Slashdot Mirror
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 best approach for dealing with piracy is making it easy to go after those that do it, without making it harder for everyone else. There are a number of good fingerprinting / watermarking schemes around. Try that as first approach with a readable "This copy has been bought by XXX" marker on the first or second page to make it obvious that it is a personalized copy.
So just make it cheap and easy for real subscribers. If it's not worth someone's time to pirate something, they won't. Also, add something that can't be pirated, like an expert's forum, with article authors participating.
then it can be pirated.
... as "privacy", which makes it make more sense.
Won't work. You can't prevent people from making screenshots. Yes, that's more work, but it only takes one person to subscribe and go to the trouble of taking screenshots of every page and compiling a PDF from them, and then uploading it on BitTorrent.
Not only that, who the fuck wants to read PDFs online using some shitty in-browser viewer? Not me; I'd never subscribe to something that made me jump through hoops like that. If I can't download the PDFs and be able to read them offline (like when I'm on a plane), then I don't want it.
There are two types of people. Type 1 will pirate. Type 2 won't. DRM doesn't stop Type 1. DRM does stop Type 2 from enjoying your product. Type 1 will discover your product and then look for a pirated copy. Type 2 will stumble across a pirated copy and then subscribe to your product.
Your basic question is whether there are enough Type 2 people to make it worth your while to offer an electronic version. My answer is: I have no idea. I only know that as a Type 2 person myself, if I am interested in your product, it is much more valuable to me without DRM, because then I can view it in a way I like and introduce other Type 2 people to it who may also subscribe.
Unfortunately, the /. crowd (or at least the younger ones) believe that information wants to be free.
Among others:
- How dare you put ads and cookies? It's an invasion of privacy!
- Paywall? Everything is a rehash from AP/ Reuters!
- We don't need journalists...we have bloggers!
- We're just trying out things on piratebay before we buy it....if it wasn't free in the first place, we would've never paid for it in the first place, hence it's not theft.
- it's not theft because you can make infinite copies.
- I want to buy it, not license it. If I paid for something, I *own* it.
blah blah, side-arguments to copyright and such, and how the system is broken.
Don't worry about it. A regular paper magazine can be "pirated" by loaning the issue to friends. You actually want that, because the more people are familiar with your magazine and the more they read it, the likelier they are to subscribe.
Make the advertisements and credits for your web site part of your content in a way that it's too much work to remove so the copied versions retain this stuff. Like watermarks in images, maybe an article delivered as an image with advertising and credits, etc. Then embed tracking links so you can demonstrate to advertisers the total "viewage".
This should be interesting...
Is Slashdot REALLY the place you think you'll get the best advice on this topic? I expect you're mostly going to hear from people who expect everything available for free.
In any case - do you know for sure piracy is causing significant issues for you? Just because something IS available on torrent sites doesn't mean that's where everyone who was a print subscriber is getting it now. I tend to believe a lot of people that download torrented stuff are only doing so because it's available for free - they have zero interest in buying it, and in the old days would never have been one of your print subscribers.
iTunes manages to sell a lot of music without protecting it at all, for example. Maybe you're thinking about it backwards - rather than focussing on making it hard to get at your content, instead think "how can we deliver this content in a compelling, visually interesting, easy to navigate way? People who were inclined to pay for "print" may very well be inclined to pay for continued access to that expertise, if they feel they're getting their money's worth.
#DeleteChrome
In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the U.S. release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.
- Gabe Newell
The only people punished by DRM are the ones paying money....
Put a watermark on the page and hand out a few small warnings to those that are distributing to please stop, and slowly step up enforcement. Make it cheap enough that people wont want to pirate it, make it valuable enough that people will respect you enough not to. And build a community around your product, you can always go the DRM route but its ruling with an iron fist, and makes the content inaccessible and hostile to port to other devices, at that point your customers will put in the effort to pirate it because they have no respect for your company.
Modern companies are getting worse at "customer service" and going the DRM route will make you just another one of the companies people love to hate.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
I'm not a huge advocate of DRM or anything, but it seems like you should aim at the Apple/Android tablet market. Build or license a magazine app for content delivery. It'll let you control how much access your users get to the content -- can they save a copy? email it to someone? etc. -- while making it really convenient for your users to get the content delivered regularly and with minimum effort. I suppose you could try to do this on the desktop, but the mobile device world seems tailor-made to your needs, assuming your target audience usually owns mobile devices.
If you watermark the file (PDF or other) with some identifying information about each file's recipient, you can track down the source of some of the piracy. Of course, once pirated, the game's over.
Alternatively, you can only make the document available online, with user identification required.
This can be hard from your POV, but limiting people to share information is usually not good. To resolve this conflict of intelectual slavery, you could try to shift business to new models that do not require denying usres from freely talking or sharing. Maybe some extra options, comments, or even crowdsourcing. If this is at all possible in your case, then such model removes the problem while keeping both sides of trade happy.
You mention that the publication can't be supported without the subscription fees due to not making enough on advertising. Maybe you should increase your advertising rates. If people are pirating the electronic version, than your circulation is higher and your advertising rates should be higher.
