Having A Paid Content Strategy To Boost Monetisation

We are witnessing the booming of paid content. That’s because, having a paid content strategy in today’s market is an absolute must among all the publishers. There is a wide array of reasons for this, but the most important one is that readers are actually interested in paying for digital content. The best example of this concept can be seen among streaming services. These services became so strong in the last decade that they are now able to produce TV shows of their own.

At first, this trend was particularly popular among the younger population. Now we can see that its popularity constantly grows within all the age groups. If we take a look from the publisher’s perspective, we can see that this concept provides them with a stable and long-term source of income. This was the reason we’ve decided to provide answers to some major questions regarding the paid content strategy and see how publishers can start practicing it effectively and how to reap the benefits in the shortest time possible.

The Benefits of Digital Growth

During the global pandemic of coronavirus, we witnessed a significant growth of information requirements. With a majority of the countries being under lock-down, news sites doubled the traffic they had before the crisis. Sadly, we saw that these numbers didn’t reflect on the advertising revenue. So, many news sites started cutting their budgets for advertising.

For a good number of years, paid content was used as compensation for the major drop of print edition revenue in the last couple of decades. At the same time, instead of a traditional, printing concept, a lot of the media continued their lives through digital forms. It was proved that digital growth is possible if there is a proper paid content strategy behind it.

What is Paid Content?

Paid content strategy has the task of increasing the publisher’s profit through digital content. This is a new channel that provides notable income. Moreover, it should be said that this is a concept that provides a whole new quality to the publisher, regardless of their number of readers and reach. Over the years, we could see that this is a truly important channel for all the new sites that were able to achieve significant revenue through subscriptions.

The best quality of paid content strategy is that the publishers are able to learn about user behavior. This is an essential element that provides a new virtue to the customer relationship. It can be provided with personalized communication or an extra content that will be interesting to the readers. Publishers can make strategies that are aiming exactly for their readers, which leads to an increased number of subscriptions.

How to Spot a Successful Paid Content Strategy?

It is important to understand that there is no outline for creating a successful paid content strategy. All of them are unique since they target different audiences. Nevertheless, the goal is the same for all of them, and that is creating a relationship with readers. So, based on readers and their preferences, publishers are able to predict the next steps. Even though there still are some publishers who didn’t implement this strategy, we believe that its necessity will actually make them use it in the future.

Types of Paid Content

There are a couple of types of paid content models. One of the most popular ones is freemium. The readers are able to read all the free content but are required to subscribe to additional content. The next model we would like to discuss is metering. This model offers a certain amount of free content before the paywall appears. The combination of these two models is a possibility, which is called a hybrid model.

How to Start a Successful Paid Content Strategy

In case you haven't implemented a paid content strategy, we would highly recommend you to do it. Also, we would say it is important to introduce it to your readers slowly in order not to scare them away. The best way for you to introduce it is through a registration wall. This way you are going to be able to convert your readers into subscribers. This is a much easier thing to do than making an anonymous reader a subscriber.