Here I’ve listed some of the most popular revenue models used by content-based businesses.

While I admit that this is not a comprehensive list of all possible revenue models, it can be a good starting point for anyone interested in generating revenue with content creation and delivery.

Direct vs. Indirect Revenue Models

Generally speaking, there are two fundamentally different types of content revenue models:

• direct revenue models
• indirect revenue models

While direct revenue models consider the audience (or content consumer) as their source of revenue, indirect revenue models differentiate between users and customers.

It means that the audience consumes the content freely and the content business generates revenue through third parties.

Some Examples of Direct Revenue Models

Here you can find a list of the most popular direct revenue models used by content-based businesses:

• Content as the facilitator of the selling process
• Selling Content as a product
• Subscription-based revenue models
• Collecting donations

Content as Facilitator of Selling Products and Services

This is one of the classic approaches to revenue generation in the online world and most of the first e-commerce websites were grounded on such a basis.

For example, you have a CRM solution, and create a large amount of content around this topic.

There are various roads to revenue through this approach to the content creation:

• Attracting visitors who are interested in CRM products (inbound marketing) and introducing/selling them your solution.
• Educating people and aligning them with your approach to the CRM (It will be easier to convince them / their companies to buy your product)
• Building brand awareness for your company/product and using it as a competitive advantage in the market

Selling Content as a Product

The content itself can be sold as a product. Selling audiobooks, pdf files, research papers, and market reports, are still popular in various topics and can be considered as a source of revenue.

However, you have to find your own ways of dealing with the content piracy.

Subscription-based Revenue Model

Subscription-based revenue model, sometimes call time-based access models, are very popular in the content industry.

Many news outlets offer different packages for monthly, quarterly and yearly access to their articles.

But such a model is not limited to journals and news publishing companies. Many streaming services (such as NetFlix and Spotify) use a similar model for selling their content to the audience.

Further Reading: Subscription Revenue Model (Definition & Examples)

Collecting Donations

Yes. Collecting donations can be a revenue model for content creating organizations. In this model, you provide content to the audience and ask them to donate if the content is helpful and they are happy with it.

Brainpickings and Wikipedia are just two examples of the content creation services based on user donations (Brainpickings as content pipeline and Wikipedia as a content creation platform).

Collecting donations can be considered as a crowdfunding business model in which funders are not looking for their principal money and its interest.

No matter you call it donation game or crowdfunding, sure the success of this type of revenue model depends heavily on the audience culture and type of the content you provide.

Many of the donation-based revenue models, use it just as a complementary revenue stream. It means that they have a primary revenue source (such as creating and delivering sponsored content) and use donations to complement or cover the other revenue streams.

Some Examples of Indirect Revenue Models

Here I have listed some of the popular indirect revenue models used by content creators:

• Selling Advertising Space
• Collecting User Information
• Sponsorship

Selling Advertising Space

Selling advertising space is still the most popular indirect revenue model in the online content-creation world.

Many social media companies, news websites, personal blogs, and professional forums, rely on selling advertising space to the other businesses.

Some of these businesses (usually the ones with a large audience base) sell ad-space directly to the others, while smaller ones, use the third-party platforms such as Google’s Adsense service.

The Ad Space Selling (ASS) Revenue Model is as old as the modern content industry itself. This practice got popular even before the digital age by newspapers, radio stations, and other mass media.

Collecting User Information

Latest advances in big data and data mining practices have resulted in various opportunities for turning the user information into money. Here are just some of the marketable user information which many companies and organizations are willing to pay for them:

• Market Demographics
• User Values and Preferences
• Search Terms
• Product Comparison Cases
• Contact Information
• Market Gaps
• User Needs

As such reports need a large user base, it’s more often used by content platforms (e.g. social media) than content pipelines.

Extracting and selling this kind of information has always been a source of debate, with many ethical activists criticising them as unethical. However, the companies usually refer the critics to the not-read-but-easily-signed terms and conditions while users register for the service.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship contracts are used by businesses as a part of brand awareness or brand identity management efforts.

In this model, a business covers the whole business costs (sometimes with a markup) and asks the content creator to guarantee a certain level of some performance metrics.

Alexa Rank and total monthly visitors are among the most popular metrics used

These kinds of sponsorship contracts are not limited to the companies. Nowadays, you can find many individuals who enter sponsorship deals with content creating businesses, to improve their competitive position in the professional services market.

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Chief Content Officer as a corporate position

The first point we should bear in mind is that the Chief Content Officer or the CCO, like many other C-suite roles, is a corporate position. It means that in a small or medium-sized company, the content strategist or even the content marketer position would be more than enough for handling the content affairs.

• How did the CCO position emerge?
• The best-known drafted job description for CCO position
• My Criticism of the current versions of CCO’s job description
• What does a chief content officer do?
• The Chief Content Officer’s salary

How did the CCO position emerge in the organizational chart?

In the definition of the content strategy, I’ve mentioned some symptoms of the weak content strategy. But listing such symptoms doesn’t help if we can’t hold anyone responsible for solving those problems.

We know that the disagreement about the content issues in the companies is already a major source of conflict in the corporates. This happens because many departments consider themselves as one of the pillars of the content creation and dissemination process and expect to have the loudest voice in the content-relevant decisions:

• Public relations department prefers to oversee every single communication with the outside world. So PR expects to own part of the content strategy pie (preferably the largest pie).
• The marketing department considers itself as the sole department with the ability and knowledge of designing and running advertising campaigns. Campaigns are often the most costly content publication activity ever happens in the content realm. So who will be more competent than marketing department to devise, implement, and supervise the content strategy?
• On the other hand, the accounting and finance department is the only department implicitly allowed to comment on every single decision in the company. Content-related decisions are not an exception.
• The sales department, emphasizing its close touch with the customers, has its own understanding and logic. Armed with many cases and previous experiences, the sales department is able to cast shadows of doubt on every plan not previously checked with it.
• Besides all these challenges and claims, the IT department considers the digital and online activities as its exclusive territory. Therefore,  as every comprehensively designed content strategy would include many digital initiatives, the IT department may consider itself as the main player in the field.