If that doesn't fly just watermark them like other people mentioned and go after the pirates.
My wife used to work for a company called 'newsstand.com' that does this exact sort of thing.
I can't say that they treated their employees well, and they really embraced the whole 'outsource jobs' thing, but, yeah. They have some sort of secured reader, they manage your subscriptions, etc. You actually get an electronic version of the print version, reflowed and reformatted to properly fit a pdf reader, as opposed to a separate digital copy with less features or ads or whatever.
They're also used to dealing with publishers who can't spell IBM, though I don't know if they actually can help in those cases, at least it won't be a shock to them. So, if you or your IT staff are somehow mentally incapable, they can still handle you.
I have no idea of the pricing or anything, however.
be the first to see the new Bieber vampire movie
Why bother? He doesn't need to play a vampire in order to suck.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You could ask the publisher of Linuxjournal.com how it works for them. They've gone all digital (with no watermarks), and I've switched my subscription from paper to digital.
I think that's what Adobe's content creation apps do. You create nice small vector-graphics and text documents, then generate a 400Mb multi-page jpeg.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
they aren't your customers
work on delivering the most convenient, accessible, highest quality content to your customers (the ones who give you money)
you ignore the ones you get it without paying just like you ignore the ones who look at it and keep walking
Exactly. If the OP wants to be respectful toward the readers, delivering an online magazine is very simple. Remove ads, put everything online under CC-BY-SA (https, no paywall, no login required to read), create a downloadable pdf for offline viewers, and start a donation drive. I promise you near-zero effective piracy rate. There will be sites with exact copies, but no one will use them or link to them because they will have ads, and your site will actually be the most convenient source. If you can't get enough in donations, then no one wants your magazine, and you should probably diversify your business.
the electronic version is quickly pirated and easily available around the world each month...
Here's the thing; Everyone wants to change the world. Nobody thinks of changing their own thinking or approach to a problem. Nobody's going to beat "piracy". Not you, not the RIAA, the MPAA, or even the most powerful governments on Earth. All they can do is guilt and shame people, threaten and cajoule them, punish them, but they cannot stop them. Everyone thinks we're well into the information age, and it's easy to believe that when the devices we use are changing so fast. But we're still at the very beginning. This is a change to society that will take generations, not years. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Now, let's talk about computers. At their most basic, they are devices for the storage, transmission, and manipulation, of binary data. Fundamentally, information sharing is what computers do best, and that capability is what is driving this revolution of human consciousness. Trying to limit it or create new designs so it only works in one direction, is a practice doomed to failure over the long term. We can make short term alterations to our devices, make it more difficult, but we can't eliminate it without destroying the very thing that gives the computer value. This is something hackers, engineers, programmers, and geeks understand implicitly, but we have a hard time verbalizing it to outsiders.
We have an even harder time convincing people like you, whose business depends on an outmodded idea that publication and distribution are married to each other, that distribution can be controlled in any way. It's our fault in part because we aren't naturally gifted at communicating how computers work -- it is a radically different approach to everything that came before. Sure, we can come up with phrases like "Information wants to be free", but it rings hollow before traditional modes of thinking. It doesn't communicate the why behind it. Information doesn't want anything. But its creation in digital format means that it is now bound to a new set of rules. Knowledge, once converted to digital form, is now subject to a whole new universe -- it's like the laws of physics got rewritten once digitized.
You cannot stop "piracy". The future is instantanious information exchange, two-way, multi-modal, and without restriction. No matter what you, or the government, or anyone does, this will eventually be the case. I know it took hundreds of years before people really accepted the Earth is flat, and perhaps it will take even longer before people truly embrace unrestricted information exchange; But it is an inevitability.
If you want help stopping this, you've come to the wrong place. The solutions offered up will be temporary, incomplete, and at a high cost. My advice to you is to change your thinking. You cannot stop information exchange, but you can give it additional value. In a world where all information is easily exchanged, the only value is in the decision to exchange it. The more you can do to convince people to make that exchange, the more value the goods will have. And as a packaged product, you can put things in like advertisement, etc., to support the costs of publication. Leverage this new resource to all but eliminate the cost of distribution. The network will find a way to do that for you. Focus on creating something worth sharing; And your reputation, your name, will gain value. That is what you sell, not the work itself. The work itself is just a collection of data.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
How about offering some interactive features for which screenshots would fail to capture the full experience.
Don't I feel stupid. I was wondering what this word (seemingly from French) "ballache" meant. Then it dawned on me.
Consider some sort of watermarking. It is not as easy to watermark text as it is with pictures. But it is still possible. Every time an article is written the writer need to find a few places throughout the text where two different versions of the text are equally good. Sometimes this will come very natural, when the writer encounters a situation where [he]/[she] can't make up [his]/[her] mind about the wording, the choice can be left to the watermarking software.
Leaving just a handful of bits for the watermarking software to chose in each article means any subscriber systematically copying articles would soon reveal [her]/[his] identity. Even copying as little as 100 bits of watermarking could produce a very clear signal about which subscriber is copying the data.
