We are packing our bags and heading north for Brightcove Play in Boston from May 13^th through the 15^th.  In Brightcove’s own words, PLAY is “a global gathering of Brightcove customers, partners and industry leaders at the forefront of the digital media revolution.”  See here for more details – http://play.brightcove.com. 

Please stop by and visit with us on the exhibitor floor, booth 113 to be exact.  To learn more about our partnership with Brightcove, check out http://www.brightcove.com/en/partners/tinypass.

Finally, our CEO, Trevor Kaufman will be participating in the Advanced Monetization: Advertising, Paywalls and Subscription Services breakout session on Monday the 13^th at 3:40 PM.  That’s it for now.  See you in Boston!

Chronicling his thoughts about a potentially viable news startup for Nieman Journalism Lab, he followed leads in search of a viable future for high quality news publishing.  Out of his story and unique angle Worldcrunch was born.

“Worldcrunch is based on a publishing idea that had been successful in Europe for 20 years”, says Israely.  “This original concept took syndicated editorial content from a wide array of the world’s best newspapers regardless of language and then translated for a single national or linguistic audience, notably for a French weekly called Courier Internationnal and others in Italy, Poland, Japan and elsewhere.  Worldcrunch believed the same model could work if they translated foreign language papers into English and published online.  Israely and his partner, Irene Toporkoff, assembled an all-star advisory board, raised angel financing and launched the company.

Worldcrunch – all news is global from Worldcrunch on Vimeo.

The first problem to solve was sourcing editorial content.  Israely’s pitch to publishers was simple.  In exchange for translating their stories, Worldcrunch would be allowed to publish those stories on their site and then share revenues with the partner for syndicated sales of the translated product.  The fascinating implication of this model is that it creates an entirely new set of products throughout the content value chain.  Says Israely, “We might choose a story from an Italian paper, add an editorial and translation filter and the New York Times syndication service will sell that to an Indonesian paper whose readers all speak English, but not Italian”.  To use the most obvious of puns, Worldcrunch takes advantage of the fact that English has become the lingua franca of the Internet.

By translating stories from 25 publications ranging from Le Monde to Die Welt and newspapers in China, Russia and Brazil, Worldcrunch has managed to aggregate high-quality editorial from many angles while adding otherwise inaccessible local perspectives.  A case in point is Syria, with a consortium of six French-language news agencies providing high-quality, regional coverage that is only available in English via Worldcrunch.

Getting the model right demands balancing staff-size with product demands.  Today, Worldcrunch’s four Paris-based staffers coordinate a team of 15 freelancers around the world to handle translation.  The result is five to six “Premium Stories” per day and the same number of “Crunch-It” aggregated articles.  Premium Stories tend to be longer articles, op-ed and reportage.  The site also publishes in-depth coverage of major events like the recent selection of the new Pope.

Worldcrunch’s growth has been steady over the past 12 months, rising from 150K readers a month to 250K.  Israely attributes much of his inspiration to “The Newsonomics of Small Things”, an article by Ken Doctor of the Nieman Lab that argued that publishers would need to move away from simply advertising and circulation and find lots of “golden eggs”, his name for small but valuable revenue streams, like in-sourcing, events and custom publishing.

Paid subscriptions also figure strongly into Worldcrunch’s plans.  “Our revenue will come from a variety of sources including ads, consumer subscriptions and B2B and institutional subscribers”, says Israely.  “Tinypass was a perfect fit for us because the technology worked for today’s paid content models and their corporate philosophy matched ours”.

Israely admits that running a paid news site presents inherent challenges.  “We have to make smart choices about what we cover and translate.  We’ve also discovered that Google’s algorithm favors “outlinks” – our goal is to keep readers on site but that lowers our ranking in their index”.  The company feels strongly that the path to success will come from creating a unique product with value.  ”We’re convinced that if you make something people love, they are happy to pay for it”.

We take our hats off to Jeff and his fellow pioneers at Worldcrunch and hope you’ll join us in supporting them and reading the best writing from the world’s best papers, all in one place.

