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Take a Peek:
Pay-Per View Best Practices Emerge from the SIIA Brown
Bag |
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24
November 2003 |
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The latest
SIIA Brown Bag Lunch was entitled "Subscription,
Ad-Supported, Paid Search….BUT Where is the Pay-Per-View
Business Model in the Mix?" The implication is that in the
midst of the latest buzz about new ways of paying for
content pay-per-view has been lost a bit in the picture. In
a backhanded way that's a good thing, indicating that
pay-per-view has moved from its own trendiness to a working
range of successful business models with proven best
practices to share. And share is just what senior
management from Dun & Bradstreet, OVID, Alacra and
MarketResearch.com did - revealing four unique approaches to
successful single sales of premium content. |
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Good old pay-per-view. It's hard
to believe that in just a few short years this online content
marketing strategy has evolved from a "radical" concept rattling
the windows of subscription-based professional content services to a way of
doing business that many professionally-oriented content
companies are embracing for incremental revenues
and brand extension. For some, selling premium content one item
at a time is a way to grab easy money from customers who would
otherwise be untapped via traditional professional content
subscriptions; for others, it's a way to identify and engage
potential premium clients for upselling; and for some
adventurous souls, it's becoming a cornerstone of responding to
the just-in-time needs of professionals tackling their
immediate business requirements. Whatever one's perspective on
pay-per-view, it's become a fixture of content marketing that
is fast becoming an inherent part of the professional content
business.
At the latest
SIIA Brown Bag Lunch, a broad and representative
cross-section of these outlooks on selling
professionally-oriented content via the pay-per-view model were
represented in a panel moderated by Hal Espo of Contextual
Connections: Adam Bernacki, leader of Electronic Licensing at
Dun & Bradstreet,
Steven Goldstein, CEO of
Alacra,
Inc., Robert Granader, CEO of
MarketResearch.com and Scott MacFarland, Vice
President of Content Product Management for
OVID Technologies, Inc. D&B,
Alacra and MarketResearch.com have all been exploiting the
pay-per-view model on the open Web for all comers as well as serving
its institutional clients, while OVID has yet to test the
waters of open Internet access for selling content. But for all
of these firms the growing strength of pay-per-view as a part
of their online strategy is evident. Here are a few of the key
lessons that percolated up through this intriguing senior
discussion:
- Pay-per-view doesn't have to mean
cheap or cheapened content. While relatively high prices
for by-the-drink premium content are in some ways a buffer
against fears of cannibalizing existing subscriber bases,
they seem to have become accepted by the individual
purchasers in professional and consumer markets and not a
detriment to the success of these services. In fact, the
model seems to work best for professional content when prices
are kept at a significant premium. Robert Granader of
MarketResearch.com notes far more service issues and
questions for their $50 reports than they do for $3,000
reports from elite research firms. In other words, if your
content is priced so inexpensively that people will wonder
why they shouldn't just get it from an open Web site, chances
are they will, or bother you to the point that you wish that
they would. Steve Goldstein of Alacra sees the $100 range as
the general point of sanity for selling individual items, and
this seems to be echoed by D&B's typical $117 online reports.
- Pay-per-view doesn't mean the same
business model selling singly. Perhaps the hardest
transition for traditional content companies to make in
adopting a pay-per-view model is responding to a whole
different range of expectations and service requirements that
extend far beyond the addition of a "shopping cart"
capability. Unlike a subscription service, where interface
weaknesses do not necessarily lead to immediate loss of
sales, getting the human side of service right is essential
to success in a pay-per-view world. Scott MacFarland related
how OVID did extensive human factors testing to get the
heuristics of online service right to both encourage online
sales and to meet the expectations of a client base that was
largely already a part of their subscription service. Others
like MarketResearch.com have built their service model from
the bottom-up around servicing single sales, providing
affordable slices of large reports and making sure that any
questions regarding a premium product can be answered
promptly by the service staff directly or by referring to the
content supplier. For D&B, it has meant making content
available to some people who would have otherwise never had a
reason to do business with D&B - a consumer or local business
doing a background check on a local company, for example. For
OVID, it has meant looking at existing content sets and
considering how different ways of slicing content by topics
rather than by suppliers may service specific needs
efficiently. Whatever the challenges, the human side of
providing content is as key a factor in pay-per-view's
success as the content itself.
- Pay-per-view doesn't need to be a
sideline business. For OVID and D&B, pay-per-view is
still something of a sideshow, representing no more than ten
percent of their revenues - typical for many providers of
professional content who are heavily committed to enterprise
subscriptions and bulk sales. But for MarketResearch.com,
it's been the core of their business from the beginning and
the foundation of an upselling strategy that allows them to
identify likely prospects in the incoming stream of
professional single-purchase clients who can benefit from
streamlined purchasing plans that in effect provide them with
a profitable subscription base. Techniques such as search
engine optimization are key to ensuring that they're finding
and addressing these professionals in the right public
venues. On the other hand, Alacra has moved from a focus on
subscription-based access to content through its content
aggregation and document assembly tools to a model that sees
a third of its revenues coming from professionals such as
"big four" consulting firms and lawyers who buy content for
specific client projects and then bill the cost of the
content through to the project - and, typically, the client.
This "just-in-time" approach to managing the cost of content
may not be practical for many other business situations in
the range of current business models, but expect that
businesses will find this concept to be more intriguing as
they try to match the cost of revenue opportunities more
closely to the intellectual materials required to discover
and exploit those opportunities.
Where does pay-per-view go from here?
Hopefully to some more adventuresome business models that were
hardly hinted at this time around. If pay-per-view is a date
and a full-blown corporate subscription a marriage, there is a
broad array of relationships that these companies have barely
started to exploit in any meaningful way. Tasty fare for the
next round of Brown Bag topics, no doubt.
-
John Blossom
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