Giving users a choice can increase members, subscribers
Lately I have seen several examples of news publications letting users decide the amount they pay for the information they receive. The goals, strategies, and tactics are different in each case. But one of them might be right for your news organization.
In each case the model is based on an intimate, trusting relationship between the publisher and the audience. The key is a product with trustworthy content unavailable anywhere else and organized in a convenient fashion.
HumbleDollar
600 voluntary donors, $50 for stories. Jonathan Clements, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, started HumbleDollar, a free weekly newsletter, in 2017 with a modest goal: “[W]e’re simply looking to help folks get smarter about their finances. Still, we would like to cover our costs, including website expenses, paying bloggers and distributing our free newsletter. Want to support our mission? Please donate.”
Clements recently gave a report card on the site’s 2020 results: 12,000 weekly subscribers; 3.6 million page views for the year, up about 40%; although he offers to pay $50 per article, many writers donate their work; and a mere 1% of all the articles on the site account for 9% of the traffic–the 80-20 rule. HumbleDollar earns a bit of money from Google ads that aren’t contingent on their clients being mentioned on the site.
With his dry British humor Clements noted that “Our goal isn’t to make money with this site—and, so far, we’ve been highly successful in that regard.”
HumbleDollar sounds a lot like a cooperative or neighborhood club more than a business. One has a feeling that if Clements really needed money from the audience to keep going, they would contribute.
elDiario.es in Spain
60,000 “partners” pay full rate, others pay what they can. This news site started out eight years ago with free access and a few perks for “partners” (socios) who donated 60€ a year. In December they made it freemium, with free access to 10 articles a month, or pay 80€ a year for full access. Most recently, they made partnership free or “pay what you can” to students, the unemployed, or the poor–really anyone who would have difficulty paying. No proof of status was required.
Last week elDiario.es announced (Spanish) that it had achieved 60,000 paying partners, at the standard rate of 80€ a year (some pay more). Of that total, 1,200 had opted to pay a reduced rate at an average of 3€ a month. In addition to the paying partners, another 4,900 are paying nothing.
The founder and CEO Ignacio Escolar said in the announcement that the new policy is “in line with the philosophy of elDiario.es from the beginning: “that no one should be left without news and information for lack of money.” Again, the concept is of news as a public service.
(I wrote about elDiario.es’s business model last summer.)
Google recommendation to publishers: let users choose the price. In a podcast with Digiday last month, Amy Adams Harding of Google advised publishers to let their users decide what their content was worth. This option increases payment rates significantly, according to metrics that the search company has collected and summarized for publishers.
When asking people to subscribe or donate, Adams Harding recommended giving them three price options: low, middle, and high. It is a subtle nudge toward the middle price, and it also lets donors feel that they are in control.
FairPay: let users set their own price. Dick Reisman is an inventor who worked for decades in the digital commerce space. During an interview last month, he told me about his FairPay subscription model, which is user centered: the user determines the value.
Reisman’s FairPay is really a design at this point, not a working application. The concept is based on behavioral economics and game theory. It allows both the publisher and the user to negotiate what they think is a fair price.
The FairPay design eliminates the risk for a subscriber, and is more efficient than the typical flat-rate, all-you-can-eat subscription model, Reisman said. It has the potential to attract more subscribers, he believes.
Reisman is looking for businesses/entrepreneurs/programmers who can bring the concept into reality. He is donating his time.
Publishers show trust by allowing choice
All four of these models build on the trend of news publications to move toward a public service model. The goals are sustainability and loyal relationships, not necessarily delivering a profit to investors or owners.
But clearly, profit-oriented publishers could follow some of the guidelines of Google and FairPay to design payment systems that would make it easy for users to decide what they are willing to pay.
When publishers allow the choice, they show they trust their users. Publishers then make it possible for more people to choose to pay, even if it is a small amount. When they have more loyal users, they have a community, not just consumers. At the heart of it all is mutual trust.