Posts tagged subscription
Google’s SEO blunder could impact whole market , say experts – New Media Age (subscription)
Jan 6th
 Fox News |
Google's SEO blunder could impact whole market , say experts
New Media Age (subscription) The blog posts however, also linked back to the Chrome page, leading the SEO agencies that raised the issue to believe it was paying for sponsored posts to be created, one of which did not include the 'nofollow' attribute. Google enforces strict rules … Do evil: 'This post is sponsored by Google Chrome' SEO spam Do SEO poisoners seek to ban Chrome from Google searches? Google pays bloggers to promote Chrome browser |
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Have You Studied the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors? – MarketingProfs.com (subscription)
Nov 28th
 MarketingProfs.com (subscription) |
Have You Studied the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors?
MarketingProfs.com (subscription) So begins the succinct and lighthearted "Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors" created by Search Engine Land. And whether you're an SEO newbie in search of a comprehensive overview, or a seasoned pro in search of some levity, you'll want to take a … December 2011 SEO For Small Business Course From Search Engine Academy … December 2011 SEO For Small Business Course From Search Engine Academy … |
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Starz Drops Netflix Just as Subscription Rate Hike Takes Effect
Sep 1st
Netflix learned today that it may lose a significant source of its content when Starz Entertainment announced it would not renew its distribution deal with the popular streaming service for next year.
It’s this contract with Starz that gives Netflix the ability to legally stream a trove of movies from the likes of Walt Disney, Touchstone, Columbia and Sony, among others. If talks don’t resume, that’s a sizable chunk of content that will be missing from the service. In response to the news, Netflix’s stock price dropped 9 percent in after hours trading.
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“This decision is a result of our strategy to protect the premium nature of our brand by preserving the appropriate pricing and packaging of our exclusive and highly valuable content,” Starz CEO Chris Albrecht said in a statement. “With our current studio rights and growing original programming presence, the network is in an excellent position to evaluate new opportunities and expand its overall business.”
This move is just the latest example of tension between traditional content providers and the Internet companies who seek to revolutionize the way entertainment, news and other media are consumed. With Netflix, legacy players have long been nervous that the service’s all-you-can-eat media consumption model would erode DVD sales, cable subscriptions and other traditional sources of revenue.
The Starz announcement happened to come on the same day Netflix officially rolled out its controversial new pricing plans. The company is eliminating its $9.99 plan that enables customers to both stream content and recieve DVDs by mail. To continue to do both, customers will have to pay $15.98 per month, an increase that was wildly unpopular when it was first announced in July.
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In Plain English: Common Craft Switches To Subscription Model
Aug 10th
Common Craft, probably the best-known creators of cartoons to explain the internet (“In Plain English”), have adopted a number of different business models over the years – including producing demonstration videos for some of the biggest companies on the web. (Like Google, LinkedIn, MeetUp.)
Three years ago we wrote here about how the two person team quit doing client work and moved into a model based entirely on licensing rights to the educational videos they produced. Their videos were available for free online, but corporate customers happily pay to have the rights to show the content to their employees. This week Common Craft changed models again. From an iTunes model to a Rhapsody model, co-founder Lee LeFever says. Customers will now buy subscriptions and have access to all the videos Common Craft produces. It’s an interesting twist in a story that any independent content producer online could find inspiring.
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“We are a two person company and don’t plan to have an HR department,” Lee LeFever told me. “Because we do everything related to the business, we can’t devote all our attention to production. However, we’re confident that we can publish at least one video a month over the long term. But in terms of our business capacity, we’ve designed Common Craft to scale such that [co-founder] Sachi [LeFever] and I can remain the only employees as the membership grows.”
The new pricing model offers subscriptions ranging from $159 per year up to $5000 per year for large business customers.
I asked LeFever a few questions about the change.
Marshall: Are you changing models because the old model didn’t work well enough?
Lee: Like a lot of what we do, the new model is a reflection of the feedback we heard from customers. We used to license the videos one-by-one via digital downloads, iTunes style. Our customers started to ask for access to the entire library for one price and we thought that made a lot of sense. So we created a subscription model that does just that.
Marshall: What % of your viewership is mobile & why is that such a big part of the offering?
Lee: In our case, mobile is part of an overall strategy to make our videos available when and where they are needed. For example, part of our target market is educators and iPads and other mobile devices are becoming a bigger part of classrooms and teaching in general. We believe this trend will increase and we want our members to see that we’re a step ahead. This goes for our website too, it’s designed to work on small screens because that’s how more and more people will access it in the future.
Marshall: What advice can you offer other content producers wrestling with these kind of business model options?
Lee: We’ve always believed that people will gladly pay for content that helps them solve a problem. That’s what our videos do – they’re useful to professionals. But that’s not enough. We’re in a unique position because we’ve spent years developing our video library and brand. I don’t think we could have pulled off a subscription service as well in the past, but today we have the library and brand recognition to make it work.
My advice is this: develop your brand and make it visible in everything you do. Also, make creating your own intellectual property your 20% project. Build a library or database of work you own and look for ways to make it a product. It may take a while, but it can pay off in the form of scalable, sustainable business models.
