It’s been an interesting week at Netflix, with US subscribers falling by 120,000.
Another interesting piece of Netflix news has been about password sharing. According to analysts MoffettNathanson, 14% of Netflix subscribers share their password, and only 6% share their Amazon password to access Prime video.
The reason why password sharing on Amazon Prime is much lower than Netflix is probably because it’s easy for a friend to purchase an Amazon product once you give them your password. Possibly just as undesirable – it’s straightforward for people to review purchases on your account once you have given them your password!
I’ve been asked a few times this week, why Netflix and Amazon don’t clamp down on password sharing. I think the answer lies with a comment from Spotify.
Think of those Netflix users who are using someone else’s password as ‘freemium’ subscribers. Spotify encourages freemium (non-paying, or trial) accounts to learn “that music is an important part of their life worth paying for”. And consider the data from those listeners, how Spotify can “learn from the biggest possible group of music fans in the world.”
Freemium places a user on the path to a sales conversion. It’s a far better path than traditional or digital marketing channels. When people share a password, it shares the value of the product, that might want to make them ultimately go and buy the product.
Mary Meeker’s latest annual Internet trends report has been released, and it’s as insightful as always.
New sections for this year include:
A new section on the ethics of data usage and regulation
Interesting sections on healthcare (expenditure by country, and their focus on preventable deaths); and China (the move from manufacturing, and the totally different user experiences, such as live streaming for ecommerce)
New section on education – US university enrolments falling, with online increasing
Here are my highlights (aka abbreviated research notes):
Slide 25: [USA-based] advertising purchasing is moving to Amazon/ Twitter/ Pinterest (basically, moving from Facebook or Google at a quicker amount than they are growing)
Slide 28 & 29: Balancing Customer acquisition cost with Life Time Value!!
Slide 32: Drive conversion from freemium (Spotify & Zoom), rather than seeking new customers
#51: Echo devices doubled last year to 47M. There are now 90,000+ skills for Alexa. Why? How are they promoted?
Customers often ask my team how we stay up to date with the latest innovations across industries. One way is to attend industry events outside of your own.
Today we went to Leaders Meet Innovation – an event for sports organisations hosted by SAP and the NBA at the BAFTA in London. We were invited to the event because we produce several sports websites.
The event itself was extremely well organised. Most of the top brands you can think of in sport were there, and SAP – the main sponsor, gave a really good presentation on why sports is important to them, especially as a case study to other industries. They were showcasing their nba.com/stats products at the event and during some their presentations. Continue reading How the NBA and McLaren are leading technology innovation→
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This is the sixth post of the monetisation series, and is about how Free trials can be used by large digital audiences.
Free trials should not be confused with a Freemium offering. The Freemium model is a long-term model which offers customers something for nothing, and an opportunity to buy something more for a price.
Free trials is usually a temporary offer (otherwise it wouldn’t be a trial!).
Personally, I believe the advertising industry is in a bubble which is ready to burst. It is a semi-self-fulfilling industry that has been growing at a rate out of proportion to the businesses revenue which support it.
Organic revenue growth of the big four advertising companies, 2010-2012. From Statista
The concept of freemium is to offer a free service, and if users want more content or functionality, they must buy a subscription.
One of the most common freemium products is the music service, Spotify. Users can download Spotify and immediately listen to music. If users want to be able to listen to the music when an Internet connection is unavailable, or they want to listen to ad-free music, they need to pay a monthly subscription.
Working on a month of 22 weekdays plus 4 weekends, the Daily Mail sells 52.1 million newspapers, read by 129.4 million people. Whilst it’s difficult to compare those readership figures with the website’s monthly unique visitors, there’s probably the same level of inaccuracy in both figures, which can make them ballpark comparable.
Back to the website for a moment – how can a monthly readership of almost 190 million users be turned into revenue?
When I started this blog, it was with the main aim that when I repeated something at work to multiple customers or colleagues, my aim was to document it here. This could be a news article, or a new technology or process.
During a recent conversation with a client, I realised that one of the key discussions that I have never documented are five key Internet trends, or what they would now be termed ‘megatrends’.
These megatrends are based on several years’ experience working across multiple sectors – including sport, insurance, retail, banking and recruitment.
This is the first of five posts, each dealing with a specific trend. Once I’ve covered all the trends in detail, I’ll put the full presentation on Slideshare.
I’m happy to discuss each of the trends, either here on the website, or to discuss on Twitter, or just give me a call.
1. Nanopayments
Coins for micropayments – what about the electronic equivalent? Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/labyrinthx/1955692114/in/photostream/
Key points:
High quality content and services can’t be free for much longer
It costs too much money to send someone a very small amount of money
When we can solve the small payments problem, piracy will significantly reduce
Our children will look back on this period of the Internet and be shocked at how many services we receive for free. Google searches, music from Spotify, news from Sky, an encyclopaedia from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, email from Microsoft, word processing and spreadsheets from Google, the list goes on and on. It’s quite easy to use the Internet at the moment without paying a penny.
It’s unsustainable. It can’t be ad-funded for much longer – and I’ll discuss this later on in another trend “Real money”.
Content web sites such as those from newspapers and films are moving to a subscription model, but this is an inflexible model. I want to read The Sunday Times on the weekend, the Metro during the week when I use the Tube, and once a fortnight I’ll read The Financial Times.
On the Internet, this model isn’t possible. At the moment, users need to subscribe to The Sunday Times or The FT on a weekly basis. I only want to read for one day, and next week I want to be able to go back to the content without paying again. It’s not possible.