Make sure any technical means you choose don't get in the way of the user. You need to ensure what a user expects to be able to do with a website will still work. That includes searching the site using the users favourite search engine and sharing links with their friends.
As far as search engines go, try to treat the search engine as just another subscriber, which happens to get free access, as you want to drive users to your site.
Anybody who visits your site starting with a link from a search engine should be allowed to read the first article they found, but you can limit the number of articles per day a single user can access this way. When a non-subscriber follows links between articles, you can provide an interstitial page with information about signing up, and limiting the number of articles the user can read before subscribing.
Ensure that your subscribers can share links. When a subscriber want to share an article with [his]/[her] friends, there should be a link to provide a URL suitable for sharing. Each subscriber should only be allowed to share a fraction of the articles on the site this way. They are not supposed to be able to generate sharing URLs for every single article they access. But for those few they want to share, they should have access to such a URL. Once the sharing URL has been generated anybody with the URL should be able to access the page without having a subscription themselves.
Once in a while such a URL might spread widely, that is just good publicity for your site. In case archives of such URLs covering a substantial fraction of your site start spreading, you can easily track the URLs back to subscribers.
The trick is to ensure that fair usage remains possible, and is not hindered by technical means. And instead of trying to prevent users from stepping across the boundary of fair usage through technical means, just use technical means to track it. Subscriptions can be cancelled, if [users]/[customers] are abusing the freedom you give them.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Or the other tablet/e-reader magazine solutions.
Why make it harder for yourself and try to roll your own when there already exists a solution.
Agreed. I just made the mistake of buying an audiobook on audible.co.uk. Never again. They expect you to install a downloader just to get the content; plus the downloader isn't triggered from all browsers so a change of browser might be needed. Once you've actually got the content, there are device-synchronization and audible-drm-compatible-player issues. Who wants to go through all that ? Unfortunately the content wasn't available on bt so I can't resort to that as a means of making it the content accesible in a way that suits me. To add insult to injury, audible 'allow' me as a customer to burn a limited number of books to CD but... drumroll... this process has a dependency on iTunes. WTH? I suppose I should know better as it's now owned by Amazon :S
What a great future we all have to look forwards to when any remaining audiobook-content creators still in competition with Amazon are no longer :S:S:S:S:S
Requiem for the American Dream
Why should I? You ask for a way to protect your 'intellectual property' so you can make money with it. If I knew the answer to your question, it would be my IP. Give me one reason, why I should give it to you for free?
Sounds good. You should do the same with your work. There are lots of people competing for jobs, so you should just show up and work for free, and if someone wants to make a donation to you, great.
Magazines can charge subscription fees to the extent that there is value in the content. Magazines can sell advertizing to the extent that people see the content. There is a spectrum here, a slider (if you will) that you can set anywhere between two extremes.
You're currently betwixt those two extremes. If you move to a model exclusively one way or the other, then the answer is obvious.
A printed magazine is inconvenient to duplicate, so can survive on subscription fees for content. An online magazine costs nothing to duplicate, so subscription fees for content is unworkable.
Drop subscription fees altogether and get all revenue from advertizing. Your reader base will skyrocket, making the publication a better value for advertizing.
Baen Books posts their older books for free on the net. Surprisingly, this increased hard-copy sales and opened their publications to a much wider audience. Eric Flint's explanation is a good read.
(And many of the free online Baen books are a good read as well.)
Note that I'm expounding the virtues of Baen Books to this website read by hundreds of thousands each day. Your magazine could do worse than be one of the handful of well-respected companies whose product is based on customer value.
And for reference, count the myriad websites that give value to the user and survive on advertizing alone. XKCD and Hackaday for example. Not websites that rely on users that add value, but websites that actually have value that the user wants. Randall Munroe lets others cite and copy his work virtually everywhere so long as it's not for money.
Transition to an open online model and throw it out to the world. Become a respected product of value.
Piracy will help your business model. Just put your content on your website and update it regularly.
If the content is truly technical you should get a CPM of many dollars.
Two separate points: First, It is easy to say that survival depends on subscription fees, but the reality is that many people today choose either to pay for subscriptions or to view ads. For a technical magazine, it might make sense to make the content more open and attempt to increase subscribers and, through that, increase ad revenue. This might not be a viable model, but it serves your purpose well. Second, sadly, even without piracy, tech articles can be easily duplicated, rewritten, or otherwise usurped. Tech articles have a short lifetime and I see very little value in print articles. Once the article appears online, I typically skip the later print versions. Relating this to piracy is simple: by the time someone has pirated the average tech article, it is old news. Dozens of aggregation websites exist that point people to the original article immediately. If it is "breaking" news, ads are the primary means of revenue generation. Frankly, most technically interested readers skip subscription serveries because they are becoming irrelevant in the tech news world.
the wrong approach for dealing with piracy is going after those who do it.
the right approach is offering something which doesn't give them a reason to "pirate" it. Not to mention that the term isn't even correct, you can't pirate an ebook/magazine.
example: having your magazine available worldwide without restrictions.
example: offering something in the digital version that print doesn't.
