hard parts paywall - stup
DESCRIPTION
Per Buers experiences working with various news organizations when implementing paid content strategies.TRANSCRIPT
PaywallsWhat works and what doesn’t
!10 some best practices according to our experience
Per BuerCTO
Varnish Software (Freemium / Premium business model)
Original Heidelberg
Original Heidelberg
Business logic
Background
• We launched our first paywall 2 year ago
• 12 projects so far
We’re moving to a paywall
Paywall concepts
• Freemium / premium paywalls
• Identity based- and anonymous metered paywalls
• Referrer-based access
• Micropayments
Lots of moving parts!
Project scope
• Paywalls involve:
• Backend, frontend, ops, business, editorial, marketing, customer support ++
• Proper project management is very important
Access control
Access Control
• Technically challenging
• Lots of different approaches
• Client (SaaS), CDN, Appserver, Edge
Scalability & Performance
• Scaling a website is harder with a paywall
• Identity based metering makes is even harder as database interactions happen at every page-view
Dev Ops
Access control rules
• Remember: Access control rules need
• To be implemented
• To be communicated to the readership
• Keep it simple if possible
• People don’t pay for things they don’t understand
Testing
Testing paywalls
• Tests now need to cover the paywall
• You need to test the whole paywall, covering VCL, CDN or Javascript based paywalls
• More complexity - higher costs
Payment
Payment is easy :-)
Subscription management
• Some newspapers have existing subscription management software that handle digital
• Those who do not might face a more complex project
Typical paywall project
• 9 months long, 3-12 month range
• Business side typically uses 3-4 months to make up their mind :-)
• Our implementation costs are in the €7-25K range and typically spans 2-4 weeks.
• New, creative models add time and cost
• (Norwegian newspaper tend to be very competent)
Summing up1. Complex projects
2. SaaS paywalls might not cut it (bias)
3. Consider scalability (bias)
4. Access control & security is hard
5. This might be the time for devops
6. Testing becomes harder
7. Statistics is different
8. Payment is easy
9. Subscription management
• Clock mechanics, http://www.flickr.com/photos/45810363@N04/4835327934/in/photostream/
• Devops, http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/8634021085/
• Padlock, http://www.flickr.com/photos/faithmonsoon/234237378/
• Munch, The Scream.
• The rest are bought of Shutterstock
Photo credits