Digital Content

Subscription Commerce for Digital Content

Leading digital content providers are continuing to experiment with what is paid content versus advertising supported or free content. The boundaries are shifting and new hybrid models are evolving. Figuring out the right mix depends on the particulars of the business and takes into consideration the customer, the content, and the competition. For digital content providers, having a monetization strategy and platform that is flexible and agile to evolve with the business is key in today’s digital content landscape.

At the top of the list for a monetization infrastructure are an ability to

• Evolve and optimize pricing models
• Support trials and hybrid pricing models
• Support integrated content access management

Case Study: Pinkerton

In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which later became Pinkerton. Today, Pinkerton is the industry’s leading provider of risk management services and solutions, including investigations, employment screening, protective services, security management and consulting, crisis management, emergency response, intelligence and information services,and brand protection and intellectual property.

For years, Pinkerton’s Global Risk Group sold subscriptions to its global intelligence reports, dashboards and alert products manually by talking to each potential customer and identifying which reports they needed. They then entered the customer data, processed payments and billing and delivered the reports using a manual process. Pinkerton wanted to automate subscriptions for:

• Security reports
• Security alerts
• Security dashboards

Pinkerton turned to us to design and deploy robust recurring subscription billing and automated subscription management on its website. The solution enables automatic subscription commerce and fulfillment for Pinkerton Global Risk reports and dashboard products. We implemented custom signups to select security topics that people are interested. We helped automate the back-end human powered workflow for creating the security reports. Their analysts can now enter the report topics all over the world in an efficient way and when ready, this information is automatically incorporated and formatted for the Pinkerton security reports. The right information is sent automatically to those customers who have subscribed to it,