In such situations, the emerged content strategy, if you decide to call it a strategy,  would not be anything more than a fragmented action plan resulted from power negotiations between various stakeholders with conflicting interests and attitudes toward the content.

This situation is noted in the power school of strategy by Henry Mintzberg in Strategy Safari: Formation of strategy as a result of negotiation between internal and external stakeholders.

The outcome of the strategic planning in such a situation is often not the best strategy for the organization. It’s the strategy of the most powerful, with minor adjustments to keep the other stakeholders silent. This is the point where the necessity of the Chief Content Officer (CCO) role emerges.

The best-known drafted job description for CCO position

ُhe most detailed and elaborated job description for the chief content officer seems to be provided by Content Marketing Institute. However, in my opinion, taking a more detailed look at the document, you will find it closer to an inspiring pool of ideas rather than a practical job description.

Let’s take a look at the brief description of the role:

The Chief Content Officer (CCO) oversees all marketing content initiatives, both internal and external, across multiple platforms and formats to drive sales, engagement, retention, leads and positive customer behavior.

This individual is an expert in all things related to content and channel optimization, brand consistency, segmentation and localization, analytics and meaningful measurement.

The position collaborates with the departments of public relations, communications, marketing, customer service, IT and human resources to help define both the brand story and the story as interpreted by the customer.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

My Criticism of the current versions of CCO’s job description

As I have stated above, the main idea behind the CCO position is to align all content-related efforts and activities, assuring the maximum possible effectiveness and efficiency.

Therefore, it’s understandable that the chief content officer (CCO) has to be able to oversee all the content-related activities and minimize potential conflicts of interests through collaboration with different departments.

However, here lies the central question:

Is it necessary for Chief Content Officer to be jack of all trades or an expert in everything related to the content?

When we talk about the content industry, we are talking about many specialties such as content creation, content curation, content delivery, and content identity development. They are all included in the content industry. However, each one has roots in different sciences:

• Content creation talks about authorship, credibility, and reader engagement.
• Content delivery is a complex bundle of technology, sociology, and psychology.
• Content identity is a territory claimed by many kings including but not limited to branding specialists.

How can a person be an expert in all of them?

The same story happens when you put yourself in the position of Chief Marketing Officer or any other C-Suit position. Is it logical or acceptable for them to be the jack of all trades?

Now, take a second look at the CMI’s definition of Chief Content Officer position mentioned above.

Therefore, it seems that the most of the CCO job descriptions are overly inclusive and following them may lead to serious organizational conflicts.

By the way, there’s no real boundary between Chief Content Officer (CCO) and Content Strategist in most of the job descriptions.

In many cases, you can change the title of the CCO’s job description to Content Strategist’s job description without any noticeable problem.

What does a chief content officer do?

It seems that the best way to reach a useful job description of the CCO is to take a look at the other C-suite positions (e.g. CFO, CIO, CEO, COO).

There are some elements in common between all CxO positions: Supervision, Coordination, Planning, and Operation:

With the term supervision, we mean supervising all the activities inside the respective territory.

With the term Coordination, we mean collaborating with other departments outside the respective territory.

With the term Planning, we mean macro-planning for the performance indicators inside the territory as well as the contribution to the higher level organizational performance indicators.

With the term Operation, we mean assuring smooth operation of all tasks and activities within the respective territory.

Considering all the points mentioned above, the Chief Content Officer has to supervise, coordinate, and plan to ensure low-friction and high-efficiency of the content-related operations in the Corporate’s Content Machine.

Once more, it’s important to underline that the mentioned duties are mainly administrative and not operational, while a major part of content strategists’ job description is expected to be operational.

All the other positions such as content strategist, content curator, and content creator are line functions with their respective job descriptions, and their tasks should not be included in the job description of the chief content officer. Otherwise, CCO would be considered as an aggressive, useless, territory-builder and conflict-arising position and will never find a respectable seat on the executive board.

Chief Content Officer’s Salary

As I’ve noted before, the Chief Content Officer (CCO) is a new emerging role in today’s organizational charts, and Chief Content Officer’s salary lies on the top of the payroll lists.

Unlike many other job positions which you can check their salary via services like glassdoor and indeed, it’s not so easy to find relevant and helpful details about the chief content officers’ salary and compensation package.

This can be due to the small sample size available or the nature of this job which often push CCO’s to conceal their salaries.

Anyway, here are some points I have found on the web about the salary of such a position:

• According to the comparably, the salaries of the Chief Content Officers in US range from a low of $68K to a high of 230K.
• Glassdoor claims a range of $295K to $318K for the annual package of a CCO in the US. The same website reports an annual salary of £115K – £125K for a chief content officer in the UK.
• Salaryboard, a website dedicated to reporting salaries in Singapore, reports $125K for a CCO with one to three years of experience and $146K for a person with more than 8 years of working experience.

The post The Chief Content Officer’s Job Description appeared first on webmindset.

Here I’ve provided some answers to the most popular questions about evergreen content and its application in content marketing:

  What does evergreen mean?

  Definition of evergreen content

  Guidelines for creating an evergreen piece of content

  Examples of evergreen content types

  Evergreen content as a gap filler or as a component of the content strategy?

  Evergreen content examples and ideas

  Tips for creating evergreen content

  Evergreen content vs. other content types

What does evergreen mean in marketing

The term evergreen is much older than marketing. It has roots in botany and describes the plants that have leaves throughout the year.