TLDR version: put in effort to make a good magazine instead of doing the lazy step of "we need more control to deal with piracy"
I am on the "DRM is more bad than good" camp. As an example, I point out Elektor magazine, which provides non-DRM PDFs of their magazine (in addition to the print version). My (admittedly limited) impression is that its made their "product" much better, and more valuable. I can treat the digital version just like my print copy (yes, even lend it), and that's a good thing. The valuable part of a magazine is the ideas in it, not the medium it's printed/rendered on. I feel that Elektor has done an excellent job of making the value of their product center around the information they provide, which easily justifies paying for it. And one way they've done that is to *not* argue that the medium is part of that value.
www.homepower.com
They have a print version, but have been offering a PDF version (no DRM) for many years.
The PDF used to be available for free download from the main web page, that seems to have changed so it is now available to subscribers only.
I do not know what CMS (Content Management System) they use but it seems to work for them.
Each subscriber gets a unique download url so I don't think it can be shared.
Alternatively you could just create a FUDL (Fake Unique Download URL) like:
www.example.com/5tsQ7ghs/issue3-2013/
and send those out to each "subscriber", telling them it is for their use only and change the name of the directory to some other goofy name for the next issue.
of course this does not really provide PP (Piracy Proof) content, but I think that has been commented on enough already and I think you should just let that part go.
Make it easy for people that want to pay to get the digital version but make it just a little bit hard to figure it out if you are not a subscriber.
I like microcars
Any technical attempts to prevent "piracy" are doomed. They will however decrease the value of the product to the customer and increase the cost of making it. So, if you want to kill your product, load it with DRM, make copying impossible, etc. You customers will show you the same respect you show for them.
Also, your benchmark for success is not how many times your product gets copied without permission, your benchmark is how many times it sells. The "one copy pirated equals one sale lost" rhetoric completely wrong and utterly stupid, and this has now been shown by several scientifically sound studies. If you do not have enough sales, then it is because your product sucks.
You may also want to look at the experiences Baen books made with publishing online without DRM. Hint: Their sales went up.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Stopping piracy is impossible
As long as you have enough paying customers to make a profit, you are OK
If you make your DRM too annoying, you will piss off your paying customers
I suggest doing everything you can to reward your loyal, paying customers, while treating piracy as advertising expense
Instead of getting part of your income from advertising, get all of it from advertising. You will then get a better distribution probably ten times more, and the advertisers will get a better deal than they otherwise would have. Everyone wins.
I have been a reader of WIRED magazine since their first year. (calm down now; its just an example. let's argue the merits of Wired's newsworthiness elsewhere).
I got an iPad, and when Wired came to the Newsstand app, I thought it would be an excellent thing for me- now I could read the magazine anywhere, anywhen. I didn't even have to pay, being a print subscriber was enough. But the thing is, I had to laboriously download each issue, they took up a lot of room on my iPad, and I just never remembered that there was an issue sitting, waiting for me.
What did I do all those times i was stuck at an airport, or babysitting a sleeping baby, and had time on my hands? You'd THINK I would open up Newsstand and read an issue of Wired, but what I really did was opened up my RSS reader and skimmed headlines from dozens of blogs, all at once. Gizmodo, Engadget, Techcrunch, boingboing, Ars, Slashdot, and yes, Wired.
I don't even read Wired any more. is it because of DRM, or watermarking? of course not. it's because: why would I sit down for an hour and read month-old news when i can get the headlines up-to-date every minute of every day, in bite-sized chunks?
If you want to modernize and get online, that's great. But why are you only thinking of modernizing ONE part of your hundred-year-old delivery service? If you're just going online because that's what everyone is doing, I would say: forget it. Save your money. Keep printing your magazine, and the people who really need it for their jobs and their wellbeing will continue subscribing. But if you want to get with the Now, do it right. Stop thinking in monthly/bimonthly/quarterly/whatever publishing cycles. Publish a steady stream of articles and news, when they're ready, when they're relevant. Give subscribers a way to log in and go thorugh old content whenever they need it. Create a community, get information flowing in both directions. Add value. No one will bother pirating your content because there will be NEW content tomorrow. You can't pirate breaking news, and you cant pirate community feedback.
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
My post fails to answer the original question, so here's an actual answer.
Call up the advertizing departments of the major online magazines which have a subscription model, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Tell them who you are and what you want to do, and ask if someone could discuss their situation with you and give some recommendations.
Surprisingly, many people are willing to spend time helping others, giving advice, and outlining their experiences with a problem. Talking to someone with first-hand knowledge is the most valuable information you can get.
If you do this, please write up your conclusions somewhere and submit it as a followup article. Many Slashdot readers aspire to have online businesses, and would be interested in your results.
From what I've read, I strongly suspect that the online magazines aren't making enough money from online subscriptions to warrant the hassles of the infrastructure. NYT, for example, had to implement their own subscription interface... is your small shop willing to bear that expense? It will take manpower, money, and time away from adding value to your product, and I suspect that the return on your subscription won't be worth the tradeoff.
You'll be putting a lot of effort into the subscription mechanism, while at the same time reducing your readership. It's better to ditch subscription altogether, put your efforts into adding value, and get money from advertizing.
