Evolve your Content Monetization Approach

Written by : Bharadwaj S

Content monetization can be described as a way of leveraging native content so that, when readers consume it, publishers can earn money. You can regulate this flow of pay through a content monetization tool. This helps you set the right type of paywall while allowing users to subscribe to a suitable plan.

If you have a monetisation tool that is stuck in the past then chances are, your readers know. It's important to ensure that the user experience with subscription remains seamless. A stagnant monetization tool will also make your publishing experience more cumbersome.

You need to find a platform that is not only reliable but also helps you to power through your tasks. With regulated updates and features, you can adopt a tool that ensures safe, secure subscription management without having to worry about it.

While there are several monetization tools in the market, few are designed to facilitate flexible digital publishing. Accesstype , from Quintype, aims to deliver the flexibility publishers need to form the right monetization strategy. It’s a scalable solution that provides a premium interface for publishers and readers alike. As a product developed by a dedicated digital publishing tech company, Accesstype is constantly upgrading and adding features to fit in with the new trends and needs of today’s publishers.

Each of these features were implemented after analysing existing customers needs, and mapping them with the gap analysis done based on research on market opportunity, competitor analysis.

1. IP based access control:

With this feature, publishers can control the access to the digital content to the readers who are part of a set of IP addresses. This gives flexibility to publishers to address Universities/organisations/colleges etc as their subscribers through group subscription plans.

We at Quintype understood that there is a big market out there which can benefit from such features especially at the group level which would help publishers to make huge margins which can indirectly help us with increased revenue inflow.

2. Analytics on dashboard:

Showing publishers the categories as Total Subscribers, renewed/repeat subscribers, new subscribers, Lost/expired subscribers is the most basic of analytics that one expects from their subscription management tool and also very important for Accesstype. This helps publishers to keep track of how their business is doing and take actions accordingly.

With our new enhancements publishers no longer have to individually download subscriber reports and apply filters within to separate this count and then take it to their respective leadership/teams. With this new analytics dashboard it is now possible to know these numbers in a jiffy without much effort.

3. New Payment gateway:

With a tech partner in the EU bringing in a new client to Accesstype from Finland, it became very important for Accesstype to be able to support one of the most commonly used Payment gateway in and around Finland. With that approach we implemented and onboarded a Adyen Payment Gateway which is famous in that part of the world. This helped us close a deal and expand our Ops in the EU.

4. Subscriber Metadata:

AT always allowed publishers to collect custom metadata [ex: address, phone#, pincode etc] but never saved them at the subscriber level. Rather this was tied to a plan that an individual subscriber purchased resulting in not being able to pre-populate it when the same subscriber tried to buy another plan or renew the same plan. Subscriber had to manually enter this metadata info every time they buy a plan.

We have now changed this approach to save this information at the subscriber level. This will also help our front end products [PageBuilder] to get this info about the subscriber using the GET API call and show them in the profile section on the website.This will also help in pre-population the metadata information for the subscriber to fasten the transaction with increased user experience.

5. Payment Gateway as an Adaptor:

There was always a dependency on the Accesstype tech team whenever there was a need to add a new Payment Gateway for a client. This is particularly becoming a roadblock and many times extending the client onboarding time. This became worse with reduced workforce etc, to overcome this we came up with an adaptor model which will make it easy for any client to get a new Payment Gateway on to Accesstype.

Clients can now work with their own tech team or outsource to any other tech team to come up with a Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) for a particular PG and share it with AT. AT will then consume the GEM and the whole PG would work for the client. So typically publishers have no dependency on AT to go live with a PG of the choice.

6. Email with Renew CTA:

AT always allowed publishers to make use of its inbuilt email feature which helps them to configure the auto triggered renewal mail to their subscribers based on their subscription expiry duration. Though these mails help subscribers know that their subscription would end but did not have a CTA/straight way to renew the subscription. They would have to manually open the website to renew the plans. This was a huge friction and the chances of subscribers not renewing was high. With the new implementation, we now allow our publishers to have a Renew CTA in the email which would direct the subscribers to their respective plan directly to renew it. This reduces the friction and increases the chances of renewal to our publishers.

7. Customized Plan header for WordPress plugin:

AT can be used as an independent product along with other CMS as it is built with API first approach. WP being the leader in the CMS space capturing more than 70% of the market, we came up with our pugin that could help publishers using WP as their CMS to monetize their content using AT.

Soon after this, we realized that one message does not fit all and every publisher wants to show a custom message that best suits them and their branding. To make this possible we added additional configurations in the plugin which allows publishers to customize their plan header and the messages within.

8. Making login compulsory on WordPress:

AT being the subscription management system does not have a user management module within. It works out of box if a client is using our Bold CMS but for WP it is important that publishers install an additional plugin for this.

Due to this, the user flow was completely broken causing a huge dent in the user experience. A subscriber was able to buy the plan without registering to the system which resulted in them not knowing what to do next post their purchase as they were not getting access to the content.

AT plugin has now been enhanced such that it detects if the user trying to buy a plan is registered/logged in user or not and automatically redirects to the respective page if the user is not logged in. Following login the user is allowed to complete the transaction making sure this whole workflow is streamlined.

9. Enhancement on the Payment Gateway for cancellation:

AT always allowed publishers to cancel a subscription from the dashboard and raise a refund request which would be triggered to the respective PG and the payment method the user had chosen at the time of purchase.

Many of these subscribers started to directly cancel their upcoming renewal/ subscriptions from their PG user page. Since we were not listening to the cancel/refund webhooks coming from PG, these subscriptions were never getting canceled on AT, whereas publishers never used to get their payments due to the standing instructions provided to PG by subscribers.This caused a major problem to both AT team in cancelling these manually based on publishers request and also to publishers as they could clearly see a difference in their subscription count vs revenue inflow. We are now listening to these triggered calls from PG to proactively cancel the plan on AT reducing a lot of issues to both the teams.