Of course, we should all be using encryption technology and SSL certificates on our e-commerce and subscription payment pages (or s-commerce pages, as I like to call them). As Dubrow explained, you should definitely state whatever safety measures you take, like “using encryption technology.” But stating outright that your site is “safe and secure” can get you into a lot of legal hot water, especially since no site is that secure. We’re all vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves, and any security breech can open you up to a lawsuit if you claimed to be “safe and secure.”

You’ll also want to use those secure icons from vendors like Verisign and TrustE only if you have a licensing agreement with the vendor. And you should definitely test your wording and icon placement — different audiences respond differently to such assurances.

For more information on data collection crackdowns, privacy policies, and how to best notify your customers to any changes in your terms of service, check out the instant replay of Dubrow’s presentation.

The company recently announced plans to host 2,000 to 3,000 offline events in 40 countries around the world for paying subscribers. The new service will be called “The Stir,” and come in two varieties:

• Free events, like casual drinking evenings, and
• Paid events, like bowling or cooking lessons.

In both scenarios, however, Match.com will only send invitations to paying members who algorithmically seem like they will be a good match (based on factors each person lists in their profile).

It’s an ingenious way for a dating site to take advantage of offline events to boost revenues — a tried and true technique utilized by many subscription sites. (In fact, our sister site, Subscription Site Insider, will be releasing a how-to guide in the near future for subscription sites interested in hosting successful offline events.) It’s also an idea that can be easily adopted by smaller, niche dating sites, who may not have the IT power to run algorithms and pre-select attendees, but whose niche focus means members are already pre-selected and eager to meet like-minded individuals.

Of that1.5 million, recent reports indicate that 100,000 are digital-only subscriptions, garnering approximately $12.7 million in online dollars for the 169-year-old publication. In addition, The Economist has 15,000 Kindle and Nook subscribers, which accounts for a conservative estimate of $1.8 million in revenues. That’s a total of $14.5 million in online subscription revenues alone!

But getting back to that savvy marketing. An off-the-record source informed me that The Economist has made a conscientious effort in its branding to be THE publication of cosmopolitan intellectuals, and indeed, it’s hard to find a smart world-traveler or business exec who’s willing to talk trash about The Economist. Thus, aspiring smart people feel almost compelled to buy a subscription. It’s tribe marketing at its best.

The Economist has also been savvy enough to capitalize on “lean-back” devices like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad, which are more friendly platforms for their long-form content. They not only know their market, but their medium. While some readers may be asking for mobile (which they provide), the majority are going to be grateful to be able to read lengthy articles at their leisure on a lean-back device.

The chart below, compiled and created by Inside Facebook, shows Monthly Active Users for a number of news sites. However, one should note that there are many things affecting social reader usage, from Facebook’s continually changing algorithm, which alters when and how user activity on another site is shared, to coding bugs within one publication’s social reader.

© Inside Facebook

Clearly, social readers can be a great way to get referral traffic to your site, especially if you have a metered (not hard) paywall that lets new visitors sample your content. But be aware that user experience is a big determinant of how much referral traffic you’ll get. Many consumers dislike social reader applications that require referred users to authorize the app and share their activity in order to read an article read and shared by their friend.

Smart subscription sites know that social readers are traffic drivers, not conversion mechanisms. They’re also wary of Facebook, which essentially controls your content’s distribution through its social reader and has a penchant for changing terms of use on the fly.

But what about the flip side — paywalled aggregators?

There haven’t been many to choose from, but a year and a half ago, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co., and Gannett invested $4 million each in Ongo, an online news aggregator with a paywall.

But Ongo had a confusing subscription offering, with a basic service that included “selected” content. Subscribers then had to pay more for individual publications, priced at different rates. In addition, much of the content was available free on the Web through other sites or metered paywalls. And so now, sadly, Ongo is shutting down.

Ongo’s strength may have been that subscribers could access their content from  multiple devices — desktop, tablet, mobile — and have an ad-free reading experience. As Ongo founder Alex Kazim said in an interview with paidContent last year: “We realized that users won’t pay for content — however, they will pay for a better user experience.”

Even though we disagree with the first half of Kazim’s statement (and have ample evidence to the contrary), there’s wisdom in the latter part of his statement for all of us. Failure makes for great lessons. In Ongo’s case, the technology was well-suited to reader behavior. It’s just that the marketing and pricing were off and couldn’t course correct in time to satisfy Ongo’s ‘Big Newspaper’ investors.

But that’s no longer true for our digital world. Online, the more niche-appeal a site has, the more readers and the more likely they are to elicit paying subscribers.

Education Week, a national B2B publication, has wisely adopted this philosophy for their audience of educational policy makers in different states and regions across the country.

The site has chosen to tailor its newsletters and RSS feeds by publication, state, topic, and other niche areas. For example, you can get a newsletter called “Curriculum Matters” (the site smartly lets readers preview a sample at sign-up). Or you can get RSS feeds for educational topics related to your state, budget & finance, or bullying. Or perhaps you just want all the content from one blog — there’s an RSS feed for that.