I do do this with my own writing, but this is besides the point. I don't ask the OP to work for free, I am just asking not to scam the readers. If the magazine is interesting, then the OP will get paid. If the magazine is crap, the proper action is to make it better or quit, not to abuse the customers.
In Slashdot that argument is often morphed to "it's not stealing, because no one loses anything, and you can make unlimited copies". Which still leaves the problem, how are we then going to decide who gets the free copy and who has to pay? Because the maker of the product has to recoup the production costs somehow.
Huh? asking subscribers to not post free copies online is a scam? Really?
Do any slashdotters have experience of delivering electronic magazines via a subscription service in a way that is cost effective and secure?"
You mean, at least as secure as the printed versions that presumably burst into flames when their buyer tries to lend them to anyone else?
Ezekiel 23:20
I just made the mistake of buying an audiobook on audible.co.uk. Never again.
Yep, same here. It's why I buy all my audiobooks as unabridged MP3 CDs on Amazon.ca. Sure, they're not available immediately, but I'm still usually listening to the last one anyway.
You're ability to stop someone copying digital data off of a screen is sightly less possible than your ability to teleport to the moon.
There is no technological solution to piracy. Instead, it's far more beneficial to view it as a type of progressive taxation and approach it from a pragmatic perspective.
Computers are machines whose fundamental purpose is copying information. There is nothing you can realistically do to slow this down. There is no future in which computers become worse at copying.
Another comment in this thread rightly mentioned that piracy is more of a service problem then anything else. When a kid across the world can make it easier and faster to access your stuff, and do it for literally nothing, you're doing something wrong.
If you want to offer an online edition, you'll need to do more than just make it a digitized version of the print edition. Make it interactive, have little games, animations, integrated live information from RSS or Twitter feeds ... be creative and make the online edition actually ... y'know, *online*. You need give readers a reason to pay for your online edition, not just "because they should." These are also things that require server/client interaction and *can't* be automatically duplicated without an enormous amount of effort -- the kind of effort it would have taken to painstakingly duplicate a magazine or book two hundred years ago.
It's a little different producing a magazine than doing free-lance writing or blogging. The magazine has staffers to buy, office space, equipment to buy, etc. When someone distributes the magazine w/o permission the magazine loses the revenue that allows it to exist, and the magazine content disappears.
which is content. You're not experts in DRM, so trying to roll your own is only going to be a PITA for you, and your customers, while hardly impeding anyone who wants to pirate.
This means if you want a solution with DRM, you're going to publish through somebody who is doing DRM'd electronic distribution. That means Amazon's Kindle Publisher, the equivalent Barnes and Noble program, iTunes, or Kobo. The trickiest thing will be figuring out whose terms of use give you the most opportunity to recapture revenue.
If you're publishing a paper magazine, chances are you are heavily into Adobe already. It would make sense to see what they're offering in terms of electronic distribution and DRM infrastructure to their magazine publishing customers. I'd be willing to bet they've got a solution targeted right at your kind of outfit, because you are hardly unique in your predicament.
If DRM isn't that critical a concern for you, you might think outside the magazine publisher's box and go right to social media. I know that a number of publications are offering Facebook apps, and again because you are hardly unique in your situation I'd bet there's a way to capture advertising revenue through a Facebook app. Going this route you probably won't be able to keep folks from copying chunks of text from your magazine for their own purposes; that could be an issue for some of your contributors. That said, it's so convenient for users that wholesale piracy of the latest stuff probably won't be a practical concern for you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
taken is to give the digital edition away for free for regular subscribers... but let's skip the subscription model here and propose a solution for a distribution model that might be nice and add value for customers.
:)
Their digital distribution, for PC, Android and IOS is in the form of something that looks like the regular newspaper. Looks really good and it's zoomable and stuff like that. It's completely readable as such. But to add to that they've also put raw text posts for easy reading if you click on the articles. This adds extra value and convenience for their customers. You can check them out at www.hbl.fi The site is however in swedish, but it's possible to google translate it with good quality
Unfortunately they've done quite a few restrictions on their website. You can still read the online articles as a non subscriber, but they've restricted the commenting to be just for the subscribers which has decreased the amount of comments significantly. You can't even read the comments w/o being a subscriber afaik.
> 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
Find a way to track the piracy, then go to the advertisers and say "Hey! Look at how many people are reading our magazine!". Actually, just search the /. history, there are many people who are willing to track this kind of thing. The subscribers will continue to pay if they actually care about the content, and are in no way inconvenienced. As an example, I subscribe to the new Linux Journal e-Magazine version. I used to subscribe to the print version as well. However, I never really read them from cover to cover, I just liked them to be there when I wanted them. When they switched over to online only, I stopped subscribing, because logging into their site to read it meant it wasn't "just there when I wanted it". Eventually I bought a tablet and renewed my subscription (now online only). I have been pretty happy so far, but every now and then the DRM starts to annoy me (taking too long to load due to a huge complex network between my tablet and their servers that spans ISP's, countries and continents), so I am considering dropping them and just carrying on reading advertising sponsored sites whenever it suits me.
