Congrats – you made it to the end of the week! We’re here to kick off the weekend with your weekly dose of subscription news and ideas. In this week’s Five on Friday, LinkedIn posts top subscription jobs, Fast Company explains how the Washington Post has become a software company, we share five time management techniques to get you through the holidays, Media Post talks about new paywalls popping up, and Wordstream gives us fun and festive holiday marketing ideas. 

Washington Post Is Now in the Software Biz: Selling Its Platform to Other Publishers

In 2014, the Washington Post developed Arc Publishing, an internal publishing platform – or content management system – for publishing the newspaper online at WashingtonPost.com. Their goal was create a streamlined CMS that loaded quickly on mobile and desktop and that provided a seamless user experience for readers. The platform has been so successful that the Post is now marketing and selling it to other publishers, in effect, transforming itself into a software as a service, or SaaS, according to Fast Company.

By selling its platform to other publishers including the Los Angeles Times, Willamette Week and the Globe and Mail, the Washington Post has diversified its revenue streams while also helping other publishers increase capacity. In fact, in total, more than 300 million readers are reached by publications using the Arc Publishing CMS. According to Fast Company, publishers pay the Post based on bandwidth which cost anywhere from $10,000 a month for small publishers up to $150,000 a month for large customers. Scott Gillespie, chief technology officer for the Post, says that selling software gives the company additional revenue that’s not reliant on circulation, subscriptions or advertising dollars.

Read the full article, ‘The Washington Post is a Software Company Now‘ by Harry McCracken, at FastCompany.com.

Top Subscription Jobs from LinkedIn 

Group Product Manager, Monetization Platform Lead
Dropbox
Seattle, Washington

You will be leading a team of product managers accountable for the core payments platform transacting more than a billion dollars in revenue, delivering a seamless experience for our customers. This role is responsible for creating the long term business strategy for our global payments processing, working closely with the business development, treasury, tax and finance teams. You will also be responsible for ensuring a high degree of financial compliance for the monetization platform, reporting more than a billion dollars and enable our finance team to close the books reliably and accurately. Read more here.

Campaign Manager, Demand Generation
Zuora
San Mateo, California

As a Zuora Strategic Account Executive you will be focused on Strategic business accounts within your assigned territory. You will have a proven track record of exceeding quota in technology sales and be a motivated and tenacious self-starter who is comfortable selling to C level execs. Responsibilities include: executing on the account plan to deliver maximum revenue potential, identifying and qualifying opportunities within your account territory, selling business application solutions to prospective and new mid-market customers. Read more here.

User Acquisition Manager, Subscriptions
Jam City
Culver City, California

Responsibilities include:

• The User Acquisition Manager, Subscriptions will build the User Acquisition function for a new mobile web-based product from the ground up.
• Creating the analytics requirements (tracking and reporting)
• Lead creative development, A/B testing and optimization of ads and landing pages
• Partner with Product to optimize user acquisition funnel
• Plan and conduct campaigns driving mobile web traffic to achieve goals in South East Asia, Eastern Europe and additional territories.

Read more here.

Director, Software Development – Payments & Subscription
Hulu
Santa Monica, California

As the Director of the Subscription Lifecycle, you will be responsible for all payment and subscription processing at Hulu, as well as critical customer, marketing and financial tools that touch all of our current and prospective subscribers. Our subscription lifecycle consists of a number of development teams that are counted on to build some of the most secure, reliable and highly available services at Hulu. The ideal candidate will be able to assimilate into this tight culture and also help the teams scale through plotting out the right future architecture, assessing new technology options, building the right organizational structure, and hiring intelligently. Read more here.

Consumer Sales and Marketing Manager
Gannett | USA Today Network
Rochester, NY

We are seeking a Consumer Sales and Marketing manager based in Rochester, NY with responsibilities and support for sites in NY and Vermont. The Consumer Sales and Marketing Manager is responsible for planning, executing and monitoring the subscription of sales, retention, and engagement strategies in order to meet revenue objectives. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to: planning sales and marketing scheme for local sites, management of the day-to-day coordination and execution of local sales programs through direct marketing, event sales, social media, display advertising, mobile transactions, search engine marketing and email as directed by the Group Sales and Marketing Manager. Read more here.  

