What Twipe Gets Wrong About Micropayments
TL;DR: What is the future of content monetization? Online audiences just read (or watch, or listen to) the content they want to and micropayments are the only user-friendly way readers can buy just that content. They generate revenue in their own right, providing instant gratification, and they also feed the subscription funnel. Twipe doesn't see the other side of the coin...
At the beginning of August, Twipe, the digital publishing platform, published a new blog entry bemoaning how slow the industry has been to convince people to pay for content. The article rightly notes the fact that research shows only about 5% of a publisher’s digital audience will pay for a full subscription, leaving 95% ripe for monetization - and then goes on to explore the options available.
Now, this is a company blog, and of course Twipe is angling the story to their own best interests - I have absolutely no issue with them doing so. It’s good business, after all. But when they review - and quickly discard - alternative approaches that my own company has seen significant success with, I’d like to at least throw in my two cents. Hell, I’ll throw in a full dollar!
Micropayments Support Subscriptions
Laterpay leverages a combination of micropayments and our unique ‘pay later’ approach, enabling content providers to monetize their content while giving consumers the choice of accessing content - the way they want it - online. When approached the right way, micropayments are an incredibly powerful tool to take a truly user-centric approach to sell digital content, generate additional revenue, and move readers through the subscription funnel.
So I take umbrage at claims that the micropayment system “...punishes the most engaged readers, rather than rewarding them – the more they read, the more they pay.”
This is dead wrong. Micropayments do not punish the most engaged reader - a publication’s most engaged readers will choose a subscription. What micropayments do is reward the occasional reader by giving them what they want without requiring a subscription. Thus, instead of losing everyone who is not eligible for a subscription, publications can build incremental revenues and generate potential subscribers by allowing casual readers access to content on their terms. And we’ve seen this play out in practice - Laterpay customers have generated more subscribers by enabling micropayments.
Single Articles: The New Normal?
Twipe’s other criticism is that micropayments in some way diminish the overall value of a publication. In their words, “...the full product that has been tirelessly designed to be consumed as a whole is now disaggregated into individual articles.”
They’d be right if they were referring to paper publications - these have been designed to be consumed as a whole. But the entire idea of the internet is giving you what you want in various increments, allowing access to itemized content. Readers consume content entirely differently in the digital age, and that has nothing to do with micropayments.
The shift from print publishing to digital turned how people consume news upside down, moving from a ‘push’ to ‘pull’ model. Whereas a newspaper was delivered (pushed) to your doorstep as a complete product without the possibility to unbundle, today readers only pull the content that actually appeals to them off the web – the story they like, the video they want to watch, the news they want to hear.
Consider the conflict we’ve seen in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over the state of opinion editorials. Staff at the WSJ criticized the publication for printing opinion pieces that were directly contradicted by their own fact-based reporting; the NYT took a hit because it published Senator Tom Cotton’s infamous op-ed. This is a direct result of consumers not reading a full edition, but only the articles they’re interested in - or that they come across via search or social media.
If readers see an op-ed without any context or background, then it’s more likely that they will accept it at face value, even if the contributor is factually incorrect. It’s a strong signal that readers are looking at articles individually, rather than at a publication’s entire body of work - what I’ve previously called the “article of one.” And that wasn’t caused by micropayments. (you can learn how micropayments can actually make a publication more money than their subscription model here.
Ultimately, Twipe doesn’t approve of single article purchases because it goes against the principle of their business model. And that’s fine. Not every model is going to suit everyone - subscriptions certainly do work for certain, larger publications, and memberships may be a better match for smaller or local media. But in my perspective, micropayments are the future of content monetization. First, online audiences are already just reading (or watching, or listening to) the content they want to. Second, micropayments are currently the only way that readers can buy just what they want to read, whenever they want to. And, thirdly, micropayments generate significant, sustainable revenue in their own right, while also feeding the subscription funnel.
As far as I’m concerned, micropayments are the only option if you truly want to create a mass market. Twipe - back to you.