When the Financial Times (FT) decided in July 2011 to ignore Apple’s Newsstand in favor of making their own HTML5 app, the news raised a lot of eyebrows.  Some praised the move as a bold challenge to Apple’s hegemony while others called it a naive and potentially suicidal denial of the realities of modern media consumption.  By July 2012 the results of the gamble were clear as total subscriptions to the FT rose 6% and the number of digital subscribers to the FT eclipsed print customers and now make up more than half of the company’s nearly 600,000 paying customers.

The FT, founded in 1888, has been around the block.  They’ve operated in every conceivable business environment and clearly asked themselves about our current one, “What are we getting for Apple’s 30% cut from our app sales?”  Conventional wisdom would say, “you have to be where people go to shop, i.e. the App Store.”  In another era, people said the same thing about the mall.  Remember those?

Now don’t get us wrong.  There is potential value in being in front of tens of millions of consumers.  Though the “in front of part” is a bit misleading.  When is the last time you ventured past the Top 10 Lists on the App Store?  Or, to go a bit off topic, checked out the second page of search results on Google?  If anything, big numbers – number of visitors, number of apps – makes “content discovery”, as well as selling, potentially harder not easier.

But buying through Apple and Amazon and the like is so convenient.  Again, a valid point.  Tinypass is all for reducing friction in the purchase process, but at the cost of 30% of a content owner’s revenues?  Clearly the FT looked at the tradeoff and said, “no thank you.”

So, what to do?  You can lock into a single model, i.e. Apple, and handover 30% of the value of your content, or you can embrace a strategy that includes the entire landscape of distribution vehicles, from walled gardens to the open web.  This ubiquity of distribution is what new technologies like HTML5 and Tinypass are built to enable.  Your greatest content discovery strategy is your own brand, your own site, not a store that you share with millions of other competing offers.  Fans come to your site(s) everyday.  Don’t send them away to purchase your best offers.  Sell direct and reap the rewards.

The Stock Keeping Unit – its acronym, SKU, serves as the phrase’s very own when it comes to English.  I learned in practice what a SKU was long before I ever came across the term in business school.  A single piece of gum at the Seven Eleven or a pack, a case of toilet paper at the Costco or a roll at the local Korean deli, a truck full of cement or a bag of dry mix from the hardware store, and following the post-war consumer revolution, whatever an individual desired has come in all shapes and quantities for all budgets and occasions.

One semi-exception to this rule has always been the world of print media.  I say semi because we could always purchase a single item off of the newsstand, i.e. a magazine, or several, i.e. a subscription to the same magazine, which we would regularly receive, no newsstand required.  Often the single purchase SKU would lead to more lucrative subscriptions for publishers.

Then along came the Internet, and as incredible as it may seem, when it comes to paying for content, our choices of what we would like to pay for online remain more limited than they are offline.  How could that be?

We all know the story that began in the mid-90s and is now, we here at Tinypass strongly believe, running its course.  Everything online wants to be FREE!!!!  All advertising, all the time enabled by journalism driven to “Top 10 Thats”, 20 Best This’”, slideshows, etc.  Or is it ads enabling the dumbing down of “online” journalism?  It’s getting so bad that they are running out of names for calling a spade a spade.  The newest term is “native advertising”.  Check out http://nyti.ms/ZtAWVp – how does that make you feel about the integrity of what you are consuming online?

“With the possible exception of the broadcast network monopoly that ended in the eighties, there has never been a working business model for quality content, in any medium, that could rely on advertising alone…and there never will be again.”

Jeff Bewkes, Chairman & CEO, Time Warner

I suppose that it is natural that as news and information providers come to the realization that some level of direct audience support is needed to sustain their businesses they have chosen the one, most lucrative SKU from their halcyon days, i.e. the subscription.  In their defense, it comes in different flavors, from “hard” to “porous”, I won’t bore you with all the permutations here, but at the end of the day it is still a subscription.  Think about that for a second, in a medium that allows you to peruse editorial content at its most granular level – an individual article, or passage, or quote, or video clip – it will only sell you a bundle of largely unrelated content.  Hell, you can’t even buy the equivalent of today’s newspaper online, you know, $1.99 for 24 hours of access to a site, much less access to just those sections, or columnists, or subject areas that matter to you most.  It doesn’t have to be this way.

