“The third country we are launching in July will be much larger than the two we already have combined,” CEO Tomas Bella told me during our on-stage panel discussion at paidContent 2012.

“That will be where we want to prove this can work in bigger countries as well.”

Piano claimed first-month sales of €40,000 ($50,000) in Slovakia and €26,000 ($33,000) in Slovenia. Several major publishers have placed on average up to a tenth of their web content in to the independent system, which costs €3.90 per month in Slovakia and €4.89 in Slovenia.

There is a question mark over whether Piano can replicate even these small numbers outside its own back yard. But Bellas is betting on operating in six or seven countries by next year, as publishers’ willingness to charge continues growing.

“We are struggling to scale the company because the size of one publisher in this (third) country is the size of all the publishers in the other two countries.

“After we prove this in September and October, we still have a lot of demand from other countries.”

And he explained how some Piano publishers are making about a third of their money from payments now:

“Media which put 20 to 30 percent of their content are at three, four, five percent of conversion to paying users.

“The best ones are getting 30 to 40 percent of their online revenues from this source after one year.”

For publishers, the microsurveys are “basically a substitute for a paywall,” said product manager Paul McDonald. When a user clicks on an article that would normally be behind a paywall, he or she can answer a question instead of paying for a digital subscription.

Google already has a paid content product, Google One Pass, that lets publishers sell digital subscriptions, but Google Consumer Surveys is different because it doesn’t require customers to purchase subscriptions or log in.

Google pays publishers $0.05 for each survey response, with publishers seeing average revenues of $15 per thousand page views, McDonald said.

So far Google has around 20 publishing partners and is looking for more. When I first tested the product on the LimaOhio.com website, I couldn’t get the surveys to appear. McDonald asked me if I had my AdBlock app on. I did, and when I turned it off, the surveys popped up. “It’s a loose paywall,” McDonald admitted, and “a very small percentage of users use AdBlock.”

Google can pay publishers because advertisers and small businesses are paying to run the questions. These companies “have market research needs that are not met by existing solutions,” in part because traditional market research is so expensive, McDonald said. “This is market research that is self-serve but has the same qualities of a high-end platform.”

The customers create surveys and select the audience who will see the questions. Questions seen by a broad audience representing the general U.S. population are $0.10 per response (with a minimum total cost of $100). If companies want to drill down by demographic or select a custom audience with a screening question, the cost is $0.50 per response.

Once a survey launches, customers have access to a custom reporting dashboard that lets them see how different demographics answered their question.

The tool can be used by anyone (including a reporter in search of data). Companies like Lucky Brand Jeans, King Arthur Flour and Timbuk2 are using it now.

In the latest refinement to its market strategy, Spotify in many countries is now abolishing a five-free-plays-per-track limit it introduced last year.

The limit was implemented along with a 10-hours-per-month free listening cap one year ago, apparently at labels’ behest, as they ratcheted up pressure on Spotify to bring them paying subscribers. Even Spotify staff, reluctantly implementing the measure, called it a “very tough day”.

Now, however, the service is dropping the plays limit in Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Spain, according to MusicAlly, and in the United States. The 10-hours limit stays in Europe.

What has changed? In short, Facebook has become a key conversion tool.

Spotify isn’t saying it along with this announcement, but all media services which announced controversial integration with Facebook’s frictionless sharing system last fall have seen a big influx in usage.

Facebook is a massive funnel that is bringing operators hot business prospects – potential customers. These incomers are unlikely to pay immediately – to convert them to pay, developing a free relationship is essential.

That is the mantra Spotify has successfully preached to labels. And it is one which rivals Mog and Rdio adopted in September when, on the same day ahead of Facebook’s announcement, they each introduced new free options alongside their paid services.

The abolition of the five-plays-per-track limit indicates Spotify’s label pay-masters are becoming more and more comfortable with allowing some free, unlimited listening if it ultimately brings them more paid custom. But the free part in isolation is a business concept some artists remain uncomfortable with.

When Spotify launched in the US in June 2011, it gave users a six-month, all-free access period. By year’s end, those free users were due to have hit limits.

But, as paidContent first reported in January, Spotify, fresh from the Facebook implementation, had never actually put these roadblocks in front of anyone. Today’s announcement confirms that this approach is indefinite.

This is the latest in what has been a yo-yoing freemium strategy for Spotify since its 2008 launch.

It initially limited new sign-ups whilst it managed growth. After an initial period of unlimited free, Spotify then introduced a 20-hours-per-month limit before halving it to 10 hours.

Finding the balance between free and paid is an interesting challenge, including finding the tolerance of free users toward free monetisation methods. Clear Channel (OTCBB: CCMO) says it will delay adding in-stream ads to its iHeartRadio service after noting complaints about the frequency of ads in Pandora’s free streams.

“There are a lot of negative comments about in-stream ads,” Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman says (via AP). “When you’re in your music collection, you want to escape from the world. It’s a completely different experience”

Piano Media, which gives access to 70 sites across the two countries for a single fee, aims to be in 19 countries by 2014, founder TomáÅ¡ Bella told The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit in this excellent quick presentation on Wednesday.

