Through a series of bills, Maryland is looking to establish an online sales tax for digital goods — including content and dating sites.
While it’s unsure which exact bill will pass, digital products in Maryland will likely include music, audio books, eBooks, audio greeting cards, ring tones (or other digitized sound files), online newspapers, magazines, periodicals, chat room discussions, and images (the last two implicate dating sites particularly). One bill singles out online subscriptions, grouping them with the sale of digital products.
So, if you have a business nexus in Maryland, you’ll need to start collecting sales tax on your subscriptions or membership billing. Read our sister site’s U.S. Sales Tax Primer and then talk to your accountant or CFO, and possibly your attorney. Also, sign up to receive free updates from Paywall Times — as these laws and regulations are bound to change, we’ll make sure to keep you informed.
That’s according to a new report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. While 90% of the 502 U.S. consumers who were polled look favorably on cloud storage, few are willing to pay to host their data/information in a cloud.
And why should they? Cloud storage is a delivery system, but also crosses the line into a medium (i.e., streaming is different than downloading a video). Asking consumers if they’ll pay for cloud storage is liking asking them if they’ll pay for the paper their newspaper is printed on. Or for the gas in the delivery truck that drops it off at their front door.
For paid content to work, content providers need to start including the costs of delivery and production in with the price of the content. This is somewhat at odds with the UltraViolet business plan, but a much more consumer-friendly way to price your content.
Who doesn’t deal with time management and delegation issues? Nearly everyone in business, of course. But I have a feeling that those who work on subscription sites and subscription products have special challenges of this sort. Why? Well, I call it “feeding the beast” — the process of constant editorial production and business marketing. And the key to success if keeping things important, but not urgent…let me explain….
In my work on subscription sites, I’ve felt the “feeding the beast” pressure more on the editorial side where new content must constantly be planned, produced and optimized — and that’s just the content the subscriber has come to expect each day, week or month. There’s also all those ancillary products and events and how to”feed the beast” with high-quality, timely content. On the business side, it is a constant churn of getting current subscribers to renew and bringing in new prospects as well as staying up-to-date and current on technology and design. How do you decide what is most important to do right now?
While life often requires “urgent” action, our most valuable work is done in the non-urgent, important quadrant of the matrix. If everything becomes urgent and important, we risk burn out and lower-quality work. Where do you spend your time? Could posting this matrix on your desk help you spend your time better and delegate less important tasks? I’ve printed it out and it is on my desk right now.
We recently did a fascinating Case Study on ExpertClick.com and their experiment in moving from a paid subscription model to a free subscription model. For the full results, you will need to read the Case Study, but I got an interesting note today from publisher Mitchell Davis who said that one the downside of the free model (with potential upgrades to paid services) was the number of customer service telephone calls and inquiries to join that wasted so much time and were “never-buys.”
A customer service telephone number — and making it very visible on your site — sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn’t. The case of ExpertClick.com’s telephone customer service is a cautionary tale for those who mostly have free subscribers. And certainly plenty of sites, like Amazon.com, are high revenue and do not offer telephone customer service via phone – only email.
But there are subscription sites, like Hoovers.com, that thrive and offer customer service via phone. On the plus side, a phone number can add to credibility and help with conversions. But there is certainly a cost for this kind of customer service that must be figured into the budget.
Whew! Just published our Buyer’s Guide to WordPress Plugins to Sell Subscriptions. I looked at a good number of paywall plugins but ultimately decided to review these 10: aMember, Digital Access Pass, InfusionWP, Magic Members, MemberWing-X, PaidMemberships Pro, S2MemberPro, WishList Member, WPMU DEV Membership, wp-Member.
In researching these plugins, I was surprised at how they missed a number of marketing opportunities:
Every plugin touted the fact that it offers multiple membership levels. But guess what, most of them do – so that hardly makes any one of them special. Marketing tip for the plugin industry: Tell me something that differentiates you in terms of membership levels. I loved to see when a plugin offered a separate welcome page for each level. Great chance to upsell to a higher level of membership.
I had to really dig (mostly by contacting the developer) to find out what the actual paywall page – the most important page on a subscription site – would look like. The sales websites would show sample sites that are using the plugin but never showed a sample of the paywall page or gave information on how much it could be customized in terms of colors, graphics, registration fields.
None of the sites I looked at mentioned group sales. If these paywall plugins want to attract businesses selling to other businesses, the ability to make group sales is crucial and a great differentiating factor.
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