Flipboard readers can now access ‘subscriber only’ articles from top publishers using simple micro-payments

No, this is not an actual Flipboard press release. However, it is a press release I would like to see Flipboard publish.

Palo Alto, Calif., July 17, 2018 — Starting today, Flipboard readers can access blocked content without a subscription, by simply paying a few cents for each article they wish to read.

The initial launch of pay-per-article gives readers access to content from: The Washington Post, The New York Time, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Barron’s.

Readers will be prompted to pay 4 to 9 cents per article, and will be billed for each $5 worth of articles they read.

While avid readers of these publications will find it more economical to subscribe, irregular readers will now have the opportunity to enjoy exceptional writing from some of the best journalists in the world.

About Flipboard

Flipboard is an award-winning curation platform, where people go to understand our time and share the stories that are worth our time. On Flipboard quality articles, videos, podcasts and products are curated everyday for millions of people around the world. It is a platform that lets people spend time on their interests, develop deeper understandings and share the best ideas with others by collecting them into their own Flipboard Magazines. Download Flipboard for free in any app store or visit.

Being an avid user of Flipboard, I am often prompted by the publishers called out above, to subscribe once my ‘free articles’ have run out, and not once in over 5 years of heavy use have I seriously considered subscribing. However, I’m certain that if I had been prompted to make a payment of several cents, I would have paid countless times.

Where I come at this from

Let me start by sharing my biases that will influence my ideas for this solution:

• The only traditional publication I subscribe to is the Economist, which I have subscribed to for close to 20 years
• I have been a subscriber to Medium for over a year
• I generally use Flipboard twice a day — my consumption pattern is as follows: Find articles I think are interesting, add them to my Pocket list, then Listen to them using VoiceDream. This is not dissimilar from what Nir Eyal described here.
• Years ago, I launched an app called reedeo that did what VoiceDream does, reading articles saved to Pocket, out loud (post-mortem here)

Why Publishers need pay-per-article, and why Flipboard is the ideal platform to finally make micro-payments a reality

First, let me acknowledge that there is a long history of failed attempts at micro-payments in the publishing industry; but I believe Flipboard’s platform is uniquely suited for succeeding where others have failed.

High barrier to entry

Asking a reader who has read 5 free articles in one month to pay $100 to $200 for a year subscription is a tall order; sure, the cost is shown in dollars per week or month, but most potential readers of these publications can easily multiply that by 10 or 50 in their head!

Many publishers equals many bills

To date, no major publisher has found a way to provide a more graduated approach to payments; for example 30 monthly articles for $20/year; and even if they were able to provide this, the friction caused by having to maintain multiple billing arrangements with multiple publishers becomes too taxing, especially for less frequent readers of numerous paywall publications.

Copy to win

Platforms like iTunes and Amazon Prime video allow TV and film creators an additional channel to monetize their content. Similarly, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu provide an aggregation platform, whereby subscribers can get access to shows and videos from multiple studios. Even companies like HBO, allow viewers to bypass an HBO subscription and purchase shows directly on Amazon.com.

News aggregation platforms like Flipboard, Google News and Apple News, can do for news media companies, what Amazon, Netflix, and Apple have done for studios, provide an additional channel to monetize their content.

In fact, many magazine publishers have already adopted the multi-pronged approach of maintaining direct subscriptions while also publishing to magazine aggregation apps like Texture. These magazine platforms have slightly different payment and revenue models which lend themselves better to that type of content, but magazines have nevertheless realized the benefits of multi-channel distribution.

Functional and Design Considerations

Why micro-payments and not an ‘all you can eat’ subscription

Magazine aggregation apps like Texture can make a compelling case that they do not cannibalize existing subscriptions, because the annual subscription cost of Texture equates to roughly 8 magazine subscriptions. How many people do you know subscribe to 8 magazines? In essence, apps like Texture are going after a different incremental revenue stream than Newspapers, namely the voracious magazine reader.

The economics of Newspapers are different — subscribing to the 5 publications mentioned above, would result in a subscription cost of around $860 a year; there may be a market for this, but it’s clearly not the market I’m trying to help publishers generate incremental revenue from.

Leverage existing mental models for payments

Thanks to Apple iTunes, most people are familiar with micro-payments, who hasn’t paid 99 cents for a song; of course, no one buys songs anymore; but everyone does buy Apps. This willingness to pay for apps was likely made easier by the fact that people had been conditioned to pay for songs.

A more recent evolution in payments is in-app purchases to unlock addition features or to buy virtual goods; Fortnite reportedly made over $1 Billion in such sales; a clear indication of how commonplace in-app purchases have become.

One platform, one bill

Flipboard readers love the personalized mobile optimized experience the app provides to them, and don’t want to install apps from numerous publishers, or worse, navigate to multiple publisher websites on their phones to read the news. Using the same app to read and pay for articles, is as natural as using a same app to listen to and pay for music.

Feature backlog

Once users are conditioned to paying by the article, pricing models could evolve to incorporate:

• Dynamic pricing based on the number of articles consumed, length of article, or even the age of the article
• A monthly fee to access some number articles across multiple publishers, with a limit of no more than 20 from any particular publisher (to minimize cannibalizing annual subscriptions)

When you consider how quickly users evolved from paying for individual songs to paying for a music streaming subscription; its not unreasonable to assume a similar evolution in how people will pay for reading articles. However, unlike today’s un-targeted ‘Subscribe Now’ pop-up, you could intelligently target users with messages and offers crafted to their particular reading habits.

In Summary

It’s more critical than ever that people are able to access exceptional journalism — Flipboard has the perfect platform to delight their readers with this type of content, while also giving the producers of this content a new stream of revenue.

I would be surprised if Flipboard hasn’t already considered and even tested this concept. Nevertheless, I want to add my one customer voice to this enhancement request.

What do you think? Would you like to have the option of paying 7 cents to read an article that really interests you, instead of being prompted for the 20th time to pay $10/month to subscribe?

Appendix

The elephants in the room

While this post has mostly focussed on Flipboard, there is nothing that would prevent Apple and Google from offering similar functionality in their news apps; in fact, given the fees both these companies’ platforms charge other apps for in-app purchases, this model could very well serve as a means to prevent 3rd party apps (like Flipboard) from providing the functionality called out above in an economic way. Put another way, I’m a bit surprised neither Apple nor Google has pursued micro-payments to gain a competitive advantage in the news reader market.