So far, Piano has made relative peanuts – €40,000 in Slovakia and €26,000 in Slovenia in their first respective months – explaining that these are relatively small countries with low internet populations.

“The third country we will launch in has tens of millions of internet users,” Bella said.

“We are 20 people – we might be 50 by the end of the year.”

By Bella’s maths, those small early returns could pay dividends for publishers: “In the first month, you can afford 25 to 40 journalists.”

Piano’s trick of aggregating rival publishers in a single bundle like cable TV is a feat which may be difficult to repeat in larger markets, where publishers are super-competitive toward each other and where “cartel” fears might discourage publisher interest. “In Slovakia, we made sure they never meet in the same room,” Bella joked.

None of the participating publishers have used Piano to make their sites paid in their entirety; only sections representing a small percentage of total content have become chargeable.

There is no shortage of paid content platforms being touted to increasingly receptive publishers nowadays. The Piano platform took funding late last year for this global expansion. Now we will get to see if Piano is a locally-specific phenomenon or whether it can be replicated elsewhere.

Users pay €4.90 ($6.4/£4.07) per month for access to new paid parts of all nine participating sites from the country’s main publishers.

So I calculate Piano has 5,306 paying customers in Slovenia. But Piano CEO TomáÅ¡ Bella tells paidContent: “53,00 customers is not the correct number since weekly and yearly subscriptions are also included in the 26,000 figure.

He did not specify actual consumer numbers. The company does say more than 25,000 Slovenians had pre-registered with Piano.

“Slovenian Piano publishers are earning more than €1,500 ($1959.3/£1247.1) per 100,000 users compared to just over €1,100 ($1436.82/£914.54) in Slovakia,” Bella. But that may be because Piano charges more in Slovenia than in Slovakia, where the monthly price recently raised from €2.90 ($3.79/£2.41) to €3.90. ($5.09/£3.24)

These numbers are small by many standards. Bella says critics would note that the countries’ internet populations are relatively small.

“If you consider that most websites were free one month earlier then these are really great results,” Bella says.

In Slovakia, Piano had made €40,000 ($52,248/£33,256) in its debut month. But Slovenia’s internet population is half the size of Slovakia’s.

Just as in Slovakia, where Piano now has 50 sites from 12 publishers, participating publishers put only a minority of their content in to the Piano system.

Telegraph Media Group, whose current iPhone and Android apps are free, will shortly unveil replacements that will be “free” only to Telegraph print subscribers (£7 per week) and iPad subscribers (£9.99 per month).

Those who want only the mobile app will get a one-month free trial before a mobile-only fee kicks in, but The Telegraph is not disclosing that pricepoint until release in the next few weeks.

New features include a deal with ESPN (NYSE: DIS), whose own Goals mobile app shows Premier League goal highlight videos, to include the same.

No Telegraph web fee has yet been implemented despite 2011 chatter.

Meanwhile, Sky News has upgraded its iPhone app with incremental feature enhancements but no new business strategy.

The broadcaster’s iPad big cousin requires a £4.99 per month subscription or a BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) satellite account. But the upgraded iPhone app remains free.

The new one includes galleries, timelines, interactive graphs, a technology news section and article swiping.

The Telegraph’s strategy is a full realisation of a model its counterpart Guardian also operates but doesn’t execute as full as it might. Although The Guardian’s iPhone app requires subscription, Guardian advertising promotes its free mobile website and not the app.

Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.

“The term of protection should be one year,” according to the committee.

“Commercial traders out there such as search engines and news aggregators should pay a fee to the publishers in the future for the distribution of press products (such as newspaper articles) on the internet.”

This could bring Germany in to line with the UK, where the Newspaper Licensing Agency (originally formed to charge royalties on photocopies of news clippings that are used commercially) now requires commercial news aggregators and their customers each pay a license to, respectively, process and receive summaries of newspapers’ online articles.

As in the UK, Germany is proposing “normal” private re-users of web news article summaries be exempt from royalties. But, whilst the UK mechanism avoids charging Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News because it targets only pay-for news aggregators, Germany’s proposal mentions both search engines and news aggregators.

The debate over whether search engines should pay for the privilege of crawling and using excerpts has been a long-running one that Google has sought to contain on multiple fronts…

Belgian newspapers won a European court case forcing Google to stop excerpting stories, demanding a phenomenal €49 million in damages. They even sued the European Commission for the same thing.

Since then, Germany’s publishing industry has been lobbying lawmakers for action, too…

In 2009, Germany hosted some 169 publishing execs (149 of them German) who signed what they called the Hamburg Declaration on Intellectual Property Rights – effectively a lobbying attempt on Europe’s then-media commissioner that complained: “Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it.”

A year later, Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) complained to the federal government about Google’s use of snippets.

Now the German coalition, in its legislative attempt, is weighing heavily the fact that newspaper publishers are facing hard economic times.

Legal firm Pinsent Mason’s Out-Law site, which first reported the government’s intention, writes: “The European Court of Justice ruled in 2009 that ‘isolated sentences’ or even parts of sentences were copyright-protectable if they conveyed ‘to the reader the originality of a publication such as a newspaper article, by communicating to that reader an element which is, in itself, the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of that article’.”

paidContent has learned the BBC executive wants to make all its shows available as download-to-own (DTO) at prices including £1.89 per show, under a scheme called Project Barcelona.