In marketing, the term evergreen is used for the products, segments, and strategies that stay relevant over a long period. In another word, evergreen marketing is an umbrella term for any marketing idea, concept, action, or initiative that will last a long time while staying relevant and practical.

Evergreen segments, evergreen niche, evergreen products, and evergreen approach are just a few terms currently used in marketing and other management realms. Let’s take a look at the definition of some of these terms:

• Evergreen industry: An industry that always has a viable market.
• Evergreen business: Businesses that have a long life and are not much affected by seasonalities. Selling books or teaching English as a second language are examples of evergreen businesses compared to selling camping equipment.
• Evergreen stock option: An employee stock option with no expiration date.
• Evergreen design: Any design with enduring popularity and long life in the market. Minimalism is an example of an evergreen design style. Many different styles come and go, but the minimalistic style always has its own demand.
• Evergreen brand: An evergreen brand is a brand that never goes out of style and never gets old.
• Evergreen product: A product that always has market demand and retains its relevance over the long run. Pens, wallets, and bottled water are examples of evergreen products.
• Evergreen funnel: An autopilot marketing sequence that turns website visitors into customers. Landing pages with good call-to-actions and permanent incoming traffic (e.g., with SEO) are examples of an evergreen funnel.
• Evergreen advertising: Advertising that is not related to specific events or periods of time and stays relevant for a long time. So they stay on websites and billboards for longer or even permanently on the city walls and other outdoor placements.
• Evergreen books: Books that don’t stop selling and their content and context remain relevant for a long time. Classic books are examples of evergreen books. But many contemporary books can also be considered evergreen. Just compare a book on SEO techniques versus a book on the life of Barack Obama. Although the latter is not considered classic, you can still classify it under the evergreen category.

Definition of evergreen content

In the simplest definition, evergreen content is a piece of content that does not expire in the short term. But here you can find a more elaborate and formal definition of the evergreen content:

Evergreen contents are attractive because of driving more traffic, having a lower maintenance cost,  getting a higher SEO rank, and receiving more social shares for a prolonged period.

Guidelines for creating an evergreen piece of content

Although every content without an expiry date can be considered green, there are many hints, guidelines, and statements about the properties and characteristics of an evergreen piece of content:

• Evergreen content can’t include news, statistical reports, seasonal topics, and current trends.
• Evergreen content shall preferably aim at narrow beginner topics. Such contents are best choices for creating evergreen content.
• Evergreen content should seek for higher stay time or long click (What is a long click).
• Evergreen articles are typically longer.

Examples of evergreen content types

Here you can find some examples to have a more clear picture in your mind:

• Most of the definitions are evergreen articles (e.g., definition of longform content, definition of complex systems, definition of content strategy, etc.)
• Resource lists are the other popular type of evergreen content (e.g., list of content strategy blogs, list of technology blogs, leading thinkers of the technology age, etc.)
• Checklists are another type of evergreen content that is attractive to beginner and expert readers.
• How-to articles can be easily designed in an evergreen format and can be helpful and engaging. You can take a look at the following topics as examples of such content:
  • How to decide on what to do with your life!
  • How to market in a recession (HBR)
  • How to learn speed reading

Evergreen content as a gap filler or a component of the content strategy?

Every content provider has a portion of evergreen content in its content portfolio.

Reading any newspaper,  you will find a mixture of green and non-green content that, in most cases, the ratio is not chosen deliberately and on purpose.

Most newspapers and news companies fill their content gaps with evergreen content. These companies would prefer to talk about last night’s blasts, and when there is no hot news available,  fill the gap with a report about an old and forgotten place in the city’s suburbs!

However, for some content providers, evergreen content is something beyond a gap filler.

Content providers who deliberately include evergreen content in their content portfolio fall into two categories:

• Evergreen content businesses such as IMDb or Study.com
• Other businesses which use evergreen content for SEO purposes and as a driver for inbound traffic

Guardian serves as an excellent example for the second category.

Besides publishing up-to-date news articles, Guardian considers publishing evergreen articles as a permanent part of its editorial content calendar.

While the articles such as successful content strategy and dos and don’t of content marketing are outside their expected scope, Guardian insists on publishing such articles regularly to drive traffic to its website.

Most universities serve the same purpose by publishing part of their educational content as educational resources and proudly providing them free of charge to every website visitor.

While providing evergreen content as a traffic driver in the content strategy is more costly than direct advertising in the short run, this approach pays off well in the long run because of better rank in search engines and lower content maintenance cost.

Evergreen content examples and ideas

Here I have collected some ideas and examples of evergreen content. I am confident you will be able to list many other ideas after reading the following examples.

Write about persisting questions

Just think about the first questions your first readers (or customers) asked the first time they visited your website. Among them, you will find issues that are still relevant, and most of your new audiences are still looking for the answer to those questions.

Write about the structure of your industry

No matter the industry, it’s always helpful and fascinating for the audience to read about the structure of your industry.

Industry structures do not change very fast, and such informative content can live for years without needing a fundamental change and adjustment.

Write a glossary for your topic of interest

Glossaries are one of the best options for creating evergreen content. Glossaries have a long lifespan, and your audience will love them, especially if they are comprehensive and relevant.

You can check the following documents as examples of this content type:

• Mobile marketing glossary
• A short glossary of marketing terms
• Knowledge management glossary
• Concise dictionary of management terms

Create a list of useful resources for beginners

Advanced articles and resources are usually subject to change. But basic documents and resources remain valid for a relatively long period.

Therefore, preparing and publishing resource lists for your novice user is a good idea.

Check the following articles to have a better idea about this content type:

• Kissmetrics’ content marketing resources
• Content marketing resource list provided by VisualNews
• Digital Content Marketing Roadmap
• Content marketing resources provided by SingleGrain
• Free SEO and web analytics tools
• Curata’s resource list for content marketers (don’t miss out)

Worst practices for obtaining a specific goal

Although it’s quite popular to write about best practices, writing about worst practices can be a gold mine for your audience too.

