MarketingSherpa Blog

Just got an email from David Spiselman, CEO CyclopsMedia.com, in which he referred to “pBooks.” What are they? Print Books. Ohhhh.

Two ContentBlog readers, Adam Gaffin, Executive Editor Network World Fusion, and Shirl Kennedy, self-described Writer, librarian, and online copyright whiplash victim, have written in to say there are common work-arounds to break the No Right Click DRM function easily.

However, as my Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman says, “Yes they exist, but the majority of people are like you Anne, too technically clueless and/or just plain honest to use them.”

I still think the no right click DRM is an idea worth exploring for publishers worrying about copyright online. Let’s face it, every type of DRM is breakable by someone. Maybe perfect DRM is not a rational goal. Good enough DRM is. For many purposes a simple solution will be ok 80% of the time, so why not use it?

Please feel very sorry for Michael Zimbalist, Executive Director Online Publishers Association, right now because when the poor guy called me up for our scheduled 4 P.M. chat about their (free access 17-page PDF) Online Paid Content Report I was far too caffeinated and coming off 3 different editorial deadlines (plus dealing with realtors all day) which equals an obnoxiously hyper, fast-talking, aggressive Anne. In heels.

The fact that he and Dan Hess of comScore were unremittingly pleasant is entirely to their credit.

My notes:

1. For a while Zimbalist didn’t quite get why it’s a problem to lump B2B content and personal finance stuff into a single category. (Little veins popping out on my forehead.) But he agrees to divide the B2B from B2C for future reports if at all possible. Part of the problem is that while B2B is a gargantuan category, it’s largely the hidden end of the iceberg. Most paid B2B titles have so few subscribers in comparison with the masses subscribing to B2C stuff, that comScore’s panel may not catch a representative sampling.

Also, there’s some understandable confusion over whether WSJ.com is B2B or B2C. They straddle both categories, but I believe consider themselves B2C because most subscriptions are paid for by individuals (vs. companies) and they publish news of more mass-interest than the typical super-niche B2B title.

Why am I so passionate on the separation issue? Well traditionally personal finance titles (and all other b2c topics) tend to have very different subscription-related metrics than B2B titles do. Roughly, consumer stuff sells vastly more units at lower prices with lower renewal rates and profit margins.

However, “vastly more units” doesn’t equal “vastly more important” unless all you care about is mass eyeballs. The subscription biz is about profitable eyeballs. Which is completely different. OK, rant over for now.

2. “Single purchases accounted for 15% of content sales” – everybody I know said “Wah? Are they talkin’ about ebooks?”
Zimbalist says no, he’s talking about electronically delivered reports, collected archives, research papers… I said, “i.e.
eBooks.”

He admitted there’s a big honking grey area here. We both agreed that it made no sense for future reports to expand to cover all ebooks because that’s a different industry. At the same time I didn’t think he should cut single sales out entirely because in the print sub world, these single sale items can add up to 40% on average of your total gross, and are often much more profitable than subscription sales. (In fact some publishers rely on them for all their profit. The subscription is a loss leader to get people involved with your brand and amenable to buying other stuff.)

In the future, they’ll probably continue to limit single sales counted to just stuff sold by subscription sites to subscribers (if that’s possible). Also Zimbalist says the whole including gift certificate purchases associated with ecard subscriptions was a mistake and won’t happen again.

3. Trial conversions. The excessive-sounding 17% conversion cited in the report was the result of mainly (but not all) B2C sites getting an up-front credit card to start free trial. Zimbalist agreed it would make better sense to split out this number based on whether the cc is gotten up front or not in future reports, because the conversion rate can vary so dramatically that it makes a merged number semi-worthless.

He also agreed to look into whether they could track conversions from free email newsletters. He hadn’t realized this was the #1 way many, many, many online publishers market subscriptions to prospects. Obviously this number is critical for projecting business success.

#4. Tracking newbie content buyers versus people who’ve bought content before. Call me greedy, but if OPA has access to comScore’s research talents I absolutely hope they’ll expand tracking to see if people who’ve bought online subscriptions before are more likely to buy again than the average newbie. In the ’90s, loads of reports showed that after people finally cracked and bought for the first time online, they then became much more likely to convert into buyers at site after site. I hope comScore can collect similar numbers, newbies versus oldies, for future reports that will in turn give us a much better sense of how high content sales in general can soar.

Link to OPA report PDF (17 pages)

http://www.onlinepublishers.org/opa_paid_content_report_final.pdf

http://www.comscore.com

My link for the week is this utterly fabulous article “ 21 Truths About Generating Qualified Leads” by Lee Marc Stein. If you are a B2B marketer who has to generate sales leads for your sales team, this is the 101 basic article for you. Handy, reality-based, and fun to read.

Color me technically incompetent, but I never realized until 5 seconds ago that you can stop people from cutting and pasting content from your public site. If you didn’t either, check this cool function out at copywriter Lee Marc Stein’s site. Just highlight a bit of text in the article there and then right-click with your mouse to begin copying it. Whoops! Up comes this little grey official-looking box that reads “(c) Protection. The RightClick function has been disabled. Please contact Lee Marc Stein for authorization to use this material.”

