“AdSense for online subscriptions”: Meet MediaPass, the platform that wants to put pores in your paywall
Summary
In a post over at Poynter yesterday, Rick Edmonds analyzed the paid-content experience of Spokane’s paper, the Spokesman-Review — and made, in the process, a case for a mixture of paid content and free living together on a media website. Because “the obvious answer for newspapers” is “a hybrid formula.” If that’s the case (and if The New York Times’ current path toward porousness is any indication of Paywall Zeitgeist, it could be), then publishers have another option for selective monetization besides Press+, Journalism Online‘s paywall-facilitator: MediaPass. The platform takes a brick-by-brick approach to walls: through its modular system, it wants to give publishers the flexibility to determine not only the specific terms of their subscription asks, but also which sections (or even individual pages) of their content to make premium in the first place. “Part of the reason everybody monetizes through advertising networks and AdSense and Yahoo’s comparable product,” Mitchell told me, “is that it’s all very easy.” MediaPass tries to leverage the power of simplicity through its quick, AdSense-y sign-up process: provide your site’s basic info, select your subscription’s price point (when I tested the system out, the pre-populated options were one-month, three-month or six-month periods at fees of $9.95, $20.85, and $47.40 respectively — though you can write in your own price, as well), and MediaPass generates a line of Javascript that you can paste onto the back-end text of whatever content you want to keep behind your wall. As the MediaPass site notes, alluding to the Times of both New York and London, “a change is occurring in the industry as major media conglomerates have announced plans to charge a subscription for some of their online content.