We've all been there. You visit a website looking for information, movies, or other digital content and find a few freebies. Eventually, however, you run into a request for registration or, more substantially, a request to pay for additional content.

DigiCareers, a website that provides job listings for those in the media industry, recently released survey results examining the impact of paywalls on current consumers. By sending emails to a random selection of its 30,000 members, DigiCareers received a 78% participation rate, using the feedback of 200 individuals. Some experts found the results surprising.

Among the most interesting results from the DigiCareers paywall survey is that, while 52% of those questioned immediately leave a site when they encounter a paywall, 42% explore prices and consider a purchase decision. "Generally, what this is telling me is that people are more trusting of paywalls," says Lee Smith, analyst for DigiCareers and the lead on the paywall survey. "I think this is good information for someone thinking of using paywalls to direct revenue to their business."

Val Swisher, founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc., was surprised by the statistic. "More people are staying than I would have expected," she says. "What that says to me is that there is a market for information that people need or want. We might not have considered it a market before."

It's important to note that statistics from the DigiCareers paywall survey lump all digital content and paywalls into one result. Social media specialist Cassie Witt points out that these statistics may be more like a generalization. "I'd be interested to find out what the difference in percentages is for a company that provides digital movies against one, like mine [cassiewitt.com], that provides training and tutorial-based content," she notes. "Is this the same? Is it completely different? I suspect it's the latter, because the mindset for people visiting those sites is completely different."

Witt goes on to explain that consumers seeking digital movies are looking to watch movies immediately and, unless they pirate them, are going to purchase them from the first reputable site they encounter. Conversely, those looking for tutorial sites are in research mode and may check other sites for free content before making a final decision. "I feel like they're doing a disservice to digital content providers when they try to lump everyone into one big category," Witt concludes. "Yes, it's true that it's all digital content, but the buyer mindset is different for each site."

Ninety percent of those surveyed by DigiCareers expect some free content on websites prior to encountering a paywall. When a company considers the use of a paywall to increase revenue, determining how to structure it is the No. 1 issue.

Brett Curry, CEO of Online Marketing Giant in Springfield, Mo., believes that the use of a paywall depends upon what the company is selling overall. "The question always has to be asked: What will benefit our company the most? The exposure, traffic, and recognition we could generate by giving this content away for free, or the revenue we could generate by charging membership fees?" Curry explains.

He mentions the ESPN website as a prime example of a successful paywall structure, offering scores, highlights, and other basics for free but requiring a premium membership for exclusive interviews and reports. "So, as a free user, I go back to the site a lot, but every now and then I'm tempted to pay for that insider membership. I think even membership sites should give as much away for free as they can to drive traffic and create highly engaged visitors. Even visitors that continue to come for the free content might be persuaded to pony up for the membership if the right offer is presented," he says.

Smith believes that businesses should err on the side of giving away too much rather than being too restrictive because consumers are used to getting free content. He also believes that companies should offer both subscription-based paywalls and paywalls for individual pieces of content, giving more latitude to the visitors and readers.

"Companies need to provide enough information that leaves people wanting more," says Swisher. "It's not really a matter of how much, but what it is you put out there. You want to grab your customers and differentiate yourself. You don't want to give away the store, but you want to entice people to go through the paywall."

Jennifer Hofer, owner of Plum Tree Communications in Bellevue, Wash., agrees that incentive works. "For models where there's a high likelihood of repeat purchases, maybe every third article is free. Or content older than 1 year is free and only the premier new stuff costs money," she explains.

The increasing prevalence of paywalls will certainly have an impact on those who create digital content, and experts believe that the perception of what quality content consists of must adapt. "The quality of content better improve," says Hofer of what paywalls mean to the digital content industry. "When I see thin logic, scarce support of claims and statistics, and just plain old terrible writing, I complain. So, yes, when Plum Tree Communications is responsible for writing something that will come with a price tag, I make sure it's something I'd be willing to pay for myself."