While this type of content benefits your readers, it’s much less competitive than the best practice lists provided by virtually all the great players in the field.

Check the following articles:

• Five worst practices in content marketing
• 14 sales worst practices
• Top five worst practices in business intelligence

Historical examples and case studies

When you cite a recent case study, very soon, it will get outdated.

You have to change words and edit phrases, and still, your blog will look outdated.

Your audience will probably be more impressed by a story from five decades ago than a case study that refers to a two-year-old story. While the former looks like an informative case, the latter may be perceived as outdated content.

Tips for creating evergreen content

Your content needs not to be timeless to be considered evergreen

Some of the contents are literally timeless. These contents are valid even centuries later. Just Imagine the following articles:

• The fall of Rome: How did it happen?
• How did Steve Jobs start his career in the digital industry?
• 20th century in literature
• How to face stress and anxiety in your daily life?

But there are many topics and articles which are not eternal but have a much longer life than the average life of the popular articles. These articles are valid and relevant until a disruption happens or some progress happens in a field.

This type of evergreen content is usually called sustainable content.

Here are two examples that I consider sustainable (but not timeless):

• 10 SEO tips to consider when writing short-form articles (Such article can stay relevant for one or two years)
• How to choose the right mobile phone for yourself? (May remain relevant for two or three quarters and even more with minor modifications)

I think it’s more logical, feasible, and rewarding to consider sustainable content as a part of your evergreen content strategy plan and not rely solely on timeless content.

Don’t get stuck in one particular content type

Most content creators are inclined to certain content types.

For some of them, evergreen content means a ‘how-to’ article. Some others use checklists and questionnaires as evergreen content. But remember that evergreen content has many forms.

Don’t let the social media trends overshadow your content strategy

Social media is an invaluable source of ideas for your content creation. However, be careful not to be distracted by hypes and trends.

You can learn the taste of your audience and the ingredients of their current content diet. You can also find their questions and what they are willing to pay for.

But evergreen content is not meant to satisfy the transient and temporary needs of your audience. There you have no chance to compete with real-time mostly-free easily-accessible social content.

The evergreen content’s competitive advantage lies somewhere else.

Start with your current content assets

If you are not new to blogging and currently already have a collection of articles on your blog/website, first look for already existing evergreen articles on your blog.

Check the Google webmasters tool and look for old articles that have a high click rate (or even a high impression with low CTR). These low-hanging fruits are much easier to pick and have more potential for immediate results and draw more traffic to your blog/website.

Moreover, prepare a list of your evergreen content and schedule a regular update and optimization plan for them. Each piece of content may need a different check/update frequency.

Although it’s easy to check the history of organic traffic to each URL (via a simple query in Google’s webmaster’s tool), I do strongly recommend making a separate table (in paper or digital format) and registering the total number of visitors landed on each URL every month. Such a table can be an indispensable source of insight if you update it regularly.

Don’t make it over-green

To make our content evergreen, sometimes we deliver over-green content to the audience. Such excessive efforts often lead to dull, boring content.

To take an extreme imaginary case, suppose a blogger who wants to use Twitter in a sentence. He thinks that one day Twitter won’t exist, and my sentence will look outdated. So he decides to substitute the word Twitter with the following phrase: “one of the popular social media tools that helps you to share short messages.”

Of course, such an extreme case won’t happen. But there are many milder cases in which we deliberately use over-green words and phrases to make our content evergreen.

Experts are rarely your audience

Sure, there are some cases where an evergreen article targets experts and becomes successful. But usually, experts are not the audience of evergreen articles. Even if they reach such articles, most probably will skim over the articles to find references and resources.

So unless you have a sound strategic reason, it’s recommendable to target non-experts. These audiences are more likely to have a longer stay-time and deeper click-throughs, leading to better SEO scoring.

Don’t sacrifice relevance for better search results

Many content creators try to make their evergreen content as comprehensive as possible.

Such a strategy may lead to better search engine scoring and higher impression and click rates. However, don’t forget that your final goal is conversion, and sacrificing relevance for whatever reason would hardly lead to more conversion.

The same logic applies to keyword stuffing. Besides the fact that most search engines recognize this strategy and penalize it, this approach won’t result in more conversions and will just decrease your credibility and dilute your relevance in the eyes of the audience.

Don’t forget downloadables

The importance of downloadable stuff can hardly be overstated. As I have said many times, downloadable files resemble physical commodities in the digital world.

Any website with a long-term content strategy must have a dedicated page for resources (Including downloadables and valuable external links). However, evergreen articles will become more attractive if you consider a download section in their design.

Evergreen content vs. Other content types

Although many content strategists emphasize the importance of evergreen content, we have to accept that there have to be other alternatives to evergreen content creation.

Here I’ve listed a couple of alternatives to the evergreen content type. Although they are not totally different, and there might be some overlap, it helps to regard them as separate categories.

Topical Content

As you may have noticed, most of the introductory contents are (or can be) evergreen.

When you dig deeper into a topic, the chances are that you shorten the lifespan of your content because you have to mention current trends, up-to-date tools, relevant news, and many other short-life content pieces.

Therefore, the so-called topical content that goes into detail usually has a shorter lifespan and is regarded as an alternative to the evergreen content strategy.

Seasonal Content

Seasonal content can be evergreen too. However not suitable for all the seasons. Consider an article titled “How to minimize chances of getting a cold this winter?”.

Such an article will be helpful this year, next year, and even a decade later. But it will be helpful in a few months when the weather gets colder.

Guides for choosing schools, attending entrance examinations, finding a new home, and many other similar topics are usually classified as seasonal content.

Real-time content

Sports and stock market news websites are among many other content creator businesses that are heavily relied on real-time content.