I think one of the biggest dichotomies between online advertising and print advertising now-a-days is that advertisers have made us hate adverts because they think we hate adverts. When I buy a newspaper, after reading the front page articles, I pull out the advertising section to see if there is anything that may help me save a few bucks in the next couple of days. It is the original "GroupOn". With online content now, sites throw adverts in your face, which means you either ignore them (normal people), or just put up ad-block (normally awesome people).
P.S I work for a company that could be construed as an advertising company in the Minority Report sense
Exactly! This is how Amazon sells so many MP3s and Kindle books. NY Times, on the other hand, doesn't get it. I peruse their headlines online just about every day. Click on an article every other day or so. Some times I get the "Limit Exceeded" message that sends me to their subscribe page. All well and good but I can't get an online subscription only and their prices (considering I only want online access) are ridiculous.
If it is similar to Audible.com, then you are wrong on a lot of things here. It may be different, though.
Audible.com, you can either have an app on a tablet/smartphone, or a windows/mac machine. To make MP3s, the process is this: From Windows, burn to CD image with a virtual CD drive that burns to an image. Mount the image with virtual CD software, save to MP3 using your favorite software.
I usually listen on my phone, but convert all my books to MP3 just to store them in a DRM-free format. It is really pretty quick to do it. Some people have even automated the process. I just do it using the above process.
I have all the convenience of the audible format, with the peace of mind of long-term storage in a format I know will work quite some time.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
maybe an article delivered as an image with advertising
No, don't ever do this. It will make the article slow loading, memory intensive and render poorly at levels of zoom other than the native one. Making your product less good is never a good way to attract paying customers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you cant provide enough value for people to purchase, don't bother 'publishing' it in the first place.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How much evidence do you have that people who pirate your magazine would buy the print or online version?
Conversely, how many who run across a pirated version might start to subscribe?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It's a little different producing a magazine than doing free-lance writing or blogging. The magazine has staffers to buy, office space, equipment to buy, etc.
For the third time, I don't expect them to work for free, just like I don't expect Wikipedia staff and servers to work for free.
When someone distributes the magazine w/o permission the magazine loses the revenue that allows it to exist, and the magazine content disappears.
Which is why I suggested giving an explicit permission to distribute. The OP wanted to reduce or eliminate piracy, and I described a way. If the magazine is available freely and is supported by donations, then redistribution by third parties can only increase the revenue.
This is something I started pondering in the early 1990's:
We want and just 'have to' have and use computers to make things easier and faster, yet there is always an uproar and fighting because things get easier and faster...WTF?
When you set about to change something...don't be surprised when change happens!
Face it. If you are going to put it online, you will have to change your business model. You no longer have captive markets to exploit.
You will have to return to the old business model of treating your customers (not consumers) better than your competition, you will have to offer better Customer Service than your competition, and...you will have to offer a better value/product to your customers than your competition.
The business world worked well for a long time with this method before the 'digital age'/'consumer instead of customer age'.
One of the downsides of the concept of Intellectual Property I suppose... It changes and limits your thinking somewhat.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Seriously, just ask your client base not to copy the mag, and maybe even do "pay what you want". It worked really well for The Humble Bundle.
If the product is good and you treat your customer base well, they will pay. IF you don't they wont.
The people who are going to copy it are not the people you want to care about as customers. Count them for ad revenue (like any other advertisement model, the reader is the product as far as the advertisers are concerned so copying is good from that angle.
You just need to find the sweet spot between universally free distribution (for high advert return) and enough direct sales for it's own sake.
And don't be a dick.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
You want to translate your tried and tested hardcopy business model over to the internet. Well, you can't.
You need a new business model altogether. Literally altogether.
Currently your entire income depends upon the inheritant slowness of distributing your hardcopy from point A to point B. It takes time and money to print, ship and display your magazine. But on the internet moving your content from point A to the rest of the alphabet and beyond takes practically zero time and with practically zero cost.
So your first thought is to create some kind of artificial barrier or to maybe rely on the aging and, frankly, woefully out of date copyright law to protect you.
Neither of these will help you make sales.
First, encrypting your pdfs or signing them with some kind of DRM only makes it harder for people who want to give you cash to give you cash. Second, the internet is a living creature that perceives any barrier to the free transfere of data, like your magazine's content, as damage and wiill route all traffic around this damage and away from your ad space. Third, do you have the money to persue the millions of people who have downloaded your pdf "for free"? No, the best you can do is pick a leaf out of the woods.
So what do you do?
1) Forget everything you know about publishing a magazine. Literally none of it applies to the arena of the internet.
2) Look at existing companies that turn a profit. Like Google. Many people wrongly think Google make money by selling ad space. They don't. They sell user profiles. They collect every bit of data, mine it and compile profiles on every angle they can think of. When you know within a few dozen metres to the millisecond who is currently using the internet to learn about dark chocolate covered digestive biscuits that are on offer with 50% extra free... well you can charge biscuit companies a fortune for that information. How much do you think Google charges to compile a report on your target demographic? Just think about it.