"I think that, because of the ease of publishing digital content, a lot of companies have lost track of the fact that you need to have quality content," Swisher says. "I think that there is now an imperative to create quality content and to focus real attention (and real dollars) on the content that you are selling to your public. So much content creation has become commoditized and sent off to where it's the cheapest to produce, so the upper management's mindset of what is ‘good enough' has plummeted. It's just going to come back to bite you. If you're going to have a paywall, then you're going to have to have compelling, quality content. Period." 

("Crumbling Wall" courtesy of Shutterstock.)

Kenny Powers is a champion athlete, famous shoe endorser, and thanks to a brilliantly orchestrated hostile takeover, the MFCEO of K-SWISS, Inc. He's bigger than cable television and/or drugs. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, try tuning into the smartest marketing move in the history of mankind.
The idea to "hire" Kenny Powers as a spokesman came from Matt Murphy and Glenn Cole of brand agency 72andSunny. I don't know who green-lighted the idea at K-SWISS, but I commend his or her phenomenal cojones.

And let's face it, what did K-SWISS have to lose?

In case you're unfamiliar with Kenny Powers, he is the lead character from HBO's Eastbound & Down-played by Danny McBride-and now the star of in-your-face, foul-mouthed, hilarious viral videos for K-SWISS. In his infinite wisdom, Kenny bought 51% of K-SWISS, and now he's the MFCEO of the shoe company.

If your brand's looking for attention, turn to Kenny, and he'll show you how it's done. Here it is, over a year since this campaign launched, and I am still writing about it. What makes Kenny Powers' videos stand out among the millions posted on the internet every day? Well, no brand has had the guts to use online video like Kenny uses online video, and for that, he deserves a pat on the back-and you deserve a kick in the can for not having thought of it first.

To call Kenny Powers imminently quotable would be the understatement of the century: "What up dog? I killed you." My friends haven't quoted this many lines from anything since Fletch dominated the mid-'80s. I'd relay a few more Kenny-isms to you, but most of them aren't fit for print. You're just going to have to tune into the videos for yourself. (Admit it, you're curious.) Will we all be buying K-SWISS Tubes shoes because of Kenny? Who knows. But we're out there talking about K-SWISS' marketing. We're passing it around. And we're integrating it into our lives with its Kenny-isms. It has risen above the clutter of everyday advertising, and I've seen it weave its way into conversations from the boardroom to the golf course. Isn't that really the holy grail of marketing?

I go to conferences where media executives stand up and show PowerPoints (a misleading name if ever there was one) that brag about how their latest promotion increased web traffic by 4% or user engagement by 6%. Snooze. Would Kenny do this? No way. Kenny would tell you that he increased sales by a million percent. And he'd be right! Because in a day when most professional online video generally looks like every ad agency's 60-second TV spot, Kenny took risks with his campaign, and now K-SWISS is reaping the benefits.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when using online video as a marketing tool is creating content that looks just like what we see on TV. If you want attention, be Kenny Powers. He screams loud. Whatever he screams is brilliant, and he offends some people along the way. Let's face it, Kenny is a raunchy, politically incorrect, drug-using, racist, offensive anti-hero for whom someone at K-SWISS had to risk her or his job. Yet Kenny always surprises us because he somehow finds the road to redemption. He doesn't stay on it long, but we know he's looking for it. It's what makes him likable.

K-SWISS may have beaten you to the punch when it comes to using a crass lunatic as a spokesman, but that doesn't mean the game is over. Now, it's up to you to step up your marketing game and figure out how to one-up Kenny. He won't like it, but he'll respect you for it.

Are you going to grow your business by doing the same old stuff? No. You should take a risk that you wouldn't have taken yesterday. Scream loud, but be innovative. Use original online video to be controversial, but also memorable. And if you fail, who cares? Try again. Consumers will actually embrace failure if they believe you're taking a risk. Like Kenny, your redemption will come.