5 Time Management Techniques to Try This Holiday Season 

This is a busy time of year for subscription managers and executives, so we’ve put together five time management techniques to help you get through the hustle and bustle of the holidays:

1. Avoid social media during your work day unless it is directly related to your job. This includes messages from friends, invitations to play games or send lives, or notifications from groups you belong to.
2. Schedule your day by blocking out sections of time on your calendar for replying to emails, making sales calls, marketing planning, budgeting, etc. Mark yourself as ‘busy’ or ‘out of the office,’ so you aren’t disturbed during that dedicated desk time.
3. Manage expectations by setting up an auto-responder to let people know when you’re away. This might help you avoid that office pest who stops by, calls, emails and texts to see if you’re available, and it will let others know when they can expect a reply.
4. Set realistic goals. Let’s say you have three one-hour meetings today, plus one hour for replying to emails and phone calls. That leaves you four hours in an eight-hour workday. What can you realistically accomplish? One task? Two? Three? Decide what your top priorities are and how much time you can devote to each as you set your ‘to do’ list for the day.
5. Make time for yourself. Yes, it is OK to be selfish. You need to carve out a little time for yourself several times a day to prepare, refresh, regroup and unwind. Try focused medication, a walk around the block or a relaxing cup of tea at different times throughout the day to clear the mental clutter. 

More publishers going the route of the paywall

We don’t hear about new paywalls as often any more because so many of the large publications – the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post – have erected either a hard paywall or a metered one. There are still some holdouts, but two more publications are or will be testing paywalls in the near future.

Wired: According to Media Post, Conde Nast-owned Wired magazine will put up a metered pay wall in January. Though editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson didn’t reveal the price point, he said it would be less than Spotify Premium which is currently priced at just under $10 a month. Thompson told the Wall Street Journal that he wants Wired to be more profitable and to ‘hedge against the future.’ In addition, the editorial content will shift to be more specialized toward technology topics like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and automation.

BI Prime: Business Insider has been testing BI Prime since 2016. According to Business Insider, the paid product will target readers who are interested in original reporting on financial news. Using a freemium model, some financial news will remain free, but more specialized and exclusive news will be put behind a paywall. Subscribers can pay $9.95 a month or $99 for a full year, following a one-month trial for $1. BI Prime would be in addition to the publication’s existing paid product, BI Intelligence, targeted toward professionals. It is priced at $300 to $400 per year for newsletters, or over $2,000 for full access memberships. 

Five Fun, Festival Holiday Marketing Ideas from Wordstream

Bah, humbug! No one wants to see the same old ads during the holidays. Try these fun, festive ideas for your holiday marketing, compliments of Wordstream.

• Create a seasonal AdWords campaign and landing pages to match. Instead of ‘subscription boxes for her,’ try ‘gift subscriptions’ or ‘gift subscriptions for my wife.’  The related web page should including an offer for giving a gift subscription.
• Try Instagram ads with something colorful and especially festive. This is ideal for subscription box companies with lots of fun holiday goodies to offer!
• Target your email marketing campaign to a segmented audience. Use your treasure trove of data to create a holiday campaign that will soothe your audience’s pain points. Need to reach busy executives who need to give staff gifts? Create a holiday campaign that shows how easy giving a subscription is – a few clicks and their holiday shopping is done and their staff gets a year of gifts from their favorite boss streaming on their TV, delivered to their door, etc.!
• Do a holiday giveaway on social media by asking your followers to comment on your post, share a post and tag you, like your post, etc. These will not only increase engagement, but they are a fun way to share your subscription offerings to more people.
• Tis the season for remarketing. Yes, that’s what Wordstream recommends. According to Wordstream, people are shopping online – and quickly – so they don’t have a lot of time to make decisions. If a consumer has dropped off your website or failed to subscribe, a gentle reminder might be just the thing to bring them back for good.