LeMonde, FAZ share tips to crack down on subscriber password sharing

In a non-tokenized subscription world, I have no real incentive to help the media brand grow. As such, I may be perfectly happy to share my subscription with other people, set an auto-forward on the newsletter I pay for, and so on.

Corporate/Bulk Subscriptions: Defined here as multi-user access to content based on a contract instead of a single user’s credit card

In recent months, two macro trends have rocked the media industry: publications have pivoted hard to a subscription-first model, and thousands of journalists have been laid off.

It’s a lot of work to get users on your article. Statistically, the first thing that happens is that the user will close the tab without reading. Only a fraction will read your content for free — consider what an effort it takes to also be paid for it! The original sin of the web, indeed.

The Dallas Morning News is one such publisher, with more than 800,000 users subscribed to their web push notifications. Now 4% of overall views and 11% of returning views are thanks to web push notifications. This new strategy has helped more than double their return visitors year-over-year and is also responsible for spurring hundreds of new digit... See more

The problem is that there are a lot of publications in the world that would like to be supported by subscriptions, and a lot of readers in the world that would prefer to pay for ad-free content, but nobody is making a market. This is where Twitter is making its play.