We often forget that media is meant to push boundaries and, ultimately, to achieve brilliance. Any time you start pushing out of your comfort zone, you might just offend a few people, and you might need to scream even louder next time to be heard. When all else fails, be Kenny Powers. I'll do the same. Don't forget to report back on your efforts to achieve Powers-like greatness. 

Announced to the public in April of 2012, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an Antitrust lawsuit against Apple and publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group (USA), and Simon & Schuster. The Justice Department alleged that Apple and the aforementioned publishing companies conspired together in an attempt to curb competitive pricing for e-books, namely in the wake of Amazon's offerings of $9.99 or less.

According to the DOJ filing, "Apple facilitated the Publisher Defendants' collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers." Basically, the publishers were looking for a way to keep retailers like Amazon from charging less than they believed adequate for a new release or bestselling book by fixing prices at a minimum of $12.99 to $16.99. This price would be set by the publisher and nonnegotiable to retailers (what was referred to as the "agency model").

In September, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote approved settlement between the DOJ and three of the publishers - Simon & Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins - who face a $96 million penalty and agreed to sever their contracts with Apple for fixed ebook prices. However, Apple and the remaining two publishers have not yet agreed to negotiate settlement terms and, at this time, are waiting for the case to go to trial in the summer of 2013.

According to the DOJ complaint, Macmillan was the first publisher to sign an agreement setting ebook prices with Apple, and followed by giving Amazon a choice to either go along with the agency model or wait seven months to be able to sell new hardcover titles in ebook form. Amazon was hesitant to agree to the terms, but once all five publishers were on-board with the joint agency model, Amazon announced that it must comply as well, which led to the DOJ's investigation of the matter.

There has been some discussion among legal experts as to whether the antitrust laws apply in this matter, specifically in the wake of attorney Bob Kohn's request to stay Judge Cote's ruling on the settlement until it's heard in appeals court. He states in his request for a stay that the price-fixing publishers attempted was not illegal, citing "because if the restraint is reasonably necessary to achieve the benefit, it's legal."

Mark Giangrande, an academic law librarian and member of the Illinois Bar since 1981, has done extensive research on the topic of antitrust law, and believes that the case law Kohn cites doesn't necessarily apply in this matter. "The move benefits the publishers, but not necessarily consumers. There is enough case law and commentary out there that states the purpose of the antitrust laws is to protect consumers. To quote Steve Jobs, ‘The customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway.' Is that a compelling market efficiency or is it something else?" he says.

Denise Howell, an attorney in Newport Beach, CA that specializes in technology law, tends to agree. "My overall take is that the DOJ was doing its job in pursuing the publishers, and approving the settlement was appropriate. The evidence against the publishers seemed damning enough that it was likely good business sense for them to buy certainty and get out. The settlement itself was more than a slap on the wrist, and seems likely to deter these publishers and others from banding together to create or protect artificially high prices in the context of digital goods."

While it remains to be seen how this process will play out in trial, it is certain that the publishing industry is on the brink of change. Some experts believe that the publishing business still hasn't fully grasped modernization, viewing ebooks as simply a way to make more money because much of the overhead costs are eliminated.

"Even Amazon's prices are ‘high' when one takes into account the fact that ebooks eliminate the costs of physical materials and resources, retail space, transportation and even conventional marketing and promotion," says Howell. "The ebook business has been thriving with Amazon as the market leader, and competition to Amazon, driven primarily by competing reading platforms and their ecosystems, remains strong as well."

Giangrande is within the same frame of mind. "Judge Cote noted in her order that the ebook market is new and that we can't predict how the market is to develop. I believe that she is right, in that, technology changes quickly and, while the publishers may not want to react to these changes, they may be compelled to," he says. "I think this case forces publishers and their distribution partners to do more than simply present the equivalent of the printed page."