In a world of infinite niches, curation, and content customization, we here at Tinypass believe that the time is long overdue for content providers to begin to think differently about their SKUs, about how they package what they sell.  There is untapped value in “Thinking Differently” when it comes to digital media.  The naysayers grumbled that it was sacrilegious to break up the LP.  See Steve Jobs.  Digital music sales, mainly all of those $0.99 purchases, now account for more than half of all music sales.

Well music, we are told, is different.  The conventional wisdom is that no one will buy content by “the drink”, primarily, the reasoning goes, because they never have.  Look, selling a subscription to your content, depending on who you are and what it is you are selling, can be the right answer for you and there is no better way of doing that today than using Tinypass.  But if subscriptions aren’t the right answer for you, don’t despair and conclude that there is nothing more you can do but cast your lot solely with the advertising gods.  People who won’t pay full-freight will pay for the niches that interest them.  We also firmly believe that people will pay for curation, for customization, for participation, for inclusion, for a look behind the scenes, for a taste of home.  The time is now to start uncovering what it looks like to pay for online content beyond the subscription.

“We weren’t interested in stuffing mailers with t-shirts,” he said.  “We wanted all of our time focused on producing BKLYNR itself.  And with Tinypass, everyone who signs up is already entered into Tinypass’s subscription management and billing system.  We also liked that we could set up Tinypass ourselves and also that it let’s us experiment to find the pricing that works”.

BKLYNR offers subscribers the choice of a recurring monthly subscription, which is $2, or a one-time annual subscription, which is $20.

The undertaking is the brainchild of three former Columbia University classmates, the aforementioned Rhiel, Raphael Pope-Sussman and Ben Cotton who all worked together at the Columbia Spectator and is an inspiring example of what Craig Mod calls Subcompact Publishing, a new breed of online writing which is “not quite website, not quite magazine, not quite book” – rather the byproduct of a close collaboration between writers, technologists and product designers.

Thomas, whose day job is at Google where he works on the Google Apps team, took a few minutes to help us understand what we can expect from his ambitious crew.

According to Rhiel, BKLYNR fills a hole in the market for serious, in-depth, cultural and political journalism about the borough.  He and his co-founders noted the broad (and sometimes teasing) coverage of Brooklyn’s artisanal movements, food and arts scene by publications ranging from New York Magazine to the Style section of the New York Times.   They also enjoy sites like Gothamist and neighborhood-specific blogs, but see a place in the market for a more magazine-like publication that’s native to the web, featuring thoughtful explorations of Brooklyn, it’s residents, issues, arts and politics.

“We all felt a need to scratch the journalism itch without leaving our day jobs” says Rhiel.  “In November we were inspired when the guys at MATTER raised $140K on Kickstarter and by what Marco Arment is up to with The Magazine”.

We here at Tinypass feel strongly that the demise of the Fourth Estate has been greatly exaggerated and we are heartened not only by upstarts like BKLYNR, but also by BKLYNR’s creative use of Tinypass.  We can serve the next wave of media well beyond their initial fundraising by providing all of the business functionality needed to run a premium content site.  Welcome to the family BKLYNR!

Our mission at Tinypass is to create new ways for people to support the content they love.  This blog is about sharing what we learn and celebrating the creators and publishers using our platform.  We are calling it “Premium”.

As new publishers sign up daily, we’re constantly delighted and often surprised to discover markets we’d never even thought about.  From hedge fund reports to medical videos to bass fishing guides to pop-science podcasts, the surprises keep coming.  We’ll regularly feature their stories and highlight their challenges, lessons-learned and triumphs along the way.

Some posts will be trend pieces and essays, others more moderated round-tables of publishers, thought-leaders, writers, journalists, filmmakers, artists and friends.  Reach out to us via email, twitter, facebook or carrier pigeon.  Off we go!