Although such contents have a very limited lifespan, there are still various ways to generate revenue based on real-time content.

Dated Content

Most of us do not consider dated content as a valuable asset. However, take a second look at The Internet Archive to see 300 billion archived web pages that are literally dated content. They are still a really valuable asset not only for the organization itself but for humanity as a whole.

Viral Content

Viral contents are another example of non-evergreen content types. Most viral contents have a very short lifespan. However, many content marketers use this type of content to promote products, businesses, and social moves.

Newsjacking Content

There are various definitions of newsjacking. But there’s a common element in all of them: Newsjacking, similar to hijacking, uses the trending and popular news as a platform for promoting a personal or business brand.

Just consider one of the recent social media contests that got popular in your community. Sure, you can remember a few bloggers or social activists criticizing the contest and publishing articles against public opinion.

Such articles will be of no value after a short period, but the content creator has made an audience with this newsjacking technique. The evergreen content usually does not provide such opportunities on a large scale.

The post What is evergreen content and how you can leverage it in your content strategy? appeared first on webmindset.

History of the Subscription Business Model and Recurring Revenue

The subscription-based revenue model is not new for content publishers.

As John Warrillow mentions in his book, The Automatic Customer, about five centuries ago, the European map publishers were inviting their customers to subscribe to the future versions of the maps. This offer was reasonable because, from time to time, new lands were discovered or conquered around the globe.

Newspapers, cable TVs, and many other media and communication businesses are more recent examples of the content creators employing this model, even before the birth of the internet.

However, with the boom of the content economy, content businesses became one of the leading examples of generating revenue through the subscription model.

In their book, “The Network Imperative,” Barry Libert and his colleagues have listed The Ten Principles for Creating Value. There they referred to “moving from transaction-revenue to the subscription revenue” as the sixth element of the list.

Although many points in this article apply to various subscription businesses, my concentration would be mainly on the content creators and how they use this revenue model.

Definition of the Subscription Revenue Model

There are many different definitions of the subscription business. Most of them address the same features with different wordings.

Alternatives to Subscription Revenue Model

• One-time selling
• Pay-as-you-go
• Perpetual License

Hybrid Models: Combining One-time Selling with Recurring Revenue Model

Although I have called the above options as alternatives, it’s also possible to include them as a complementary element in your selling proposition.

Outside of the content industry, you can find such hybrid models in many e-shops and online retailers such as Amazon.

Amazon offers a subscription option called Subscribe & Save on the product categories with recurring orders. The Amazon model provides free shipping and up to 15% discount on selected categories of products (Amazon’s Prime service is just another subscription offer, more similar to the classic style of subscription-based systems).

However, in the content industry, the hybrid model is not as popular as in e-tailing.

There are many content businesses with one-time purchase offers (e.g., a video file or an ebook), while some others prefer to sell subscription services. Again Amazon is a great use case of the hybrid revenue model with its Audible business. There you can experience a well-elaborated content revenue model utilizing the advantages of both types of revenue models.

Different Types of the Subscription Business Models

John Warrillow, in his book “Automtic Customer,” has listed nine different types of subscription business models:

• The Membership Website Model
• The All-You-Can-Eat Library Model
• The Private Club Model
• The Front-of-the-Line Model
• The Consumables Model
• The Surprise Box Model
• The Simplifier Model
• The Network Model
• The Peace-of-Mind Model

Some Examples of Using Subscription Revenue Model

• Universities and MOOCs
• Online Libraries
• Journals
• News Sources
• Music Streaming (e.g., Spotify, iTunes, Deezer)

Advantages of the Subscription Revenue Model

• A better opportunity for developing and deepening customer relationships (relationships tend to be longer)
• Lower barrier to entry (because of the lower price)
• The potential for reduction of customer acquisition costs
• Steady flow of revenue and more manageable cash flow (predictability of revenue)
• The possibility of providing customized services and creating personalized experiences

Disadvantages of the Subscription Revenue Model

Although the subscription model looks very attractive (it seems like sitting idle and just counting transactions), it has serious challenges. Here I’ve listed a few of them. So you can see if this model is the right choice for you and your content business:

• The recurring purchase-decision
• Maintaining value over the long run
• A significant part of your content is buried under paywalls (So it’s harder to attract organic traffic via search engines)

Critical Success Factors in Subscription-based Business

It’s not easy to list some factors as CSFs of the subscription business model. However, it’s safe to consider the following items as three pillars of success in a subscription model  (Don’t forget that no one knows the total number of the pillars):

• Viable Acquisition Strategy
• Powerful Retention Program
• Reliable Pricing System

Key Metrics and Performance Indicators in Subscription Revenue Model

• Total Number of Subscribers
• Subscriber Acquisition Cost (SAC)
• Active Subscribers Ratio (ASR)
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• ARPU (Average Revenue Per User)
• Share of the New Customers in Revenue (SNCR)
• Retention Rate (RR) / Churn Rare (CR)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
• Trial Conversion Rate (TCR)
• Service Upgrade Rate (SUR)

Future of the Subscription Revenue Model

There are different imaginable scenarios for the future of the content subscription business model.

About two decades ago, James Heskett of the Harvard Business School summarized the prospect of the subscription model as “down but not out”, in his article titled “The Future of the Subscription Model“.

In his article, he noted that the content providers might prefer to give away everything free-of-charge, just to attract more audience and generate revenue through selling Ads.

But now we know that the subscription model is growing yet. This is what McKinsey reports in 2018, referring to the 100% growth of the e-commerce market over five years.

It’s still too early to bet on one of the possible scenarios. But Robbie Boxter’s advice in The Membership Economy can help prolong the lifetime of the subscription model. He suggests that businesses should aim higher than subscription, Something he calls membership.