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GameTanium: Subscription Mobile Gaming Comes to Android
Jul 18th
From games-on-demand company Extent, there comes a new distribution platform called GameTanium, the first unlimited subscription gaming offering on Android. With GameTanium, users can play all the games from participating developers for just $4.99 per month. By year-end, Extent says that there will be over 200 games on its network.
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At launch, some of the most notable of the initial 75 titles include Farm Frenzy, Speedx 3D and The Secret of Grisly Manor. All are available as a free trial from www.gametanium.com/mobile for those who want to sign up directly.
For Operators, Too
The service was designed with the needs of operators in mind, too, says Extent, which already has relationships with mobile carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile, for example. With GameTanium, carriers can customize certain elements of the service, including its branding, UI and packaging. They can even adjusting the pricing, if desired.
For game developers, Extent offers a new way to monetize their applications. With its Netflix-like service for mobile gamers, the company offers integrated billing options and discovery tools for helping users find new games via things like Editor’s Picks and the like. In addition, Extent plans to host only quality content from the looks of it, which will help end users avoid the “demos, spam, broken apps” as well as the “boring games” which comprise “close to 99%” of the games currently offered on Android…or so says Extent. Ouch!
Whether or not gamers will pay for games on demand like this has yet to be proven, of course, but it’s certainly an interesting experiment to watch.
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Streaming or Buying Books: Will Readers Choose a Subscription Model for E-Books?
Apr 10th
When Amazon launched its new Cloud Drive a few weeks ago, it prompted a debate in the ReadWriteWeb editorial room about whether or not the future of music involved downloads and ownership – as supported by Amazon’s cloud stage – or streaming and subscription – as provided by any number of music startups, like Rdio and Spotify. The ReadWriteWeb writers kept our discussion focused on music, but the debate could easily extend to any number of digital media now in Amazon’s catalogue: movies, magazines, books.
We’re familiar with these streaming and subscription services when it comes to music and movies (Netflix, Hulu for example). But books? Will we (can we) rent books?
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Lit Subscriptions and Banner-Ad Books?
A Spanish startup called 24symbols is launching this summer with the promise to do just that: provide a subscription service and become the “Spotify for e-books.” (Much like Spotify, 24symbols won’t be available at launch in the U.S.)
24symbols will offer an ad-supported and a subscription-based access to e-books, the latter running about 10€ per month. The books are all DRM-free, but 24symbols is entirely cloud-based. In other words, books are streamed, not downloaded for reading.
While we can probably wrap our reads around a Netflix or Spotify for e-books, that bit about ads in our literature might be anethema to many. I mean, how dare they! I poked around on the 24symbols website, but I don’t see examples of how those ads will appear. Flashing banners in the margins just won’t do, and it will be interesting to see how 24symbols – now in beta – will actually look.
What’s on the 24symbols Bookshelf?
As Bookspring notes in its review of the new service, one of the most interesting things about 24symbols isn’t simply that it’s offering books by subscription. It’s how it’s splitting the revenue. On some levels, it’s actually adopting the funding model that fuels much of the Internet: pageviews: “The company says it will create a standard page measurement as a specific number of words, and apply that to all texts equally when splitting up ad and subscription revenue.”
As the reading is all done online, 24symbols will have some fascinating data about readership — like, at what point in a novel do people just chuck it aside. It’s not clear that all of that information will be shared with authors and publishers, but data about page views will serve in part to determine revenue share.
Will this ad-supported, pageview oriented model help keep content farms out of e-books? After all, it would be difficult to make much money with your spammy, scammy e-books if people don’t get past the opening paragraph.
The content farms may steer clear of 24symbols, then, but will book publishers join? That may be the thing to watch, for as GigaOm’s Michael Wolf suggests, publishers may be better served by a Hulu for e-books, where they set the terms of the publications.
Book Buyer or Book Subscriber? What About Loans? (What About Libraries?)
E-book subscriptions may sound like a new and exciting model for readers, authors, and the publishing industry. But there’s already an “all-you-can-eat” model for books: libraries. That library card gets you access to all the books you want, for free.
Libraries are already finding themselves at odds with some publishers when it comes to e-books – not notably HarperCollins with its 26 checkout limit. If a new model for the publishing industry becomes a subscription-based one, how will library loans fit in?
It will be interesting to watch the launch of 24symbols this summer and to see which publishers and authors play along and how many customers are interested. As my ReadWriteWeb colleagues and I debated with the launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive – we may be moving away from the idea of “owning” our digital content. Will e-books be the next content that we subscribe to and stream?
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Rdio Launches Technical & Business Plan to Route Around Apple’s Subscription Fees
Mar 11th
Streaming music subscription service Rdio today announced availability of a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that outside developers can use to add playback of Rdio’s 8 million song catalog and social features like popular playlists to their web applications.
Developers that can sign up new subscribers to Rdio’s $5 or $10 per month paid services will receive a two to three percent commission for the lifetime of the subscriber. That could help create a small army of sales people that could sell Rdio in settings outside of the Rdio iPhone app, where Apple will soon begin taking a hefty 30% cut.
