“We take great pride in the quality journalism we provide to the communities we serve. We’ve spent nearly a decade building and establishing theday.com as a brand. That’s what is driving us to put a price on our growing digital platform,” said Gary Farrugia, The Day’s publisher.

The membership program, which ranges in price per month from $9.99 to $22.99 for top-of-the-line Platinum service, will begin on Wednesday, September 14. Current home delivery subscribers to The Day are automatically members in the new program once they complete their registration at theday.com. Non-member visitors to theday.com will be allowed up to 10 “premium” staff-written articles or features each month. Only members will be allowed commenting privileges on stories at theday.com.

As part of the new membership model, The Day also introduced a new members-only rewards program, The Day Passport, which includes rewards, events, and giveaways to local businesses, entertainment venues, and cultural institutions.

“We are shifting from an address-based print subscription model to a user-based content access model, whereby those who join will enjoy our award-winning products in all the forms that we publish them, as well as additional benefits and privileges,” said Daniel L. Williams, Director of Audience Development.

The Day’s introduction was covered by News & Technology  and by Poynter.com.

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“John Winn Miller, publisher of The Concord Monitor, which launched a metered paywall in May, also found it was important to look for the best practices from what other papers wrere doing and be rigorous about having data for every opinion.

“It might sound obvious, but it can’t be overlooked: Publishers have to offer readers something worth paying for before they even think about putting up a paywall.

“The Concord Monitor, for instance, rolled out a complete redesign of its website shortly before the paywall, focusing on a more usable design and better local content. The paper also only puts local copy behind the paywall, since readers can’t get that type of content elsewhere.

“Miller noted that he was initially wary about reader acceptance of a paywall; after all, the statewide newspaper the Monitor competes with isn’t behind a paywall. ‘Typically if you’re in a competitive market you’re afraid to do anything,’ he said. Largely because of the newspaper’s research and preparation, the Monitor went forward with the paywall and the newspaper is enjoying a year-over-year online revenue boost.

Here’s a graphical depiction of how Clickshare works. Think of Publisher A as an Atlanta newspaper and Publisher B as a Boston newspaper. And imagine for a moment that both of these papers have web sites and that in each case they enroll users for $5 a month and allow their own users “all you can eat” access to basic news resources for that price. Now lets suppose a baseball fanatic in Atlanta wants to read a Red Sox pregame workup and finds a link to the Boston newspaper’s story at the Atlanta web site. Click . . . the reader goes to the Boston site. But here the Boston server, in the present world, says “Sorry, access prohibited please subscribe.” The user, faced with paying $5 for one article and starting a second ongoing $5 a month relationship just skips the article and the Boston paper loses a sale.

Now consider if both newspapers were running Clickshare Web Server Software and were Clickshare Publishing Members. Repeat the scenario. Now the Atlanta readers request goes out with a digital calling card. And that card, read by the Boston server, says, “This user is a Clickshare enabled user and has an account at the Atlanta Clickshare member.” The Globe sells the article for, say, 10 cents at wholesale. The reader gets his article with no additional password or challenge. At settlement time, Clickshare Corp. applies a 10 cent charge to the Atlanta newspaper’s clearing account and pays the Boston newspaper 8 cents, keeping 2 cents as a transaction fee. The Atlanta newspaper to charge its user whatever it wishes. It could pass along the 10 cents, apply a 20% retail markup to 12 cents, or bundle the Boston story as part of a premium subscription package. Clickshare does not set pricing at the user level because it doesn’t own the user the home base publisher does.

A similar reference to the “digital calling card” technology appears in a later piece: “TV in the ’50s, the ‘net in the ’90s: Three examples of real-world clicking, and why per-click will work in the Clickshare System.”

cross posted from: http://www.newshare.com/News/tvs_sale.html

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 13, 1998 — Clickshare Service Corp. is seeking strategic allies, equity investors and licensees to participate in the commercialization of its patent-pending Internet subscription, microbilling and distributed user- management system.

“We are aggressively seeking partnerships with one or more technology companies, publishers and audience owners such as banks and ISPs to me the Clickshare technology rapidly into the marketplace,” said said Bill Densmore, co-founder of Clickshare.

A six-month prototype demonstration of the Token Validation Service technology involved nearly 2,000 users. Marketed as the Clickshare Service, TVS was tested with three publishers: The American Reporter, Studio Briefing and The Christian Science Monitor.