He considers the subscription as a financial agreement, while membership is based on an emotional relationship and community mindset:

Books about the Subscription Business Model

• The Automatic Customer (Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry)
• Oversubscribed (How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You)

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Kelly calls these values “better than free.”

Among all factors, Kelly puts the immediacy on the top of his list.

Here’s his definition of the term:

Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released – or even better, produced – by its creators is a generative asset.

Therefore, Kelly believes that still, you can charge the customer for a product that could be available in free. It’s just possible if the customer receives it before the late majority.

Here are some of the examples of the early delivery premium paid by the customers:

• Many people pay a relatively high price to watch a film in the cinema, although it’s possible to download it later for free or almost free.
• Many readers pay a higher price for the hardcover version of a recently published book, although they know that it would be possible to buy the cheaper paperback version just a few weeks later.
• Despite expected bugs and problems, many people are willing to install the beta-version of software products, just to experience them before the others.

The same idea can be applied to the content-based products. However, in some cases, it’s not as easy as it seems.

For a business that delivers news or digital magazines, it’s not so hard to charge the customers for early delivery. But for the evergreen content creators, it’s a bit harder to define and deploy a model.

Although I have found and implemented various ideas for immediate delivery of the evergreen content, willingly leave the case open to the reader, to find creative solutions for it.

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This vagueness in the concept has been one of the reasons that last year, Michael Bhaskar published his book titled Curation.

Although many people expect to read about curation tools and technics, he has devoted a major part of his book to the philosophy behind content curation.

Here I have collected some of the most important points of his definition of content curation.

Definition of content curation

In Bhaskar’s words,  curation is where the acts of selecting and arranging add value. .

He also notes some other important aspects of the content curation:

Bhaskar stresses the point that most of the times, the content curator is not an official position in the organizational chart. In fact, it’s more often an emergent property of the organization.

He believes that the curation concept should be considered more seriously as a fundamental value-creating activity in the organizations. Despite the fact that most of the times, there’s not a straight path from the curated content to the financial outcomes.

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Mark Schaefer used the term content shock for the first time in his article titled why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy.

Here’s how he defines the content shock:

The argument behind the content shock concept

Mark Schaefer’s argument about content shock is based on a few pillars including but not limited to the following statements:

• Content marketing is not a sustainable strategy for many businesses based on the simple economic analysis.
• In the content world, the content price is zero. Therefore, oversupply will force content producers to pay their audience to consume their content.
• Two factors impact the economics of content marketing – the amount of content available and the amount of content consumed.
• The volume of free content is increasing exponentially.
• Our ability to consume the content is finite.
• Content creators have to spend more and more on the platforms like Google and Facebook for convincing audiences to read and consume their content.

What does Schaefer suggest us to do?

About two years after publishing the article, Mark Schaefer published a book titled Content Code. Shaefer believes that he has found the solution for his self-proposed threat to content marketing practice.

If you try to summarize the book in a single word, that world will be Sharing.

Sharing is the secret key Schaefer believes that will be able to break the content marketing deadlock. Let’s read it in his own words:

Schaefer suggests six strategies for achieving the above goal (sometimes acronymized as BADASS):

• Brand Development
• Audiences and Influencers
• Distribution, Advertising, promotion and SEO
• Authority
• Shareability
• Social proof and social signals

How strong is the content shock claim?

The Content Code is a helpful and instructive book to the eyes of every fair reader. But, just if you consider it as a roadmap for achieving higher content sharing rate.

But regarding Schaefer’s argument, as he calls his claims as a purely economic view of the content economy, there is a serious flaw in his content conceptualization as a product:

Content is not a commodity. This is clear for anyone who is familiar with both content and the economy. Ignoring this basic fact will mislead us in analyzing the future of the content economy.

However, still his first claim can be considered as a valid statement: Content marketing won’t be sustainable for many businesses. Not as a result of the content shock. For the most part, because many content marketers like him may consider content as a commodity.

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Here you can download the document:

At least, part of the Google’s motive behind releasing such a document is easy to guess. Although Google search will keep its critical role in the mobile era, the Google advertising services seem to be less important than before. The vast empty sidebars dedicated to the AdSense program in desktop screens are not available in small and tight mobile screens anymore.

As it is expected, through the document Google has emphasized the importance of Google advertising services in post-desktop world implicitly and explicitly.

A brief definition of the micro-moment concept

Here you can find the definition Google offers for the concept:

These are the moments when we want help informing our choices or making decisions. For marketers, these moments are an open invitation to engage. And they’re the moments you have to be ready for.  At Google, we call these micro-moments. They’re the moments when we turn to a device—often a smartphone—to take action on whatever we need or want right now

The critical characteristics of micro-moments

Google considers three main distinct characteristics for all micro-moments:

• loaded with intent
• based on immediacy
• context-dependency

To make it short, let’s suppose that you have a question in mind and decide to use your mobile phone hoping to find a helpful answer. There on your mobile screen, all of the businesses that can fulfill your need enter in a tight competition for a few seconds. Either you will find them, or they will lose the opportunity. That’s the central theme micro-moments are talking about.

Classification of the user needs according to the micro-moments model

Here’s the core concept of micro-moments model: According to google, user demands can be classified into the four main categories.

It means most of the user demands from the mobile phone will fall within one of the following categories:

1. I want to buy something [and how can you help me?]
2. I want to go somewhere [and how can you help me?]
3. I want to do something [and how can you help me?]
4. I want to know something [and how can you help me?]

From here on, Google starts promoting its online advertising platform and tries to tell you that how its services can help you to survive, or thrive, in the tight, competitive mobile economy.

Strategic and operational implications

Putting aside all injected and embedded promotional materials, Google’s micro-moment concept can be helpful in many ways for online businesses, strategically and operationally.

From the operational point of view, you can ask yourself whether your website or application fulfills the above need in the most convenient way? This operational perspective is what I have referred to as content usefulness, in describing the concept of landing page experience.

