Author: Brian Hood - Page 4 - Subscription Insider

Stripe Makes Subscription Billing Easy for Start-Ups, But Seasoned Merchants Should Avoid the High Fees

News, Payment Processing, Technology / Brian Hood

Much has been made lately of Stripe, an upstart in the realm of web-based payment processing. From powering the payment processing on uber-successful apps like Lyft, and partnering with Apple and Twitter, 2014 was a good year for the four-year-old company. What sets Stripe apart is that it’s built on agility for startups, allowing them to bypass the common complications of payment processing through a traditional merchant account. Essentially it’s a suite of APIs that allow…

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Facebook Nudging Publishers to Spend Money for Sponsored Posts

News, Subscription Apps, Technology / Brian Hood

Facebook has become a massive engine for content dissemination, driving three times the referral traffic of all other social networks combined. With a pool of 1.35 billion users, the potential is great for publisher sites to reach a wide audience. Yet last month Facebook announced it is going to punish overly self-promotional brands by de-emphasizing their posts as part of an effort to drive users to its new “sponsored posts” advertising platform. Currently, any company can promote…

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Google Leaves CAPTCHA Behind in Favor of New API

News, Payment Processing, Subscriber Acquisition, Technology / Brian Hood

Google is ditching CAPTCHA in favor of a simple check box, according to a blog post on their website. For those unaware, CAPTCHA is that annoying little box with a sequence of nonsensical letters and numbers, and a necessary evil for secure customer identification. But in recent years, the technology has failed to foil Internet robots, and users in general find it to be a pain and nuisance. In fact, today’s spammers are able to decipher…

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Spotify Continues to Navigate Uncharted Waters for Subscription Streaming Music Services

Business Strategy, Entertainment and Streaming, FInance, News, Subscriber Acquisition / Brian Hood

As we have reported on these pages before, Spotify is an interesting case to watch as they attempt to bring online music streaming to mass audiences while fairly compensating the artists who make the music, essentially trying to right the fifteen-year-old wrong that is digital file sharing. Spotify is succeeding at compensating artists where otherwise there wouldn’t be any compensation, as well as bringing their service to mass audiences, but turning a profit is another story. As…

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Blloon Re-Invents Subscription Model for eBooks

Business Media and Publishing, Business Strategy, Industry Announcements, News / Brian Hood

A new app that originated in Germany and is soon coming to America has an interesting pricing model that encourages word-of-mouth subscription registrations. Blloon is an eBook app with a “catalogue of almost one million titles” that offers users a freemium subscription model. The “Free” level requires no up front subscription fees, just registration with an email address. However, the site does have some novel rules around usage; users immediately start with access to 1,000 pages, which…

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Subscription Streaming Spending Tops 1 Billion in Q3 of 2014

Business Strategy, Entertainment and Streaming, News, Technology / Brian Hood

No corporate demise of the past ten years was more evident than that of Blockbuster Video. The stores that were once ubiquitous across America were gone seemingly overnight, killed by the convenience of Netflix. While Blockbuster was the most famous casualty of the switch from physical to digital media, the numbers continue to grow favorably for digital streaming subscriptions. In a recent release by The Digital Entertainment Group, the year-over-year numbers for the third quarter show a…

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Monthly Digital Subscription Costs Overtaking Cable Television

Business Strategy, News, Subscriber Acquisition, Subscriber Retention / Brian Hood

Monthly digital subscription costs are overtaking those of Cable TV, and not many consumers seem to care. The growing devolution of paid television consumption continues as subscribers leave cable in growing numbers. According to Frank N. Magrid Associates, 2.9% of paying TV customers are “very likely” to cancel their service in the year ahead, up over the 2.2% who answered the same in 2012. Even though consumers are eschewing the traditional monthly cable or satellite service, they…

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Are Subscription Models Next for Academic Textbooks?

Business Media and Publishing, Business Strategy, News / Brian Hood

Ask anyone who attended college what their largest expense was after tuition and they are most likely to tell you, aside from adult beverages, that textbook purchases burned the largest hole in their wallet. There are signs, however, that the time-honored tradition of purchasing seemingly hundreds of pounds of paper at the beginning of the semester may be changing. This past July, the Book Industry Study Group released a survey of 4,000 librarians, publishers, and retailers and…

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Jill Abramson Seeks to Create Subscription Site for Long Form Journalism

Industry Announcements, News / Brian Hood

Despite her rather ignominious departure as executive editor of The New York Times earlier this year, Jill Abramson is rolling the dice on a new journalistic venture. The unnamed startup is in the very early stages of development, but Abramson and co-founder Steven Brill have said in multiple interviews that they’re betting on something potentially valuable: subscription long-form journalism. If their plan comes to fruition, subscribers will receive one long-form article a month. These articles would be…

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Blendle Seeks to Expand its Single-Article Paywall Model

Industry Announcements, News, Subscription Apps / Brian Hood

In the Netherlands, a new way to access digital news articles is making noise, and it may mean trouble for subscription publishers. A recent announcement by The New York Times and Axel Springer Digital Ventures of a $3.8 million dollar investment in the Dutch website and app Blendle could be a transformative event. While the website and app are currently only available in The Netherlands, this investment can be seen as a potential springboard for expansion…

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Insight to drive subscription growth

Brian Hood