Here, unfortunately the glory of this as a content licensing marketing tool ceases, at least for Stein, because when you click the ‘OK” button, instead of sending you to an authorization request or purchase form, the darn thing sends you back to the article. Hey iCopyright.com and CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) guys, this is something you should build in to feed to your online article buying systems. I bet for some publishers it would
be a nice little ancillary revenue generator. Ooh, ooh, do you think it could work for people who try to hit print too?

http://www.leemarcstein.com/truths.htm

I just got an email marketing campaign with the subject line, “Friend, your dog can be smarter!” This reminded me that in this world of getting HTML versus text, and rich media such as Flash or audio in email, and all the gizmos we can do as e-marketers, when it all comes down to it all that matters is picking the right list, having an offer that your target audience will immediately be enthralled by, and writing hits-the-spot copywriting.

Old fashioned skills still rule.

Last week we started adding “typos” to commonly filtered words in our issues, such as s^pam and f^ree, but it’s turned out to be tougher than you might think just because training yourself to spell that way and remembering to check for it when proofing isn’t second nature yet. Now I guess I have to ask our writers and editors to add auto-change to Word so when they use the correct spelling, it uncorrects it for publication.

Interestingly, our bounce rate of subscribers’ email went down 2/3, from an average of 3% to an average of 1% as soon as we implemented the typos. There were other factors at play, so this number isn’t based on a pure lab test.

M&A trend: Over the past few weeks several would-be online subscription publishers have approached me to ask, “Do you know any subscription sites I could buy?” One last night added, “They should be already be profitable.” Others have told me they don’t
care whether the publisher is online-only or partially print, but there should be some online component.

Most are looking for small-mid-sized firms to buy. A few hundred B2B subscribers or a few thousand B2C subscribers. Something semi-proven that they can come in and grow substantially with their cash and/or publishing wisdom.

Only problem, these smallish pubs are not remotely interested in selling right now. They probably have 3-5 employees, and are making an OK (maybe not thrilling but definitely OK) living at this, plus enjoying the whole work-in-your-PJs lifestyle. They know when the economy improves they’ll probably make an even
better living. If they want to sell, it’s worth waiting until after the recession to do it because right now you won’t get enough return for your sweat equity investment.

Analogy: You never want to sell your beloved house in a down market when you know it will be worth a whole lot more if you wait a bit, plus where the heck would you live if you sold?

The publisher-side folks who have approached me about selling are almost always the ones which are bigger. Folks with dozens of
employees and a higher burn rate. Often profitable, but maybe just on the edge of it. They’ve worked very hard at growing their
service to be as big as possible, thrown some investor money at it, burned the midnight oil, and gotten it to a thin wedge of black. Not the 20% average profit I was used to seeing as normal for a print niche ezine, but not losing money either.

I’m not sure why these guys want to get out of the game now. Maybe because when they started, they expected it to be a 3-year game. Get money, launch, sell. Now that the economy is dragging, it’s obviously gonna take much lonher than anyone thought to become zillionaires with your dot-com site. So perhaps these guys are cutting their losses and moving on to the next opportunity.

Analogy: These are people who buy houses for investment and then flip them and move on to the next one. It’s not about living in
the house, it’s about moving on to the next one.

Anyway, although loads of people have contacted me on either side of the equation, nobody wants to come public in the Blog, yet. If you do, let me know and I’ll post it here.

editor@contentbiz.com

Otherwise, we’re launching a new ContentBiz
membership site in a few weeks where you’ll be able to post stuff like this privately to our members only.

Are you getting links to your site from vendors in your field? Publishers are generally so used to marketing to vendors that it’s weird to think of having vendors market for you. Two best ways:

1. Check to see if the vendors (retailers, suppliers, services) who sell to your niche have their own email newsletters or alerts going out to customers and prospects. Then find a way to get a link to your stories or subscription form from their emails. Perhaps you offer a special report (a collection of several articles from your archives, a tip-sheet, whatever). Perhaps you make sure those vendors editors have easy access to the best links to stories that might fit in their ezine.

We do this with our SherpaWeekly newsletter which is a collection of links to our best stories from the week before. And lots of vendors then pick the links up and mention them in their own newsletters. For example last week, GotMarketing linked to three stories of ours, and we gained more than 300 clicks. At our average conversion rate of 68%, that’s a tidy new group of opt-ins.

2. Never email a complete story to a named source or company that was mentioned on your site. Instead, email them a link to the story. That way they forward the link to their entire company, friends, parents, and not the story.

http://www.sherpaweekly.com
http://www.gotmarketing.com

Home cookware retailer Sur la Table just came up with a clever spin on the whole how-do-I-coordinate-email-and-print-catalog front. I just got an email newsletter issue from them entitled “Sneak preview of our new fall catalog.” Who can resist a sneak peek? The HTML message shows a smallish picture of the front cover of the catalog which you can click on to open it online. Plus the product featured on the front cover of the catalog is also separately pictured with a special price. Nicely done.