And, from the strategic point of view, you can assess your strategic position in the market. Are you adhered to responding one of the above needs? Or you are trying to fulfill all of them in some ways which will inevitably lead to sandwiching between more strategic businesses that have focused on a single axis.

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However, as there are significant differences between the content as a product with other physical products, would be helpful to take a more detailed look at the concept of the content life cycle.

Various models are proposed for the content life cycle. But what I describe here is a modified six stage model inspired by Hilary Marsh and developed based on the concept of product life cycle.

The first stage: Conception

At this stage, you have not created the content yet. But you know (or feel) that you need to publish something.

There’s a crucial question to ask yourself before creating and publishing every piece of content: Why we are going to create it?

Although we always have some reasons in mind, the best way would be putting all these points on the paper and thinking about them explicitly.

To get some ideas, here you can some of the most popular reasons for creating a piece of content:

• Making sure that your business in found on google and other search engines
• Personal branding or corporate branding
• Targeting specific keywords
• Introducing or re-introducing other contents and URLs
• Trying to find new audiences
• Converting the audiences to potential customers
• Converting potential customers to the real customers
• Increasing satisfaction of our current customers or decreasing their dissatisfaction level
• Encouraging current customers to use our product more than before

The second stage: Creation

At this stage, your content is still under development.

You might try to create original in-house generated content or curate relevant contents from other sources.

While you are thinking about the message of your content for your target audience, don’t forget to optimize your content for search engines.

Sure you have to consider the audience as the first priority. But it won’t help if they can not find your article on the web.

The third stage: Publishing

Any content is designed and created to be published somewhere and to be read by some audiences.

Here you have to choose between available channels. There are many factors that can influence your choice:

• Channel Reach
• Channel Cost
• Channel Conversion
• Personas of the channel audiences

Tip: Channel conversion and channel reach to the target audience, is not necessarily correlated with channel cost. Channel cost just indicates the demand and the demand is subject to user perception rather than visitor conversion.

The fourth stage: Promotion

Now we must make sure that the content is exposed to the majority of the target audience.

There are many choices available for content promotion:

• Asking other publishers to introduce your content or to republish it.
• Using PPC advertisement
• Sharing your content via social media
• Providing backlinks for your content from other parts of your website

Sure, even without all the above-mentioned promotion channels, search engine crawlers will find your content and provide it. As they are looking for the best interest of their clients, they will never miss a helpful piece of content,

However, with promotion, we mean trying to reach the customers in the shortest possible time. Especially when your content is not evergreen, and it has a short lifespan.

Generally speaking,  there are two different type of promotion channels available for most of the digital contents:published on the websites, there are two different categories of promotion strategies: on-site and off-site.

• on-site (e.g. banners, articles, specific landing pages)
• off-site (e.g. newsletters, RSS Feeds, search engines, social media)

Tip: Here lies a simple yet crucial point that is often forgotten by content marketers. The content has to be promoted for the target audience.

It’s easy to understand that the content targeted to the relevant audience, will have a longer lifespan and most times, less delivery cost.

The fifth stage: Maintenance

Even the most relevant content will not stay relevant forever.

You need to recheck the content relevance from time to time.

Therefore, the relevance check is considered as one of the most important aspects of content maintenance.

At the same time, you have to regularly measure and evaluate performance of your content. You may need to edit it because of the latest changes in the search engine algorithms, or to adapt it to the newer contents you have published.

Checking the weekly (or monthly) reach, engagement, virality, conversion rate and other similar factors would also provide you with helpful maintenance clues.

 The content maintenance policy can be one of the most crucial competitveness factors in today’s oversaturated content market. 

The sixth stage: Retirement

No content will live forever.

Every content has an expected life and sooner or later it will be of no use, or at least its maintenance cost woud exceed its benefits.

There are a few choices for retiring a piece of content:

• Deleting and forgeting the content or blocking the public access to the content
• Archiving the content and letting the others reach it, but explicitly stating that the content is considered outdated and you accept no liability for it.
• Disassembling the content into a few parts, dismissing useless compontents and reusing the useful parts.

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I’m proud of having tens of thousands of people subscribed to my weekly E-Newsletter. Most of them are active subscribers and open the emails with an incredible steady rate of 50-55 percent just in the first 24 hours.

Although the design of my newsletter has undergone various changes and still evolves to satisfy my current subscribers and to attract new ones; I’m already happy with it.

So I decided to share my experiences in writing an effective E-Newsletter here.

1. Preparing and sending weekly newsletter is a long term investment.

Never believe in anyone who tries to convince you that you will have a high return on your investment within a couple of weeks.

I think that in most cases you won’t even see the return of your investment in the short-term or mid-term. But don’t worry. Developing and publishing an effective, engaging E-Newsletter, would be one of your most rewarding decisions in long-run.

2. Sending newsletters to the people who have not asked for a newsletter is not a wise decision. If someone advised you to do so, send him generously to your competitor at your cost.

Sending bulk emails to every email list you’ve found will lead to some results. That’s for sure.

But it’s the most expensive content marketing strategy and considering all tangible and intangible costs, the cost of such campaigns exceeds the benefits.

Every unwanted message irritates the user, and a beg-for-click approach will ruin your brand in long-run.

Do your homework and prepare the best possible E-Newsletter. Your subscribers will forward it to the others, and your subscriber community will grow.

The logic behind is so simple: If your content is helpful, no one likes to be a second-hand receiver.

3. The formal style of writing is not attractive anymore.

The corporate-style email writing is not the key to trust or success anymore.

As most of your subscribers receive many formal messages every day, no one looks for more.

They are looking for an informal, casual style of writing and a message to be read in their coffee time whether in the office or at home.

4. Provide your readers with the quotable information.

It would be too optimistic to suppose that the majority of people look for the knowledge to put it into the practice.

