Minal Bopaiah

Newsweek’s Smart Animated Cover and Stupid Business Decision

Newsweek’s decision to go digital-only has been met with some skepticism, but cutting printing and distribution costs may allow the publication to truly innovate and capitalize on the growing number of subscription tablet editions. It certainly allowed Newsweek to put its money into its design and graphics department, evidenced by the animated cover of its first digital-only issue: As I’ve said many times before, its best to play to the strength of any media — audio…

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MerchantBidding.com Lets Subscription Sites Get Quotes from Multiple Payment Processors

A new site called MerchantBidding.com is making it easy for small to medium businesses to get comparable quotes from multiple payment processing vendors. The site is not intended solely for subscription websites, but the filter on the homepage makes it easy to sort bids simply by indicating that your company is a “service/card-not-present/Internet” business. Merchants must also enter their monthly debit/credit volume and the average transaction amount. The site will then list a number of vendors that…

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Wall Street Journal Agrees to Sell Subscriptions through Apple’s Newsstand

After being a long-time hold-out, The Wall Street Journal has finally agreed to sell digital subscriptions through Apple’s Newsstand. The all-digital package is priced at $21.99 for the first three months. Previously, the Journal only sold its downloadable apps through iTunes. It refused to be on the Apple Newsstand and refused to sell subscriptions. It’s unclear what prompted the switch, but multiple publishers have been frustrated with Apple’s rules that require a 30% cut and don’t allow…

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Hearst Gains 800,000 Digital Subscribers in 2012, 266% Growth from 2011

Hearst Magazine’s president David Carey recently issued an open company-wide letter stating that it ended 2012 with 800,000 monthly digital subscribers across its iPad, Nooks, Kindle Fires and Android devices. That’s a 266% increase since 2011, when the company had only 300,000 digital subscribers. Most interestingly, 80% of digital subscribers were new to the company’s files, indicating that digital subscriptions are able to capture an audience not interested or served by print. And while there was…

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What Andrew Sullivan Is Doing Right (and Wrong) With The Dish’s New Subscription Plan

2013 seems to have started off with a bang for our industry after Andrew Sullivan announced plans to make his popular blog The Dish independent of The Daily Beast and adopt a subscription model. But while many media outlets are reporting on it (really, kudos to Sullivan for getting such widespread publicity), no one seems to be willing to stick their neck out and answer the question on everyone’s mind — Will it be profitable? My answer?…

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Case Study Lessons: How to Convert Free Data into $12K/Year B2B Subscriptions

In the era of big data, sites that clean up and format some of that data have a distinct competitive edge — and a chance for impressive revenues. Just take a look at this week’s Case Study on Equilar Insight at Subscription Site Insider. Equilar Insight is able to provide benchmarking data for executive compensation for large corporations mainly by cleaning up, coding and formatting information published by the SEC and in other freely available financial…

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Equilar Insight Makes $20 Million with Group Subscriptions for Open-Access Data

By cleaning up publicly-available SEC data, Equilar Insight generates approximately $20 million a year by selling group subscriptions, priced above $11K/year, to large corporations. CEO David Chun spoke to us about how the site uses old-school B2B sales techniques to close deals, while investing heavily in technology to create online content that’s consistent and convenient. Plus, find out why Chun thinks usage, not renewal numbers, are the most important retention figures.

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Subscription Site Central’s Top 10 Stories of 2012

2012 is coming to a close, and since we’ve avoided the apocalypse, it’s a good time to reflect and take stock of everything that’s happened. In that spirit, we’ve compiled a list of Subscription Site Central’s top 10 stories (determined mainly by your clicks, likes, and comments). We hope this will hold you over through the holidays, as Subscription Site Central will not publish December 25-January 1. (But we’ll be back in the New Year…

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Guardian Offers Special Christmas iPad Edition to Drive New Year Subscriptions

The Guardian seems to be catching on a bit to subscription marketing. The bastion of free content, in partnership with sister paper The Observer, has created a special Christmas edition for the iPad, promoting it with a two-week free trial to its email lists: Previously, the paper was getting a 2% conversion rate with a three-month trial, which is way too long for a B2C site to initiate a credit card charge without massive chargebacks and cancels…

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