The newspaper model is the opposite to the music industry’s. You can’t just buy a single track on a CD, you need to buy the entire album. On the Internet however, you can buy just a single track.
There are authors who earn a reasonable living from successful blogs. When I say successful, it’s in terms of traffic levels. The blogs have advertising, and the authors rely on readers to click on the adverts. Neither authors nor readers want advertising. Authors would much rather a model where each reader pays a small amount for the content.
In the future, we’ll have a central company which will have a pot of our money. As we visit websites, the central company will provide the websites we visit with nanopayments, which are tiny amounts of money – perhaps less than a penny, on a per-page or per feature (e.g. sending an email, or searching the Internet) basis. This will be an automatic process, and we’ll have some sort of browser plug-in which shows how much money we’ve given to this website, and the remaining balance in our centralised wallet.
As a result, nanopayments will significantly reduce piracy. If the price point for content can be reduced to nanopayments, perhaps on a per-play model, users will find this model as easy to use as the illegal models. (This is one of the was the music business combat piracy – buy allowing legal downloads at less than a dollar per track, the price point is acceptable, and piracy is less desirable).
Currently, content owners need to charge a higher price partly to cover the transaction processing costs. If the transactions costs are significantly reduced, we could move to a per-play model. So instead of paying 89p for an mp3 track, users could pay under 5p for the track each time they listen to it.
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There has been a lot of discussion on the web this week regarding three separate services: Google Reader, Evernote and Posterous. I have talked about how our Internet trust will be broken soon, and each of these three vendors have demonstrated this in their own ways.
Google have shut down their Reader service. It doesn’t bother me too much – the service was satisfactory, nothing more, and I prefer to read RSS feed in Outlook. Reader was a free service, and its users’ main complaint is how it knocked other services out of the market only to stop the product years later when everyone has gone bust.
Evernote announced that it’s service has been compromised, “…but don’t worry…” passwords haven’t been compromised. What its users don’t understand is that the content in the thousands/ millions of notes probably was compromised. So if you used an Evernote page for passwords or other confidential data, well, it’s probably not so confidential any longer.
And while Posterous announced a while ago that they would be shutting down, I’ve spent a few evenings this week moving this very blog from Posterous over to a new provider. I’ve actually bitten the bullet and moved the blog over to my own personal server. I just didn’t want to go through the hassle of moving it again.
Playing Devil’s advocate, the services above are free. You pay peanuts (or nothing), so you don’t get a chance to say “Hey, I was using that…”.
As a learned friend of mine once said, “Today’s gift is tomorrow’s expectation.”
So what’s the advice for the future?
Firstly, corporates take note. If you use these services, be prepared for here today, gone tomorrow. Use PaaS (Platform as a Service) vendors – Salesforce, Google Analytics, Endava (shameless plug), etc., but make sure your data is transferable, accessible and secure (not necessarily in that order).
Secondly, consumers need to be similarly aware. I have a simple approach – I assume all new startups can be gone in an instant, and are operated by a fourteen year old in their bedroom somewhere dodgy. Only once the trust builds up will I invest more time with content.
As I mentioned before, Google Reader doesn’t affect me. Posterous… well, whenever I’ve been to blogger meetings, everyone is talking about WordPress and I felt like I was on the wrong platform.
Evernote is the one that has annoyed me the most, because it’s (present tense) such a great product. But I can’t trust it. And my corporate security guys have said we can’t use it any longer (or any similar services).
So I’ve started using OneNote again. A few guys in the office use OneNote, and since I got the new convertible Ultrabook, OneNote makes sense. And then I discovered the OneNote iPhone app, which syncs with my laptop… and boom! I now have an enterprise version of Evernote.
Whilst writing this article I noticed that Menshn has shut down as well. Menshn was a great idea, and I was lucky enough to be one of the first users invited. I say it was a great idea, although I hadn’t logged on for a couple of months, so it hadn’t quite replaced my preferred social networks.
But the morale of this post is that if I had invested huge amounts of time and content, I’d be pretty miffed at the moment that it’s now all gone.
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We have a Spotify Premium account at home, mainly because we want to listen the tracks offline (such as in the car), and also because the freemium model limits the number of tracks available.
I really like Spotify – the PC and iPhone apps are both easy and no-nonsense to use. The quality is great, which is important because we have speakers wired around the house.
I read an article last week explaining that when ATM machines first arrived, it was assumed that the ATM would see the demise of high street bank branches. However, 45 years after the first ATM machine in the UK, we still have bank branches.
This got me thinking about music. The appearance of Internet services such as Spotify has seen all but the end of music shops in the high street, but we still listen to music radio stations. The media group which owns Heart, Capital, Classic FM, XFM, Choice, Gold and LBC boast an audience of over 19 million listeners per week.
Why do radio stations get such a large audience in the 21st century? I think there are a number of reasons:
It’s free to listen to the radio
There is a huge percentage of the population who only listen to the radio in the car, and who spend huge amounts of time in their car (such as commuting or as a professional driver)
Radio stats are probably as extrapolated as TV audience figures
Discovery.
I listen to the radio mainly for discovery. I like the radio playing a random song, or a brand new song, when its different to anything else I listen to.
The problem with Spotify and its equivalent ‘radio’ modes is that they are trying to find music that is similar to the music you already like. There are some basic algorithms in some music players, which try to determine whether you prefer groups, male or female singers and then play only those to you. Spotify provides a little wider coverage in its radio mode, but it still won’t play something as left-field as the FM radio channels.
In a world where we select what we want to watch, when we want to watch it, and which output channel we want to watch it on (web, phone, tablet, TV, etc.) – radio has defied the odds.