3) Information is consumed differently on a web page to how it is consumed on a piece of paper. For a start pages are viewed in all kinds of formats from your tiny phone screen, to a monitor on a desk, to a snippet headline on someone's twitter feed or facebook wall. PDF is fine if all you're doing is sending it to a printing press but it is terrible if you want your content to look good on every consumable medium there is. The Bible on this subject is a book called "Don't make me think". Go and buy it now.
4) Your unit of sale can no longer be a monthly bundle of stories contained in a paper ensemble. On the internet, your unit of sale is page hits and landing page conversions. You need to make it easy for people to get to a specific article. They need a link that takes them directly to that article that is easy to copy and share. They need buttons that enable them to share it on twitter or facebook or whatever. The more people linking to you, the less people that will be linking to someone who has copied your content. Your landing page should make it easy to drill down to a specific article. The easier you make it for the user, the less they have to work for it or think about it, the quicker and more often they'll be viewing your article AND your ad space. So you want to release your articles in a way that generates maximum repeated traffic.
5) Hire someone full-time and on professional level pay to manage your social media. They will get you a twitter and a facebook and a blog and a forum and some box of magic and they will get people to follow a link to your articles and to your ad space. It's a real job.
6) Forget about the people who take your content for free. Literally forget about them. They aren't worth your time and money. The film idustry would have us believe they would have made x billion dollars more last year if every person who pirated their movies had paid for them. But the truth is the people who "pirated" the movie we're never going to pay for it no matter what the circumstances wer
Look. Pirates are smart, Not all of them but enough of them, No matter what you do someone will figure out how to pirate it. You need to figure out at what point antipiracy stuff costs you more then the piracy but there is always a point.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Content distribution should not be part of a modern business model. Like it or not, you have to compete in distribution with piracy. The question should be: Can I distribute my content for free and still generate revenue? The answer lies in some of the following possibilities:
1. Subsidize the creation of the content through syndication, sponsorship
2. Monetize the consumption of the content (ads)
3. Value added products/services which are hard to copy
4. Add intangible value through community, zeitgeist
You still have to compete on the content itself and there is not much scarcity in that market. As some other comments mentioned, format is increasingly important. A 50+ page magazine can psychologically daunting compared to a stream of content which can be check and "finished" several times a day. The latter also results in repeat engagement opportunities. Something like ESPN insider may be good to examine.
The fact that the content industry is evolving and requires innovation for survival is a good thing.
This turned really long, but I believe it will be quite helpful. It has 4 themes: 1) Realizing what is happening, 2) what you are going to lose, 3) why this is happening and 4) at least one suggestion to turn it around.
:)
I was also involved heavily in this industry, there's no two ways about it, you have to realize this isn't 'business as usual' any longer. The Internet is a revolution from print just as cars were from horses. Print won't be around a decade longer, and it's only embraced by those who still remember the old ways. Kids don't even bother, and older people are getting worse eye sight
If you don't adapt, you'll die. Frankly, you have already adapted too slowly. I think a lot of us sit back in amusement or get steamed about how slowly media is adapting to our wants.
While I understand the pain of such a brutal change, believe me, I made my money in media as well then went to nothing.. I had plenty of time to think about it, Even while I tried to adapt as my sales hit around 50%, it was still way too slow. (Mine died in 2 years, stopped making money in 4-5, but basically dead within 2)
As soon as the Internet was developed, you should have been trying to get on it, as should have I more-so. Now you're so far behind you are basically asking how to keep your old customers, and the Internet won't matter much. Time is doing pay for their mags and get online free which is fine, but they are still struggling getting new subscribers. For new customers, you need a whole new business model. They have grown up with free information, and 'worse', the belief that information ought to be free. If it is just information that is. What can you bring them they want to pay for? it won't be opinions and reports. They get that for free now, how will you convince them your opinions and reports are worth paying money for (and even a bigger stretch, worth paying what you previously had expected people to pay!)? You yourself can see everyone else adapting slowly but still dying. They aren't asking the right questions. They aren't seeing how the Internet is revolutionizing the world and how to contribute to it. You know you're dead when you're not trying to figure out your customers anymore, and instead stuck in the mindset of how do we 'make people stay with us'. We come from evolution, we either help progress the 'field' or we die. For some periods of time sure we can gain a foothold on the market with one innovation, but all innovations come to and end. Media had a really long run, they were the very few who were able to just do the same thing over and over again and in the process completely forgot how to innovate.
This is just how it is, there's no incentive to know what's going on anymore as in old times - the internet is truly making people more individuals. They don't care what you or I think is cool, they care only about their peers and their interests. This is why media is evolving into Niche markets.
