This is quite an about-face for the Google-owned company. Google’s Eric Schmidt has previously praised the virtues of free content, an easy stance to take when your business model is wholly based on user-generated content. Then YouTube started funding its own original content to the tune of $100 million, and suddenly realized that, maybe, artists and writers should get paid for their work.

It also raises some questions about how they’ll index their subscription content. Right now, Google preferences free content in its search and Google News rankings, and tells content creators to make their videos free-to-view on YouTube, frustrating publishers trying to make a dime off their video content (it’s possible to index content behind a paywall, but it takes a careful reading of Google’s instructions).

However, given the companies recent move to preference Google+ information over other social media data, any decision to create YouTube subscription channels will likely preference that content over any other video subscription platform. It’s a bit like Apple’s move to control the content and distribution of iBooks.

Old-school journalism used to believe in the separation of church and state when it came to editorial content and advertising. In the digital age,  perhaps we need to create a separation of content creation tools/platforms (YouTube,  iBooks, Kindle) and their distribution systems (Google, Apple stores, Amazon.com)?

EMV (which actually stands for Europay, Mastercard and Visa) uses a digital chip to encrypt card data, much more secure than the current magnetic strips. The push will mainly be for bricks-and-mortar stores to update their technology to read the cards by 2015. However, bricks-and-mortar updates have very serious ramifications for online merchants.

Randy Vaderhoof, Executive Director of the independent nonprofit Smart Card Alliance, spoke with me by phone today to explain how fraudsters migrate to online fraud when offline security is increased. Thus, financial institutions abroad, particularly in the U.K., have issued hand-held readers the size of a calculator to customers with EMV cards. Customers then scan their card, which issues a one-time password they have to enter to verify any online transactions. Some banks have also issued a “display” card, which are battery-powered cards with a display and button the cardholder can press to generate a one-time password.

There’s no news yet on what card manufacturers or financial institutions will be offering cardholders for online transactions, but subscription sites should start thinking now of how they can increase their security and decrease card-not-present fraud, which is likely to increase in the near future.

But it looks like Apple may be as conflicted as Anakin Skywalker, easily seduced by the dark side of greed.

Close reading of their user end licensing agreement states that users can only sell their iBooks through Apple’s iBooks store, which also gives Apple a 30% cut. Digital publishers will not be able to sell works through their own site. Moreover, Apple has the sole discretion to approve or reject a work.

This means that you can create a work for profit, submit it to Apple, get rejected, and then not be able to sell the iBooks version anywhere else, even through your own site. (You can, however, strip the content of all iBooks formatting and then sell it through a different platform, like ePub or PDF; however, you will lose the unique interactivity iBooks software allows.)

It’s a bit like Adobe claiming a percentage of every PDF you make, or Microsoft wanting royalties on each presentation you make with PowerPoint. It also makes Apple the purveyors of taste. This is particularly alarming given their ban of pornography on Apple Newsstand. Oddly enough, I supported their ban on Newsstand since storefront owners should be able to say what they want to sell. But software companies should not be able to tell me what to write. Will iBooks ban erotica? How about The Joy of Sex with its detailed illustrations (which are purely for instructional purposes, of course)? How about dated fiction, like Tom Sawyer, that uses racial epithets?

Their decision is also contrary to the goals of the International Digital Publishing Forum, of which Apple is a member is good standing. It looks like Apple is going to have to decide whether it wants to work to preserve the federation or create its own empire.

Note: There is some dissent on this issue, with some calling it just good capitalism. They may have a point, but the whole issue speaks to the bigger problem of companies outgrowing industry categories so quickly, anti-trust laws can’t keep up. The most recent example is Twitter CEO saying Twitter is not a media company but a media business. I’m sorry, what’s the difference?

But Boston.com rallied and has played to its strengths as a lifestyle website. It eschewed the paywall model and branched into ecommerce by selling sports tickets online. Some journalists may call it a conflict of interest, but 21st century journalists know the difference between journalism and content curation.

And yet, while ecommerce cross-sales and upsales can work for a number of paywall and membership sites, it’s not always the best move. For example, Esquire just announced that it will be terminating its ecommerce venture with JC Penney. The main problem seem to be that the two brands had very different images with very different audiences.

So make sure your mission and audience is served by your ecommerce venture before jumping on the bandwagon.

EMI’s Capitol Records is currently seeking an injunction against ReDigi, a start-up that claims to sell “used” digital tracks. The site scans user’s hard drives to make sure their digital tracks were bought legally, lets users upload them to the site, and then erases the track from their hard drive.

The technology is both ingenious and creepy, but the there’s no word yet on whether it’s legal. Capitol Records claims that that there’s no way of knowing whether users have copied the file for themselves before the site erases it, and this is basically a service that sneaks through current anti-piracy loopholes (seriously–when is someone going to come up with a reasonable anti-piracy bill?).

Written content faces the same conundrum–even if your readers can’t print out your content, they can always print their screen and get a hard copy to distribute. But who hasn’t photocopied an article for a friend or copied a movie onto a VHS tape?

