Paywall

Behind the NYT Paywall: Six Lessons for Publishers of Any Size

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The New York Times recently issued a report on their third quarter performance, which exceeded expectations. The Times now boasts more than three million digital subscribers, and their revenue from digital subscriptions was up 18 percent to $101.2 million for the quarter. This represents the ninth straight quarter of growth for the publisher—an impressive figure …

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What Drives Subscribers, In Their Own Words | The Sterling Woods Group

What Drives Subscribers, In Their Own Words

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As a content creator, you understand the time and effort that goes into creating a valuable and thoughtful product. It’s your livelihood, it’s something you’re passionate about, and it’s likely something you sometimes struggle to monetize. The digital display ad market is not a viable way forward for publishers. With advertisers dedicating their dollars and …

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Use Technology & Strategy to Leverage Online Revenue Growth | The Sterling Woods Group

The Right Way to Use Technology to Maximize Online Revenue Growth

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This Spring, I’ll be publishing a new book entitled A Member Is Worth a Thousand Visitors: A Proven Method For Making More Money Online. The book is anchored by a discussion of the five forces of online revenue growth through memberships. My team and I identified these forces over the past two and a half …

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How to Make Money Online Once Google Starts Blocking Your Ads

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There are big changes coming down the line for online publishers in 2018. As more and more large publishers move to diversify their revenues and as digital ad growth slows even for industry giants, organizations at the top of the advertising food chain are exploring how to keep businesses profitable. Perhaps the greatest sign of …

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Caitlin Roman, Subscriptions Product Manager for Medium talks about the new membership and partner program | The Sterling Woods Group

Medium Is Fixing the Broken Ad Model: An Interview with Caitlin Roman

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Early last year, Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams declared the current media model broken, pointing out how ad-based publishing tends to encourage clicks more than high-quality content creation. If you’ve been following the Sterling Woods blog, you already know we agree. Digital advertising isn’t inherently bad, but it does support tech giants more than …

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Hiding Behind the Paywall: What Content Customers Will Pay For

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Niche publishers tend to have a lot of fear about hiding any of their content behind a paywall. I often hear the same concerns over and over from my clients. Perhaps you’re hitting one of these mental roadblocks right now yourself. But first and foremost, these fears are myths we can debunk. 1. No one …

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Boost Digital Subscriptions with a Free Trial of Your Content

Driving Paid Digital Content: Tradeoffs Across Various Trial Models

Conversion, Free, Marketing Strategy, Optimization, Paywall / By

If you’ve ever gone fishing, you know that when you hook a fish, you need to reel it in quickly. But not too quickly, either. Moving too fast or not fast enough can cause you to lose your catch entirely. Subscription conversions are a lot like catching a big fish. In order to monetize your …

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The Top Performing Articles on the Sterling Woods Blog

Been Living Under a Rock? Catch Up on the Sterling Woods Blog!

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It’s hard to keep up with all the content you love. We live in a largely post-RSS feed world, where we spend more time Googling the specific answers we need rather than subscribing to a single source for it. So if you’ve missed what’s been going on with the Sterling Woods blog lately, here’s the …

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