Source: Washington Post

Was Turning Off Comments a Publishing Blunder?

 Reader Comments and Online Dating

Source: Bigstock Photo

For more than a decade, publishers have had their fair share of obstacles which we won’t rehash here – except for one. Comments. Over the last few years, publishers like The Atlantic, Alaska Dispatch News, The Verge, the Chicago Sun-Times, Tablet and Popular Science have experimented with different ways of handling comments.

Some publishers discontinued comments altogether, some experimented turning them on for certain articles only, and one – Tablet – started charging readers to comment. Most who ditched comments referred would-be commenters to social media pages for sharing their thoughts on specific articles or topics. Editors thought this would be a better way of spending their time. Instead of moderating comments and weeding out trolls, they could spend their time producing content, not fighting what they believed to be a never-ending battle.

Simon Owens thinks this was a “colossal mistake.”

“When it comes to unforced errors, the decision many publishers made to close down their comments sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders,” Owens wrote in an article for What’s New In Publishing.

He reminds us that letters to the editor used to be a newspaper highlight, even when many papers began offering a digital version. However, when editors lost control and were stuck with reader comments, they didn’t like what they saw, Owens says, so they shut them down. Moderation also became a sizable investment, but one Owens believes publishers should have made, rather than pushing readers to social media, because it would have strengthened their relationship with readers.

To support his theory, he offers the example of The New York Times who values reader loyalty. According to Owens, The Times has a dozen moderators who review about 12,000 comments daily with the assistance of machine-learning. Not all articles offer a comments’ section; those are carefully selected, Owens says. Despite the associated costs, The Times’ readership continues to grow. During the first quarter of 2019, the newspaper grew the number of paying subscribers to 4.5 million, keeping it on pace to reach 10 million subscribers by 2025.

In a related story, the Wall Street Journal is making changes to how it handles comments, reports Nieman Lab. Audience posts will be prominently featured in the stories that accept posts from readers (editor’s note: WSJ.com has a hard paywall, so virtually all readers are paying subscribers). Audience comments will be renamed “conversations” and clearly marked as such; WSJ reporters will sometimes converse directly with readers. Read more about the changes to WSJ’s audience conversations on Nieman Lab.

Online Dating Services Market Expected to Grow Exponentially by 2025

Five on Friday: Free Trials

Source: Bigstock Photo

Match Group estimates there are 600 million singles around the world, and there are hundreds – perhaps thousands – of subscription services like Tinder, Grindr, Match, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, Zoosk and eHarmony ready to take your money in the name of matchmaking. And there is much money to be made in the online dating world – it is big business. In fact, in a recent report by Allied Market Research, the online dating services market was estimated to be $6.4 billion in 2017 and to grow to $9.2 billion in 2025.

Tinder, one of Match Group’s online dating brands, is arguably one of the most well recognized dating apps. In the first quarter of 2019, it added 384,000 new subscribers, bringing total number of subscribers to 4.7 million, an increase of 1.3 million year-over-year. In India, Tinder was the #1 growing dating app during Q1. Match, which also owns Meetic, OkCupid, Pairs and PlentyOfFish, also did pretty well for itself – growing first quarter revenue by 14% to $465 million. Its competitors may not have the same success secrets, but there are plenty of singles to go around between now and 2025.

Lessons Learned as Adobe Transitioned to an SaaS Company

 Reader Comments and Online Dating

Source: Adobe

Once upon a time, Adobe made its bread and butter with perpetual licensing of software. When it launched Creative Cloud in 2013, it moved away from that model into the wonderful world of software as a service. Back then, the company made about $200 million in annual recurring revenue, reports Venture Beat. Now the company is making more than $5 billion in ARR.

How did they do it and what did they learn? Here are some highlights from a recent conference and shared by Venture Beat:

  • The company once only had a small percentage of recurring revenue. Now it is nearly 90%.
  • Revenue growth was around 11%; now it is about 24%.
  • Customer relationships are critical. If you keep them happy, they will stay with you, lowering your customer acquisition costs as retention improves.
  • They improved customer service by strengthening their relationships and real-time interactions, 24/7.
  • Use your data to show you where your customers need support to increase satisfaction and reduce churn.

Read more about Adobe’s success story on Venture Beat.

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