Of course, one should be careful about how fine one splices content. Education Week is a national publication with 30 years of archived content, so 100+ RSS feeds was do-able, even reasonable, for them. Other subscription sites may want to start off on a smaller scale, with three to five different offerings.

• Both small (<$5M) and large ($5M+) B2B publishers rely mainly on print advertising for revenues.
• However, when comparing online content, events, data sales, and print content, both large and small publishers said online content and events were the most profitable areas for them (see chart below).
• At the same time, 36% of smaller publishers and 11% of larger publishers reported zero revenue from online content (perhaps they need to start reading Subscription Site Insider?)
• Most publishers across the board plan to invest more heavily in online/e-media content in 2012, with employees being their biggest investment.

Technology Investments

The Folio report also had some interesting data on technology investments for other digital publishers who might be wondering how much they should be spending on technology.

While there was a wide spread in the data (see chart 10 below), it turns out that, among small publishers, 27% spent $10,000-$20,000 on technology, 35% spent less than $10,000, and 22% didn’t invest at all. More interestingly, of these technology investments, 35% invested most in computers, hardware, and software. Only 16% prioritized their websites, and 8% spent the majority of the technology budget on content management systems (Chart 11 below).

Among large publishers, the picture is a little different, with 26% of them spending $100,000 to $249,000 on technology. An additional 18% spent $250,000 to $499,000. They also seemed to diversify their areas of IT investment, with 24% investing most in computers, hardware and software, 18% prioritizing their websites, and 23% spending their tech dollars on content management systems.

$$ Invested in Technology (©Folio:)

Largest Area of Tech Investments (©Folio:)

M&A Outlook

The one other gem of information in the Folio: report was this: Small publishers are luke warm to mergers and acquisitions, with only 7% planning on buying another company and 9% hoping to be bought.

Large publishers, on the other hand, are on the hunt for mergers and acquisitions, with 30% looking to acquire another company. Only 1% expect to be acquired.

The site will begin an invitation-only offer to paying subscribers to get a DNA test for a one-time fee of $99. The information from that test will then be incorporated into their Ancestry.com account, allowing them to see if they’re related to other members, as well as discover their ethnic roots.

AncestryDNA.com, which offers the test, is not yet making it available to the public, but people can sign up to join a waiting list to receive an invite. By doing so, the site is not only upselling an integrated member service, it’s gathering new opt-ins and prospects — effectively killing two revenue birds with one marketing stone.

Ancestry is basing its new offer on its 2007 acquisition for exclusive access to DNA assets from Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, a non-profit organization. However, the site should be careful. Another DNA testing service got in hot water for changing its terms of service on the fly. Not to mention the legal ramifications that can occur from knowing someone’s genetic information.

Smart idea, Ancestry. But make sure your legal team is prepped and ready.

This figure, of course, does not account for all of the company’s revenues as LinkedIn has a hybrid subscription-advertising model. Advertising brought in $48 million, accounting for 26% of the company’s total revenues. Yet, the 91% growth in subscriptions noted above is promising, as subscriptions now take up 20% of the revenue pie. Interestingly, the company’s biggest revenue generators are its B2B offerings — Hiring Solutions and Marketing Solutions — which generate 54% and 26% of total revenue in the first quarter, respectively.

The company is also employing some smart subscription benefits to increase retention. After finding that 22% of traffic in March came from mobile devices, LinkedIn introduced an iPad app. CEO Jeff Weiner said, “we believe we can create more value by enabling our paying customers and subscribers to get access to those products and services regardless of where they are.”

Furthermore, the recent acquisition of SlideShare for $119 million indicates that LinkedIn knows it must highlight its online features. While some professional networks would seek to make exporting contacts or printed directories an added benefit or upsell, LinkedIn is strategically planting retention seeds by making its online offerings more engaging and unique to anything offline.

For the full year, LinkedIn forecasts revenue of $880 million to $900 million. Adjusted net income is estimated to range from $170 million to $175 million.

As some of you may know, online education sites like Lynda.com and ArtistWorks.com are some of the hottest paid content niches out there. So competition from universities willing to provide educational content free of charge may give subscription site professionals reason to pause.

On the one hand, this could be a repetition of the “original sin” committed by newspapers, who made their content available free online and with no plans to monetize. They cannibalized the revenues in their own industry and are now struggling to smack together a way to monetize their work.

On the other hand, when Google came out with its free Google Website Optimizer, companies creating testing software were nervous. Yet, according to our sister site, WhichTestWon.com, free testing software introduced more people to the industry and led to an uptick in testing over a 24 month period. Turns out, thousands of marketers got their start with the free Google product, and then felt comfortable enough to “upgrade” to a paid software that better fit their needs.

So in this case, perhaps Havard and MIT will help more education consumers feel it’s “normal” to take online courses, and thus open the market for the rest of us. Niche online education folks may not be celebrating yet, but they may want to put the champagne on ice.