Minal Bopaiah

Use Affiliates to Test Your Subscribers’ Interest in Offline Events

Smart subscription site professionals know that a good business Model includes diversified revenue streams. One of the most profitable revenue streams for paid content sites can be live events.However, event programming and marketing is time-intensive. Some sites may not have the staff, while other may need to make sure their audience is going to buy. In this week’s Case Study on Subscription Site Insider, Contact Any Celebrity Founder Jordan McAuley gave us a great tip for…

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Bloomberg Tackles Legal Research Market With Subscription Model

Online legal research has long been dominated by two companies — Westlaw and Lexis Nexis. But this week, Bloomberg News announced its foray into the legal research market. The financial news service just launched Bloomberg Law in the hopes of taking a bit out of the $8 billion legal research market. And encouraging to subscription site executives is the media giant’s decision to use a subscription-based billing Model. Instead of the complicated metered Model employed by Westlaw…

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Subscription-Based Netflix Surpasses iTunes as #1 Online Movie Provider in the U.S.

Proving once again that subscription sites can dominate the online paid content arena, Netflix surpassed Apple’s iTunes as the #1 movie provider to U.S. audiences in 2011, according to recent research.According to Daily Tech, “Netflix’s share of U.S. online movie revenue skyrocketed to 44% in 2011. This is a significant jump from Netflix’s share in 2010, which was less than 1%.” These statistics indicate a growing trend in how American audiences consume online content, especially for…

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Enhanced eBooks: Great for Audience Engagement, Bad for Communicating Information?

A recent study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (the research arm of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street) found that enhanced eBooks can be detrimental to children’s literacy as opposed to basic eBooks. The PDF report found that both parents and children are likely to engage in enhanced eBook features, defined as multimedia and interactive features and exemplified by apps like Scholastic Storia and subscription sites like Ruckus Reader. However, children retained fewer narrative…

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WSJ.com Increases Referral Traffic by Letting Subscribers Share Paywalled Articles for a Limited Time

As marketers have known for years, the best marketing is word-of-mouth. But allowing subscribers to share your paywalled content can be tricky — on one hand you want to let them do it, but on the other hand, you don’t want to corrupt your paywall. Some publications, like The New York Times, have chosen to allow any visitor from a social media site to bypass their metered paywall. But we like the solution the Wall Street…

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After $9M Settlement, Netflix Agrees to Delete Ex-Subscriber Data

Last year, Netflix settled a class action privacy lawsuit to the tune of $9 million. After paying $2.25 million in attorney fees and $6.75 million to various privacy organizations (ironically, the plaintiffs received no money), the company remained tight-lipped about whether it would be changing any of its data collection procedures. But this past Friday, new details emerged. Apparently, Netflix has agreed to delete ex-subscriber’s video cue list at least one year after they terminate their…

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The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design for Subscription Sites

For paywalled and other paid content sites, deliverability is an important determinant of success. There’s nothing worse than having a beautifully designed mobile site, only to discover the majority of viewers are accessing your site from an iPad or Kindle Fire. For that reason, a lot of the technorati are touting responsive web design as the solution to ever-changing platform sizes. (If you think you’re all covered with sites optimized for desktops, laptops, mobile, tablets, iPads,…

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Google More Friendly to Stopping Copyright Infringement Than You May Think

A recent article reported that Google is apparently taking down 1.2 million search links a month over copyright infringement and piracy issues. That’s good news for paid content professionals, who have been skeptical of Google’s Wild West attitude towards online content and publisher/artist remuneration. According to Google’s Transparency Report, the most requests come from software, entertainment, and adult content sites. Microsoft is the leading copyright owner, and the number of take-down requests seem to be growing exponentially. According…

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Want More SEO and PR? Consider Donating Online Subscriptions to Worthy Individuals

Someone wise once said, “You can’t optimize everything.” I’m not sure if there were in online marketing or not, but I’m sure most online marketers would agree. At the very least, you can’t optimize everything without going crazy. That’s why this week’s Case Study on A Story Before Bed is such a great read. The site, started by former Microsoft employees, had expert software programmers and little marketing expertise.Yet A Story Before Bed has been able to…

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