Have you been thinking about adding a paywall service to your site? I have. I’ve spent many hours of my life creating amazing content to entertain my users and it is valuable.
I have some advertising and it gives me a nice revenue stream, but I was looking for a content monetization platform to add value to my business.
I decided to add a paywall service to my site and I could not be more pleased with the decision. I have added another revenue stream from my content, and I have added value to my content.
Many of my users have a perception that paid content is of higher quality that free content.
By putting some of my best work behind a paywall service, more users feel that it is worth paying for!
These are the things I considered when I chose a paywall vendor:
Make sure the paywall solutions includes an easy integration into your existing site. A paywall plugin is a great tool for this. The service needs to be flexible and customizable, but it also needs to be easy enough to use that you can adopt the service without any problems or downtime.
Your paywall service or at times also termed as metered paywall must be easy for the user to use – logging in and submitting payment must be easy for your user. If a user has trouble signing in, they will stop using your paywall service. If a user needs to get up, find a credit card, plug numbers in, and jump through any other hoops, they may not sign up in the first place.
Make sure that your paywall service accepts payment methods that your user is already using – Apple Pay, Google Pay, or others. If you want to receive digital content subscription fees, it must be easy for the user to make payments and access the paywall service.
The paywall service you select must be usable to mobile users and compatible with both iOS and Android platforms. We all intuitively know that more and more people are accessing online content with mobile devices.
Your content needs to be easily accessible to mobile users, and the user experience for a mobile user must be as good or better than the user experience for a desktop or PC user.
Your paywall service must be flexible enough to allow you to put all or a portion of your content behind the paywall.
Some sites will use free content to bring users to their site, and then require a digital content subscription to access more detailed, more valuable, or more resource-intensive content.
Also, the free content is a like a free sample at the grocery store. If you never experience the product, you won’t be moved to purchase more of the product.
You will want your paywall solution to allow you to also run advertisements on your content. If you are currently running ads and receiving revenue from those, it is more desirable to add the paywall as an additional revenue stream.
You want to make sure you don’t kill off one revenue stream to create another.
