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Ask Slashdot: How To Deliver a Print Magazine Online, While Avoiding Piracy?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a technical magazine that has been available in print for over 40 years. Moving to providing an alternative subscription available online has been hard; the electronic version is quickly pirated and easily available around the world each month. We are a small company, and our survival depends not only on advertising but on the subscription fees. Do any slashdotters have experience of delivering electronic magazines via a subscription service in a way that is cost effective and secure?"
The expert's forum is an excellent idea. I often read the article comments for valuable insights beyond the article.
This makes me think the best way is to deliver the "magazine" in a continuous flow instead of as a "monthly". On the web, monthly magazines make no sense. Publish an article every few days and link between articles such as part 1 and part 2.
Who wants to pirate one day at a time? Who wants to have to sort and organize multi-part articles? This increases the labor for the pirates and actually gives you some labor flexibility on producing content.
How about if you know who posted the last copy online, he doesn't get any more issues? Assuming that most people are honest (and I believe they are) makes it easy to weed out the jerks.
This increases the labor for the pirates and actually gives you some labor flexibility on producing content.
You clearly have not seen the tenacity that pirates are capable of. For most, it isn't about ripping someone off, it's about sharing something. Add to that a lot of people with with a lot of time on their hands, and they will work tirelessly to put those articles together, day after day, month after month.
,make so much more money on the web if you have good content.
The other posters suggesting the value-adds mixed with free are bang on. Forums, article archives, lots of "free" stuff, and a reasonable price will potentially get you far more revenue on the net than your print editions would. Embed short videos or effects that help get the article's point across. That's tougher to include in pirated versions, and generally won't be, so you have one up one the pirated version. Use the medium to it's potential, and they will come.
Most important, work on eyeballs for advertising revenue, not necessarily subscriptions. You have the potential
This is the digital age... the best method is to re-tool the publication process. As part of the subscription service, have a questionnaire to fill out that personalizes the ads. As part of the publication process, include information about the subscriber in the ad holes -- you can even customize the content to some degree (in an automated manner) based on the subscriber.
This results in an excellent watermark, as each subscriber will have slightly different content. Just do rolling MD5 hashes, and you'll quickly figure out who's leaking the content. Then stop their subscription.
It comes back to the old "give them something to make it worth it" model -- if you make the subscription for more than "get a dead tree magazine in digital form" and add in the ability to provide online feedback for ads and content, do things to make the customer feel connected to what you're sharing with them, and as a side benefit get excellent demographics information for your advertisers, then even if the magazine itself is pirated all over the place, people will still subscribe, as you're providing them a service that goes beyond that.
One idea off the top of my head: have an online forum where subscribers can discuss the content -- close it off to everyone else. When you print the digital copy for the individual for the month, include the "top 5 posts in customer's chosen category" as part of the Letters sections, and maybe even a roll-up of all comments the customer left on the website since the last publication, plus responses to those by other customers. Costs virtually nothing, but would be an excellent hook and security mechanism.
The best approach for dealing with piracy is making your content easily accessible, hassle-free (i.e., no DRM), and offered at a fair price.
Let me expand on this point. There are broadly 2 kinds of pirates - those who enjoy your product and pirate for personal use (the fans), and those who pirate commercially to make money for themselves (the thieves).
The fans are normally concerned with easy and cheap access to your product. Give it to them and most fans will not bother to pirate because it is risky (exposure to malware), often time consuming (some obscure products can be really hard to find), inconvenient (usually need to assemble from multiple sources) or require technical expertise (eg. applying cracks, rooting). A good example would be Steam which provides cheap and convenient access to games. A counter example would be Game of Thrones - If you live in Oz, you can't get it (no access) and it is expensive (requires cable subscription).
As for the thieves, normally an obscure small technical magazine would not be of interest to them. The exception is if your product is so expensive that even your fans are willing to buy copies from pirates, making it financially worthwhile. Again, reducing your product to a fair price (by market standards) will largely solve this problem. One example is AutoCAD, which has a captive market, ridiculous monopoly pricing and a huge piracy problem.
Since you mentioned "secure", I assume you are contemplating some form of DRM. Just be aware of its disadvantages -its usually expensive (you need to buy/licence the DRM, maintain some way of policing it, maintain customer service to handle irate buyers, have some sort of refund sceheme for customers who cannot run the DRM), it can negatively impact sales (see Sony rootkits), and if badly implemented, can actually cause lawsuits e.g. SecureROM.