("Books and tablet" from Shutterstock.)

AOL has focused, almost pathologically, on local news over the past few years. The center piece of that strategy has been Patch, which is now getting a makeover. The new look focuses on social networking, and according to paidContent it will debut on five Long Island Patch sites, and slowly roll out to more - and that Patch CEO Jon Brod says the site is focusing on "content, conversation, and commerce."

Apparently, the social layout is designed to accommodate groups, created by editors and users alike. It's unclear what this means. What does belonging to specific group mean? Is it like Google+'s circles?

There are a few problems with AO'sL social networking aspirations. The company may want to learn a lesson from Google, and stop trying to beat Facebook at its own game. One thing is for sure, the only way to compete with Facebook is to offer something different and then integrate with the social networking behemoth (like Pinterest did). But local news sites are also notorious for problems with commenters. Neighborhood feuds and petty grievances have threatened to shut down more than one local site, and Patch will need to find a way to keep these kinds of incidents from turning its site into a gossip mill.

(www.patch.com)

If you were hoping for a long-term record of every link you ever shared and errant thought you ever tweeted, there may be a solution for you in the works. According to CNET, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told an audience at the Online News Association conference that users may soon be able to download a history of their tweets.

This comes in the wake of a publicity push which saw Costolo unveil Twitter's new profile look on The Today Show and has him doing battle with angry developers after Twitter announced changes to its APIs.

(www.twitter.com)

It appears that the battle of the retail behemoths is in full swing. Last week Wal-Mart announced it would no longer carry Kindles. Wal-Mart has long been one of the biggest book sellers in America. Amazon, of course, is not only known for being the largest online book retailer, it's now one of the leaders in the e-reader market and is leading Wal-Mart in the online and mobile commerce world.

Speculation says Wal-Mart is taking direct aim at its competition by refusing to sell its popular e-readers and tablets - some of which effectively operate as shopping portals for Amazon.

(www.amazon.com)

Company:University of Memphis Athletic Media Relations
The University of Memphis Athletic Media Relations (AMR) office strives to promote the Tennessee school's various varsity sports teams-including softball, football, men's basketball, men's tennis, women's tennis, volleyball, and women's basketball-through a variety of methods, including print publications, its website, and social media such as Twitter.
www.gotigersgo.com

Business Challenge
With more and more information going online, AMR has not had as much of a need to stockpile physical copies of sports publications, such as team yearbooks, as it had in the past. "We have gone more to online yearbooks and media guides, where before we used to print all those out, but print has kind of gone away a little bit," says W. Brandon Kolditz, assistant media relations director/publications coordinator for Memphis AMR. As a result, the department wanted to find a way to save money on printing costs while still having enough printed team yearbooks on hand for anyone wanting one.

Vendors of Choice: Issuu and Peecho
Peecho is an Amsterdam-based free service that allows individuals to sell their digital content as a physical product, and Issuu, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a leading global digital publishing platform that says it delivers "exceptional reading experiences of magazines, catalogs, and newspapers." In April 2012, the two companies announced the integration of the Peecho Cloud Print Button (CPB) within the Issuu website. Now, according to a press release, more than 2 million digital publishers on Issuu, such as Memphis AMR, have the opportunity to transform their digital publications, including magazines, glossy paperbacks, and hardcover books, into printed copies. All are printed on demand, regardless of size or the number of pages.
www.issuu.com; www.peecho.com

The Problem in Depth
Ultimately, ordering physical copies of yearbooks for Memphis' sports teams amounted to a well-calculated roll of the dice. "Let's say for football or basketball, you have to print so many [copies] based on the media needs and fan needs. And depending on how the season goes, you don't know if you're going to need them for the postseason ... so at the end of the year, you may be throwing away a few boxes," says Kolditz.

