It’s been proven time and again that presenting a soft friction point, such as a rich brand interaction, in front of premium content, or a premium feature, is a proven best practice that generates high monetization and user loyalty, while also producing a secondary bell curve of subscriber conversion in the fence-sitter and late-payer consumer set.

This is not an experiment, it’s a bankable best practice proven out by publishers in the innovator and early adopter categories.

Maybe take a cue from the music industry: Get out of subscription-package pricing (album) and go for micro payments just for content the reader wants (buying individual songs cheap).

I’m thinking cheap. Very cheap. IMPULSE cheap. As in, “Yeah, I can probably find this news/info elsewhere, but hell, it’s only XX cents here and now and easily, and they write sufficiently well, so what the hey.”

Take a cue from Amazon and make it ONE-CLICK easy.

Problem: Payment processing costs will be prohibitive. Possible solution: Pre-sell credits, so instead of paying XX cents to read an article and processing a CC charge each time, reader just pays with credits or points. May help stimulate even more impulse buying behavior… Incentive: Make costs per credit cheaper when reader buys more of them at a time. (20 credits = $5 or 40 credits for $9 or so on so forth).

Maybe allow readers to sell back credits (at a loss) if they no longer want them. Not too big of a loss but enough to make them think twice before cashing out. Gives them a little out for the warm fuzzies that’ll get them to tie up funds buying bulk credits in the first place.

Maybe minimize the need to hassle with figuring out pricing based on popularity. Best writers or even topics will earn the most credits from the readers. The system has built-in metrics!!! (Author celebrity different story; publisher may want to charge more to access them).

Hmm. OK, thinking out loud done. Have fun!

I think they are doing this “personal paywall” :))

Implicit in the proposed model is that as a consumer I will expect to pay less for access to one individual’s content, say $x, than for a bundle of all a publication’s writers, $z which = $x+$y.

The publisher could choose to market access to the star individual as costing $z which includes FREE access to all other content. I.e. The price remains the same just the marketing has changed. Or indeed make $z the new starting price for one author and $z+$y for everything.

This is made trickier being the anchor price for stuff on the internet is commonly zero.