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Rdio subscribers will be able to listen to all the music in full through apps using the API, trial subscribers will be able to listen for 7 days and non-subscribers will hear short previews. How many apps will want to integrate music for subscribers to another service? As an Rdio subscriber myself, I hope a lot will.
Rdio is offering 3 types of APIs for the web: one based on the much-loved open OEmbed standard, a REST API and a Web Playback API. Playback APIs for iOS and Android apps are forthcoming, the company says. In other words, the functionality and affiliate sales are focused for now on web apps.
That makes the most sense from a financial perspective, but whether streaming music service subscriptions can be sold in large numbers through the web, instead of through in-app purchases on proprietary platforms like Apple’s iOS, will be a big determinant of the viability of this low-margin new business. Rdio makes no mention of Apple in its announcement, but given the industry’s intense focus on Apple’s controversial new plan to take a 30% cut from subscriptions sold on its platform – it’s hard not to consider an affiliate program for web-based sales of subscriptions in light of that.
It’s a bold experiment but it would be great if it worked. It would be even greater if a standards-based API play ended up being what helped innovative music startups thrive despite concerns about Apple’s stranglehold over mobile platforms.
Will web apps be able to generate a meaningful amount of interest in music that requires a subscription after 7 days? There’s not a whole lot of options otherwise for quick and easy integration of music streaming. “Ever since our launch six months ago our API has been our most requested feature,” says Todd Berman, VP of Engineering at Rdio. “Developers who have been looking for a way to integrate music into their web applications now have a way to do it easily, legally and accessibly. We’re also excited that our subscribers and the public will now be able to access Rdio content all over the web.”
The whole subscription streaming model still seems like an open question – I like it a lot myself but will it catch on generally? It’s hard to say. APIs for subscription streaming are a step even further out. It’s a bold experiment but it would be great if it worked. It would be even greater if a standards-based API play ended up being what helped innovative music startups thrive despite concerns about Apple’s stranglehold over mobile platforms.
Rdio’s APIs are built on top of the Mashery API management platform. (Disclosure: Mashery is a long-time sponsor of ReadWriteWeb.)
Below, Rdio’s new Mac desktop app, just released last week.
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Fallout and Frustrations From Apple’s New Subscription Plan Continue
Feb 21st
Since announcing its new subscription plan last week, Apple’s move to collect a 30% cut of revenue has had raised the ire of a number of developers and commentators. Mike Melanson offered a round-up on some of the initial reactions, that ranged from “greedy” to “anti-competitive” to “Brilliant, Brazen or Batsh*t Crazy.
Apple’s 30% fee is posing problems for a number of companies and developers – those who’ve built their businesses around the existing rules, for example, and those who don’t have the margins to be able to hand over such a cut to Apple. Companies that have raised questions about the new policy run the gamut – music streaming services, e-book sellers, and software-as-a-service developers; big companies and startups alike.
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No Margin for That 30% Cut
The expletives that came from Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones last week may be one of the most colorful responses to Apple’s announcement, but his analysis speaks to the core of many developers’ concerns. Jones said in an IRC chatroom that “apple just f***ed over online music subs for the iphone.” Jones hinted that Apple may have plans to launch its own streaming service and is therefore attempting to squeeze out the competition. But whether that’s the case or not, he contends that “many services can’t survive a 30 percent loss of revenue.” Jones specifically mentions Spotify, reportedly poised to make its entry in U.S. markets, arguing that he can’t imagine its “margins are anywhere near 30 percent.”
Trouble for Alternative Funding Models
Readability just announced this morning that its iOS app had been rejected by Apple as the startup wasn’t running its service through the new subscription plan guidelines.
Readability offers a service whereby it redesigns Web pages – stripping out ads and resizing text, for example – in order to make online content more legible. Users pay a monthly subscription fee to use Readability, which in turn offers a unique funding model for publishers – the company gives them a 70% cut of the revenue from folks’ reading lists. “If we implemented In App purchasing,” writes Readability in an Open Letter to Apple, “your 30% cut drastically undermines a key premise of how Readability works.”
No Room in the Store for Big Catalogs
Jim Dovey, formerly the Apple Platforms Team Lead for the e-bookseller Kobo had raised another key stumbling block. As it currently stands, there’s a cap on the number of items you can sell via in-app purchases. According to Dovey, Apple’s “in-app purchasing system only allows 3000 or 3500 distinct items to be in your catalog (depending who you talk to). Kobo and Amazon each have around 2.5 million titles. Judging by the title of Kobo’s app, 1.8 million are public domain (or otherwise free), so some 700,000 are paid titles, which they are under obligation to the content owners to make available for sale to all their users.”
The dissatisfaction isn’t only coming from developers or companies who’ve invested in the Apple third-party ecosystem. PaidContent.org reports that anti-trust regulators are looking into Apple’s subscription plan. But in the meantime, angry developers are looking at their own alternatives.
As Readability notes in its blog post today, “To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.”
It seems likely that others will follow suit – putting their development efforts into the mobile web or into alternate operating systems (namely Android).
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