For the last couple of years, AMR worked with a company that offered "print on demand where they set up an online store for us," says Kolditz. This gave Memphis fans the ability to order a physical copy of their favorite Tigers' team yearbook. But, in the last year, the company began charging a $3,000 upfront fee for its services. "We made a little bit of profit on each guide that was sold, but by the end of the year, we were still in the red; we didn't make up that $3,000," he adds.

In addition, there were strict specifications that needed to be met before printing. "With some of the other companies ... you have to send them the high resolution version, and it's got to have a spine and binding and stuff like that," says Kolditz.

The Solution
With the integration of the Peecho Cloud Print Button on the Issuu website, Kolditz and his department now have the ability to print yearbooks on demand without any upfront costs.

"With Issuu [and the CPB] we're not spending money up front, we are not losing anything by doing it, and it's still giving us a way to [cater to] people that do want to have the hard copy in their hands, that don't want to look at everything online," says Kolditz. "This way, what we do is we print some on the front end, and if there's ever more of a need, it's all on demand and you're not wasting anything, so it's more green friendly as well."

Peecho and Issuu executives both admit they still see value in printed publications-even as the rest of the world has feverishly trended in the opposite direction.

"Everybody's going from print books, p-books, to e-books," says Mik Stroyberg, director of consumer engagement and US sales at Issuu. "There's a great value to having a book or a magazine in your hand; what I would like to do is go from digital publishing to print publishing to get the best of both worlds."
Martijn Groot, CEO and co-founder of Peecho, agrees. "We do believe in the fact people will still want tangible products of certain content."

According to a press release, the CPB connects digital publishers who use Issuu "with a large network of the world's best print production facilities. By analyzing the specifications of any digital document in real-time, it automatically calculates the accurate, lowest price for a printed version and displays the price comparisons."

Due to the "diverse nature" of Issuu's publications, transforming its pixels into high-quality print has been really complicated-until now, according to Stroyberg. "The Peecho Cloud Print Button does an excellent job by offering a service that used to be impossible. We look forward to providing our digital publishers with a fast, cost-effective way to receive their digital content as a physical product," says Stroyberg.

Most online content is not print-ready because there is "a bewildering range of digital publishing file formats, and print facilities all require their own specific values for size, spine, cut marks, margins, and more," says Groot. "This is the reason that there are plenty of sites that let you print a magazine or book on demand, but most services only print specific product sizes via a single print facility. A lot of titles are never published in print because the volume isn't large enough. Peecho aims to be the long tail of print publishing: professional printing for the masses."

According to Groot, Peecho and Issuu became acquainted via one of the latter's investors. "Of course, because of the fact that they have got so many publishers, they were immediately a very interesting company to us," adds Groot.

In fact, Issuu is the fastest-growing digital publishing platform in the world with more than 52 million monthly visitors. More than 210,000 publications are added each month, and Issuu has more than 4 million original publications and serves more than 3.5 billion monthly impressions.

With such a large and quickly growing audience, "it was a very logical match," says Groot. Every day Issuu has 20,000 new uploads. "So there are 20,000 new publications on our platform each and every day," says Stroyberg. "And when they upload and open their publications for the first time, they will have the opportunity to actually make a physical print of it with the Cloud Print Button."

Kolditz, like Stroyberg and Groot, also sees the value of a physical publication. "There's a lot you can do digitally with adding videos and stuff like that, but there's definitely something about having an actual hard copy in your hands and being able to flip through it and having it on a coffee table to show others," he observes.

The Outcome
In the future, consumers will also have the opportunity to print on Issuu with the CPB, says Stroyberg. "What we are hoping for is that publishers can go into our system, and they can actually say that if people want to print [their publication], ‘We would like a cut of it,'" he says. "And the publishers can start earning money on the publications."

Kolditz says he couldn't be happier with the results of the CPB on Issuu. "One of the first things I did was use the print button to get us a copy of one of our volleyball yearbooks that we put up on Issuu, and the quality is great," he says.