Clickshare is now seeking a patent for TVS. “We believe the service constitutes a novel application of technology to the problem of how to make the Internet commercially viable,” said Densmore.

So far, consumer web publishers have tried to become profitable on advertising alone. Increasingly, they are viewing micropayments and personalized information delivery as essential to boosting revenues — but few sites have actually ramped up such services.

“We regard TVS as a vital service — because it offers an infrastructure for tagging and identifying Internet users for a variety of purposes — as required for Internet information commerce to become mainstream,” said Densmore. “There are many publishers and equity partners who have looked at what we have and may want to play a role in bringing it to market.”

About the Clickshare Service (TVS)
Clickshare is a client-server based, distributed user-management system for Internet commerce. It enables aggregation of content subscriptions, micropayments, audience measurement by identified user, personalization using a “reverse cookie” approach and Web-site access control. Clickshare employs “Digital Calling Card (SM)” technology which allows users to view and purchase information at multiple, independent web sites using a single ID and password. It enables sale of information “by the click” down to 10 cents per item. TVS requires no special end-user software. More information about TVS may be found at: http://www.clickshare.com/. “Clickshare” is a registered servicemark of Clickshare Service Corp.

Paid online subscribers are above projections and reached the high-end of industry norms in less than four months, says Rob Mitchell, state editor of the combined-20,000-circulation dailies and the third-generation in the Mitchell’s family ownership of the two papers.

“As a subscription engine it’s worked out very well because it technically works very well,” Mitchell says of Clickshare.

Clickshare’s solution went live for the family’s customers on Oct. 1, and since then a total of 28,200 people have registered online for free, including readers from the Mitchell family’s four monthly regional business magazines (circulation about 40,000). “Some of them we would not have been able to connect with if it weren’t for this system,” says Mitchell, who heads the family’s online and mobile news delivery efforts.

Clickshare manages a single database for the papers and for four monthly business magazines operated by the Mitchell family as Vermont Community Media. The Clickshare technology handles one-account, one-ID, one-bill authentication and login of print subscribers and users on the web, mobile and soon-to-launch tablet applications. So readers and users can manage all access and billing from a single account.

“The business monthlies had never been integrated with our daily subscriptions,” says Mitchell. “Now they are, and this produces more activity for them online, and we can also market across all platforms.” In addition, the single sign on, single-account solution means Mitchell will be able to offer a variety of multiplatform subscription packages and bundles.

The family is following the emerging practice of a hybrid free-paid approach on the web.

Of the 28,200 registered users, about 7,500 are existing subscribers to the print dailies, who signed up to get free access to the newspaper’s web site. The other registrants have signed up for one of a variety of online and print packages, which may include some or all of the print newspaper, the web site, a new online e-Edition, and the mobile site.

Paid online subscribers are above projections, said Mitchell. He said his father, Publisher R. John Mitchell, had figured online paid subscribers would settle at around 2-3 percent of print circulation after a year. The actual number tracked after a little more than four months as 950 – already at 4.7 percent.

“My father surveyed the prices people were charging across the country and we basically took our print price and gave probably a 30-percent discount off that to make it attractive both to people who had discontinued their print subscription and to new subscribers,” says Mitchell.

The online annual subscription works out to $2.99 a week, says Mitchell. The minimum subscription length online – a month – works out to about $3.50 a week. A day pass – which Clickshare’s technology supports – is a dollar.

Mitchell says they’ll have to do some survey work to see how many of the 600 paying subscribers online are former print subscribers – they don’t know that yet. “A significant portion of them are either outside our print-delivery area or out of state,” says Mitchell. “That’s encouraging.”

As for print circulation and web advertising, Mitchell says: “We’re doing well. I think the paywall is helping us. I think we’ve benefited by being willing to take this step.” Mitchell thinks online advertisers will view registered and paid subscribers as more valuable than casual surfers. And, after three months of decline in web traffic – page views and daily visitors – the traffic trended back up in January, and showed an increase in online reader engagement.

“We will continue to market our online content as worth paying for, and do the newsgathering that will back up that promise,” Mitchell said. “And many of our readers have told us they are confident and happy that we are building a business model that will sustain our journalism well into the future.”