Print is already dead in younger generations, and they are paying customers next year.The internet wasn't on until I was in college, and it was an instant sell to everyone in my age group. No one had to tell us, we all knew it and saw it's potential (hence the dot com boom). Cloaked in this revolution of information, are several residual effects, for example, water cooler talk has changed. It's not Seinfeld against Friends any longer, it's Game of Thrones -vs- Kardashians -vs- X-Games -vs- 1000 other programs.. I'm sure Radio stations wondered what they were going to do when TV started broadcasting. Some realized they must be on TV. But this is even potentially a bad analogy, as radio still has a use to exist (though an *incredibly* diminished one). Print media really does not. Before e-readers, yes, because it wasn't as easy to read, but with e-readers and with the growing problem of waste, storing heavy books, shipping times, environmentally friendlier (which will only get friendlier and friendlier as population grows and resources decline), etc,
-Ultimate Stickman Game Developer Infinite World Puzzler
There are 2 types of pirates:
1. Those that pirate for convenience.
2. Those that pirate because they don't want to pay.
#2 you don't have to worry about. They never would have bought your magazine anyway. The fact that they get it for free likely is actually good for you in that it's free advertizing.
#1 on the other hand just want it easy to get. So you just have to make it easier than downloading the torrent and uploading it to their tablet. Lucky for you, that's a pain in the ass. Make an android/apple app that gives you half the magazine for free, then wants you to pay for the rest. (or some other configuration like that) Also there are apps out there that allow broad subscriptions. They have lots of magazines in them and you just pick what you want to read. Then they pass on a portion of the subscription to the publisher... this is likely the easiest route for a small company.
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.
You don't want people to get your information for free.
And you came here and asked people to tell you for free... how to keep others from getting YOUR information for free?
Holy fuck... Thats some epic hypocrite right there.
If you wan't help securing your information so everyone has to pay for it... YOU SHOULD PAY FOR THAT! Not come here and ask us for free...
You want my ideas? PAY ME. No? Fuck me? Well... Same to you buddy.
You either embrace the paying for everything and embrace only profits for everyone. or you embrace free and take the piracy hit.
Your attitude suggests tho you want the best of both worlds. You douche.
I've worked in the magazine industry before and basically, your advertising should cover all costs. Subs etc are just icing on the cake. Out the things our DRM free and concentrate on raising ad revenue.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
You could deliver the content via iTunes. Sure it has DRM, but it's not very obtrusive, there's plenty of evidence showing people paying for content through the iTunes store. You'll have to give up 30% to apple however.
You could as well ask "how to deliver a vinyl record online while avoiding piracy". The answer is simple: If you want your business to survive, you don't. You should rather develop a new product that actually makes sense on the medium you are about to move your business to.
It's called terms of service.
Simply put in the terms of service, that if you distribute your copy to more than 2-3 people or computers or whatever (or however many seems reasonable to share with), then this invalidates your terms of service, which will be cancelled, unless you want to pay for these extra copies. This is pretty common practice many places I've seen, and can often lead to added sales for legit users
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
What was your magazine's stance on piracy, before it affected you?
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
If they can read it on their screen then they can pirate it. You're wasting your time
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Who *want* to pay for your magazine because you put out quality, incisive and interesting journalism. People will always be able to pirate or share stuff available online, but if you build a good sized readership who like your output enough to pay for it, that won't matter. www.nsfwcorp.com is a great example, they do brilliant investigative reporting with some brilliant writers and are just all around great. Subscription is currently $3 a month for online and $7 a month for print and online. They also have a cool little feature where subscribers can "unlock" a piece for 48 hours with a link, great for passing around Twitter and building awareness and audience.
And you'll be better off in the long run if you don't try. Price your online edition accordingly and provide a great product and people will buy it. Focus on them, as they are your customers, and forget about all the others. Continuing to see pirated copies as a loss of income is not only counterproductive and futile, but grossly inaccurate.
Pirates actually exist and are people who steal cargo, take hostages and murder people. Unauthorised distribution has nothing to do with piracy. Please stop calling it that, you're playing into the hands of the content industry who want to make it sound scarier than it is.
I think you've just described internships.
Wow. Your magizine is pirated and posted around the world for you? I hope you have good ads and links in your articles so you can take advantage of all that free advertising.
"the electronic version is quickly pirated and easily available around the world each month." Your magazine is not being pirated, it is being made available to those who, due to unfortunate geography or those for whom you do not provide payment options, could not previously have access. This is an opportunity for you to reach out and convert a much larger readership rather than villify them as criminals. This is very good free advertising for and should be embraced and leveraged. It is good thing that you were too cowardly to post the details of your magazine, as you would have had many cancelled subscriptions due to your arrogant attitude, and your accusing filesharers of being pirates.
You'll need to add some sort of value to make it worth while for people to subscribe beyond just being able to read it online.
Although people subscribe to newspapers etc so they can read it as it comes out, many people will wait to read it in a local
coffee shop or other means without paying additional fees for it.
It's a problem that the music industry is running into. Originally people would borrow their friends tapes, a few would make copies, but
often they would just borrow it and return it. Then they saw software licenses and they got all glossy eyed with cash signs.
"What if, we could make it so every person had to pay to listen to it personally as a license, instead of sharing hard copies!
We can move it from a you purchased this physical thing to a license!"
This was bad. It would be like if you bought your car, paid it in full, and then you gave it to your kid, and you were arrested as you only you
have a license to own and operate that vehicle. That your kid had to purchase their own licensed copy of that vehicle, and you cannot resell yours.
So there will definitely be copies of your magazine around. The only real way is creating a system to reward loyal subscribers.