Finding a Financial Plan that Works for Modern Media

By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

Realizing that your current revenue model isn’t working for you and your news organization is half the battle, but what do you do instead?

You could experiment, but who has the time or the money for that? So, let’s do the math.

Plummeting Subscription Prices = Little-to-No Profit

In effort to stay competitive, newspapers have been charging less and less for their new digital subscriptions and battling the churn, making subscriptions less and less profitable for their publication, resulting in mass layoffs and other drastic cost-cutting measures.

Instead of charging 99 cents for a month of unlimited access to your high-quality articles and leading news journalism, why not charge 25 cents per article or a small dollar amount for a curated collection of articles around a particular topic with micropayments and mini-subscriptions?

This has the potential to make your news publication more money, capturing a lot of organic traffic, while at the same time catering to the needs of the modern news consumer (something that will be touched on later in another article).

Say a reader stumbles upon the link to one of your articles on social media or through a Google search. Instead of giving away your content for free in the hopes of moving them towards a long-term subscription, move up the point of sale and take advantage of your reader’s current interest.

One article consumed could lead to another and another given the way the internet works with the reader leap frogging from the article they stumbled upon to a related article advertised below or alongside the article they’re on.

This is the new way readers consume news and 25 cents per article is more money in your pocket than a 99 cent subscription when you price it out per article on your site. Especially when you consider the retention of deep discount subscribers.

If a reader consumes 6 articles in the course of a day that’s a $1.50 sale while the unlimited subscription is still just 99 cents. A subscription that can be canceled any time, leaving your publication high and dry and having to scramble to find the resources to refund the reader. A transaction that may cost the company more than the 99 cent subscription is worth.

You’re missing out and leaving money on the table by not choosing a micropayment platform like Flittz. With little to no start up and implementation costs, Flittz, the iTunes/Spotify for news, is the financial solution to your publication’s profitability problems.

Learn more in the coming weeks with Flittz’s informative reader revenue article updates.

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