Kolditz adds he would recommend the service to other publishers. "You can share all of your things with the people who want it but aren't losing anything in this digital age, where there is still a need for hard copies people want in their hands."

While he didn't have an exact dollar amount on hand, Kolditz says the ability to print team yearbooks on demand saves his department "several thousand dollars" per year in its budget; those funds can be used in other areas, such as hiring staff. 

One of the most important implications of Facebook's high-priced acquisition of mobile social photography app Instagram is the tacit admission that the social network was really a social network. The game-over thinking around Facebook, that it was the de facto social platform for the web, is an important fallacy to debunk. As one who has never been a fan of Facebook's ever-changing face, interface, privacy policies, and ad models, I admit to enjoying some of its recent missteps. From walls to timelines to sponsored stories, the company still feels like a cool lab experiment that isn't clear and stable enough in its mission to be a platform for anything but breathless coverage in the digital press.

Its lack of a clear mobile strategy-even as the majority of its users will soon be engaging the network from devices-struck me as odd in light of its IPO. And frankly, just from a user's point of view, I never found Facebook easy to use. The torrent of posts is intractable and seems to demand tending. Certainly, it has an interface that still seems crafted by engineers for engineers. And its performance on mobile devices has always been terrible, no matter what phone or tablet or even set-top box I use.

I don't think I am alone, and so the popularity of other social media offerings such as Instagram, Pinterest, Viddy, Tumblr, and SocialCam doesn't surprise me in the least. My 20-year-old daughter, who generally keeps her Facebook page open in the background for most of the day, tells me even she now prefers posting on Pinterest and Instagram. These visual media-sharing services have a different tone and mood. They encourage the exchange and discovery of creative and inspiring moments, not the offhand and relentless brain droppings that seem to occupy most Facebook and Twitter scrolls. Interestingly, a number of media sites are reporting that Pinterest, in particular, has become an even more important driver of social referrals than Facebook.

Perhaps even more to the point, these alternative sites are simply more visually engaging and attractively designed than the first generation of social networks. This is content that people don't scroll to "catch up," but content people truly browse and swim within.

Now, to be sure, many of these new services such as Instagram, SocialCam, Viddy, and Pinterest are relying on Facebook and Twitter to supply the actual social "network." People use the sign-ins for these larger social nets to log into the new media-sharing sites and often help the new sites grow their base by posting to Facebook and Twitter. But even on their own, some of these personal media-sharing sites are in fact growing their own networks. SocialCam, for instance, has a leaderboard where the top most followed posters each have more than a million followers. The same is true for the top four posters on Instagram.

The most interesting byproduct of this greater diversity of social media energy in the last year will be new ways of thinking through the business models. Some models will be quite familiar, such as MTV using Instagram (700,000-plus followers) to broadcast backstage images. But many of these more stripped-down, image-heavy services such as Tumblr also encourage different ways of thinking about communicating an advertiser's brand-perhaps more through shared senses of style than in straightforward promotion.

Sports teams have embraced mobile video-sharing app SocialCam, for instance, as a place where they can post in nearly real time video interviews with players and coaches from the sidelines during and after a game. Because SocialCam is tied into the mobile OS's and the associated alerting systems, the user gets a system alert whenever someone he or she follows has posted new content. The mobile media-sharing ecosystem allows advertisers to craft a one-to-one direct relationship with the fan in a way even earlier social networks could not.

The best news for brands about emerging social media-especially the device-based personalized platforms-is how hard it is to advertise on them. Traditional pitches and touts in the midst of browsing Instagram or Pinterest would simply break the experience and feel cheap in otherwise delectable settings. These platforms demand content, not advertising. They force advertisers to genuinely please and engage customers and to build brands by doing, not just saying. While Facebook and Twitter keep trying to figure out ways of inserting ads into our daily torrents of trivia, I am more interested in how publishers and advertisers use the new mobile media to break out of the old-media, impression-based box.