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.
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.
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!
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
Don't I feel stupid. I was wondering what this word (seemingly from French) "ballache" meant. Then it dawned on me.
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
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.