However, digital content is far easier to copy than any other medium. Content creators may need to create rules that are more flexible instead of traditional rules that were black-and-white but turned a blind eye to minor infringements. Instead of installing the anti-copying encryption that most DVDs have, what if content creators coded digital products to allow a certain number of copies? Since word-of-mouth is the best marketing, especially for Millennials, such a solution might be the rare win-win we need.

Update: Google apparently tried to advocate for ReDigi, to almost farcical effect. Read “Google Can’t Weigh In On ‘Used’ Digital Music Case” and then look up the definition of hubris.

• The Indie label Stones Throw just launched a subscription service by which members would get ever song/album they released delivered to their Inbox
• Hitch.me lets singles date by ‘hitching’ into their LinkedIn profile. The site has only three questions: two about finance and one about what type of car you drive (which, as a native New Yorker, I found to be a curious litmus test of net worth).
• Rhapsody just acquired Napster International in order to compete with Spotify.
• Meredith Corp just bought AllRecipes.com from Reader’s Digest.

On the other side of the equation, a number of sites are experiencing growing pains:

• Gods & Heroes is dropping its subscription service in favor of a flat $9.99 fee.
• Netflix is keeping its subscription service but phasing out its DVD rentals, moving more to a SaaS model with streaming movies.
• AOL, the original online subscription service, seems to be going down the rabbit hole with their resistance to subscription services and rapid growth of the Huffington Post abroad.
• Slader.com, a new service to help kids with math homework, downgraded from a promising subscription model to free!

Of course, there’s no one algorithm to success. But recently, Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com fame went on Big Think to give her opinion on the matter. We just love how she emphasizes getting to know the daily workings rather pondering abstract business models. Perhaps that’s why Paywall Times readers are finding success in the subscription industry?

What does this mean for your publication? For one, old-school execs need to shift their idea of brand identity. The New York Times was a newspaper, Reuters was a wire service. Now they’re both global news organizations, and in more direct competition. You’re no longer defined by your medium; you’re defined by your niche.

What that also means is that its worth your marketing department’s time to find out how your audience wants to process your content. Ebooks and eSingles can let audiences get a birds eye view on your topic — at a fraction of the time and money it takes to write, print and market a print book. At the same time, once you build audience trust online, they may be willing to pay more for your content in print through a monthly magazine (Our sister site, Subscription Site Insider, has an upcoming case study highlighting this tactic). And perhaps music lovers would like to burn a DVD of their preferred tunes for a loved one by tapping into the songs saved on their subscription-based music site.

So I challenge you all to come up with at least three different ways you could re-purpose your content on a different platform (online, print, audio, video, mobile, tablet or live events). If you’d like some help brainstorming or some feedback from Paywall Times readers, post your ideas in the comments section below.

Fortuitously, Sesame Street recently presented its lessons learned in publishing digital content for children, particularly mobile apps, at the Publisher’s Launch conference, and had some interesting take-aways:

(Full disclosure: I used to work for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, and have a soft spot for their research-based content creation.)

• All content should never be more than two taps away.
• Design for small hands and growing minds (big, colorful icons that are easily distinguishable).
• Make it easy to skip over instructions after they’ve played once. Kids don’t like waiting and neither do parents.
• For early childhood, audio cues should be accompanied by visual cues (perhaps a “soft glow” around an item).
• Young children have a hard time holding a tablet vertically, so design in landscape mode. Also keep icons away from the bottom of the screen where children tend to rest their hands.
• Content should be related. Don’t just throw in extras as a bonus feature. Parents don’t like encouraging ADD in their kids.
• Parents may be open to cross-sells but don’t want their children to come across them. Keep cross-sell/up-sell advice in a separate “For Parents” section.

And ethically-speaking, children shouldn’t be able to purchase anything without parental action or oversight. Seriously. You may get great conversion rates with children, but if parents aren’t on board, you’re likely to be satirized as a drug dealer on The Daily Show.

At the same time, 55% like contacting brands through social media to give them feedback. They also like it when a brand has a page or site, especially if the page has coupons and discounts.

What’s the takeaway? Let your social media be a lighthouse, steadily attracting traffic but not wading in the waters to collect people. Wait for them to engage, but then make sure to follow-up, even if the request falls more squarely in customer service than sales.

Unfortunately Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” feature may have dimmed your lighthouse’s beacon, highlighting Google + profiles over all other social media. However, the clever engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are not going quietly into the night. They just released a browser bookmarklet, or small piece of code, that can run in Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari (sorry IE users) and pulls up relevant social media profiles across platforms for any search you do.

Perhaps you want to tweet/post about it on your social media profile to let your fans/followers/friends know?

Afters users expressed frustration with sites that place an inordinate number of ads “above the fold” and bury content, Google has decided to penalize sites that do so.

The good news is that Google estimates this will affect only 1% of sites, and Paywall Times readers who are concerned with serving their audience through quality content shouldn’t be too concerned. Sites can still have banner ads above the fold, and the new rule will not affect pop-overs, pop-unders and overlays at all.

How much is too much? Google Browser can help you figure out what gets looked at the most on your page, and you want to make sure there’s some content in that 90-99 percentile area. But again, this new rule does not call for the elimination of ads, just their strategic placements. In fact, Google AdSense will tell you that you can place up to three ads on content-rich pages. Although, ironically, Google may be breaking its own top-heavy rule, as this article cleverly illustrates.