It has been negotiating for rights with independent producers that make some of the shows. They support the aims of the scheme, believing it could represent a new revenue opportunity and a defence against piracy.

But the producers, through their umbrella organisation Pact, have so far declined to give their outright blessing, citing uncertainty over revenue share, exclusivity and the potential for cannibalising DVD sales. They have asked for more detailed assurances.

The project, which has not been announced, could be one of the most radical in the BBC’s 85-year history. UK viewers already pay an £145.50 annual license fee under the BBC’s Royal Charter.

Currently, new TV and radio shows are available to watch or listen to again via the multi-platform iPlayer service for up to 30 days after transmission. After that period, rights are passed to the commercial outfit BBC Worldwide or back to shows’ original producers, who each license them to commercial services including iTunes Store and Blinkbox for paid consumer access.

But the BBC is upset that only seven percent of its archive repertoire is available through third parties in this way. So it wants to make the remaining 93 percent available through an own-brand service. The most notable departure is that even new shows from the public service window, not just old classics, would be available for paid download immediately after transmission. A previous news report had said the scheme would leverage only archive.

The BBC is promising producers a greater share of episode download prices than iTunes Store – an average £0.40 on a £1.89 episode fee compared with £0.28 from iTunes, which takes a 30 percent commission. The corporation would handle operational costs like encoding on producers’ behalf. It thinks it can unlock at least £13 million in revenue in the next five years for independent producers.

According to information seen by paidContent, the project is “about making what is effectively seen as non-commercial programming available to the market at a price and ease of use that will encourage consumers to purchase programmes that the commercial market would not make available due to the poor returns and risk involved”.

Some indies do not want to give exclusive rights to Barcelona. The BBC has promised producers can also go on licensing their own shows elsewhere – for example, to iTunes.

Even if the BBC wins suppliers’ eventual full backing, its executive must still put the scheme forward for the approval of the regulating BBC Trust, which, upon public consultation, would likely hear opposition to any plans to charge a secondary fee for publicly-funded BBC content.

If approved, Barcelona could lay groundwork for a pay-for BBC in a post-analogue, post-linear world. But, so far, it concerns only the download-to-own market – a model that may yet diminish as streaming alternatives, which provide cloud-based access but not ownership, grow in popularity.

After previously capping the BBC license fee, the UK government recently urged the BBC to generate more money for itself.

The BBC later told paidContent: “In addition to BBC iPlayer, the BBC already makes some of its content available on a download-to-own (DTO) basis.

“Any proposal to extend this facility would require not just the support of the industry but formal approval by the BBC executive and the BBC Trust.”

“Yahoo has 700 million users each month,” Yahoo’s EMEA SVP and MD Rich Riley told the FT Digital Media Conference on Wednesday, when asked about direction. “Today, we’re virtually exclusively focused on display and search advertising.

“There are a lot of adjacent business models around that, whether it’s virtual goods in gaming, subscripton content. There are also more things that our core customers spend money on that we don’t offer today.

“Scott is suggesting it will be smart for us to offer other things to the portfolio. E-commerce would certainly be one of the big opportunities that’s close to the model we have today.”

Riley did not comment on timescale nor on rumoured restructuring. But Thompson is “preparing a massive restructuring of the company, including layoffs that are likely to number in the thousands”, according to AllThingsD, amid reports Yahoo’s product team is set for a shake-up and its product management SVP is leaving.

If Thompson is seeking fresh ideas about new revenue opportunities, injecting new product talent makes sense. Developing business streams other than ad-supported page views is also logical, in a world where ad rates are diminishing and, aside from search, ad-exposed eyeballs are moving rapidly to Facebook.

But what lays ahead for Yahoo? The areas Riley mentioned – virtual gaming goods, subscription content and e-commerce – have naturally all been done before. It also sounds like a grab-bag of hot ideas that are working for some other operators out there. Yahoo recently enlisted Boston Consulting Group to give it some ideas, reported AllThingsD, which also said Riley is helping Thompson scout for new product talent.

In e-commerce, Yahoo already has its own Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) clone, Yahoo Deals. But audience response to paid content is warming, and 700 million people is ample audience to try converting some to cough up not just eyeballs but cash.

Google is setting up a stall and workshops for the initiative at Games Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, just two blocks from where Apple is expected to unveil its latest iPad this week.

In recent weeks, Google enabled in-app payments in 17 more countries in eight currencies and simplified the process of creating a new Google Wallet account, which is required.

In-app payments have set a light under mobile gaming, ensuring developers can benefit from free downloads whilst profiting later from self-contained in-app purchases. That has put a rocket under titles like Angry Birds.

On iOS, which launched in-app payments in October 2009, the method made up half of the revenue of the top 200 grossing apps, according to Distimo. For Android, which launched in-app payments in March 2011 and takes a five percent cut for Google, that was 65 percent, Distimo said.

Payments subsequent to download are particularly important for Android because, compared with iOS, fewer Android users are likely to pay for initial app downloads.