Sure using the content in life or business is one of its applications but not the most important one (at least for most of us).

Quoting is the most practical use of every piece of content.

Write a piece of content titled “How not to be stupid in the workplace” and show it to your friends.

I bet that even before reading it, most of them will tell you: “YES! I have a colleague who must read this!”

Designing and creating a quotable or viral content has its own tips and tricks which I will write about in future.

5. Use original content as much as possible.

As I have mentioned before, no one likes to be a second-hand receiver of good content.

So the major part of your content has to be original.

Hiding the source doesn’t make you an original publisher. Even if you hide your sources, sooner or later someone will find them, and you will lose their trust.

So if you use any source for curation of the content, you have to specify it explicitly and honestly.

6. Neither pure-click nor full-content are the best email content. Try to find an optimum combination.

Some of the newsletters are pure-click emails. Full of links and tempting headlines trying to seduce the reader to click on them. Some other newsletters have taken the exact opposite side. They are full-

Full of links and tempting headlines trying to seduce the reader to click on them. Some other newsletters have taken the exact opposite side. They are full-

Some other newsletters have taken the exact opposite approach. They are full-content emails. These emails are a combination of texts and illustrations in such a way that you will lose nothing if you print them out on the paper.

These emails are a combination of texts and illustrations in such a way that you will lose nothing if you print them out on the paper.

Pure-click emails will become boring and even irritating after some time. According to my experience and also experiences of other friends, subscribers of such letters will not stay loyal to them and this strategy will lead to lower open-rate and higher unsubscribe rate in the long-run.

According to my experience and also experiences of the other friends, subscribers of such letters will not stay loyal to them and this strategy will lead to lower open rates and higher unsubscribe rates in the long-run.

Full-content emails have other downsides.

First of all, your subscriber will not visit your website anymore; If there’s something important, they will tell me via email.

The second problem is that a full-content email is not a newsletter anymore. It will be closer to a newspaper or magazine, and your subscriber will unconsciously compare its quality and content with his/her favorite newspaper or magazine, and sure you know who will be the winner.

7. If you’d like your subscribers to do something, ask them to do it.

You may not believe me, but I firmly believe that in spite of existing hype around the highly interactive digital media, nowadays the audiences are more passive than ever.

Just test it as I have tested:

Put a hyperlink in your email and send it to half of your subscribers:

Here is a hyperlink to a very nice article.

At the same time, test a different style with the other half:

Here is a hyperlink to a very nice article; please click on it.

You won’t believe me. But I have even tested a third style:

Here is a hyperlink to a very nice article, please click on it and write there your opinion.

You can’t imagine the incredible difference between results of these three emails.

You may love it or hate it. But it’s the fact. Test it with your next newsletter.

8. Sometimes full-text emails can be more successful.

I’m nearly sure that even if you trust me on the previous point, still you will not believe this one.

Take a look at the most popular newsletter recommendation lists and you will find a standard advice there in the first lines: Make a combination of text and picture.

Yes. It can make your newsletter attractive. But will it make your newsletter a differentiated one? I don’t think so.

People get used to any attraction, but they will never get used to the differentiation.

Nowadays, every email is full of photos and click-on-me-banners and irritating colors and please-look-at-me dancing-gifs.

If you want to be one of them, just do it. But if you are aiming at a differentiated newsletter, there might be the better options.

Any newsletter is kind of letter after all, and any letter has to be informative before anything else and images are more a tool for the attraction than a piece of information.

I’m not against combining photos and the text. But just please double-check your decision before blindly following the popular practice.

The Popular practice is not necessarily the best practice.

9. Don’t limit yourself to the contents you have generated by your own.

We all have heard that content is king. But just a highly optimistic king would try to expand his territory with the soldiers of the others! This is the reason that in any website, it’s neither strategic nor prestigious to use the contents of the others excessively.

But the situation is a bit different in newsletters. The first aim of a weekly newsletter is earning subscribers and if there’s any way to provide value to them, just use it.

Offering them some links of the week from the other publishers would make every subscriber happy if you select them carefully considering interests of your audience.

Quoting sentences or paragraphs from the famous authors or interesting books would make everyone happy.

Don’t forget that newsletters are not supposed to produce the news; they are expected to deliver the news to the audience.

But there’s one thing to hold in your mind every time you quote any content from any publisher: Never Steal their traffic.

Beyond all official rules and laws, there’s an ethical practice in quoting the content.

Every publisher has invested in the content to attract the target receivers and convert them to the active audiences. Quoting the whole content or forgetting to mention the access address to the owner is not a professional act.

10. Consider a limit for advertising material.

We are all fed up with advertising materials, and no one looks for more. In the outdoor advertising, the advertisers are looking for the most exposure, but this is not the case in digital newsletters. In our today’s overcrowded market, every subscriber feels a permanent temptation to unsubscribe from your list. So never trigger them to do so. This is the reason that I never dedicate more than 10% of the whole newsletter space to the ads.

In our today’s overcrowded market, every subscriber feels a permanent temptation to unsubscribe from your list.

So never trigger them to do so. This is the reason that I never consider more than 10% of the whole newsletter space to the ads (whether direct or indirect ones).

11. Provide them with downloadable content.

Tina Seelig notes a critical point in her fantastic book called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20:

People waiting in a long restaurant queue would easily pay you to get your position if you are far before them.
But they would pay more if you give them the electronic notification device you have received from the restaurant.

It means that for most of us, any tangible object would be more favorable than an intangible service with the same characteristics.

The same holds true in the digital world.

Having a link to an article would be good. But a downloadable pdf file would be great.

Streaming music is nice, but I feel if I could have it downloaded on my computer.

So even if your subscribers are already happy and satisfied with the links you have provided them, still consider some downloadable pdf files or audio files in your weekly newsletter.

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