34% of Subscription & Membership Site Benchmark Reports Are Sold Outside the USA

Anne Holland — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:17:26 +0000

Normally, I’d expect anywhere from 7-17% of sales for a paid content b2b product to be made to customers outside the US. That’s based on a bazillion years of real-life experience. (OK, not a bazillion, I’m still in my 40s, but you get the picture.)

However, so far 34% of the customers for our new Subscription & Membership Site Benchmark are international. It’s a clean split between Canadians and Europeans. What does that mean for the site launch horizon? Murdoch’s just as famous (or possibly more) elsewhere than he is in the US, and he’s been bombasting a lot this year about subscriptions. Plus the Guardian bought paidContent.org a couple of years back. Not to mention the fact that SubHub.com – one of the do-it-yourself subscription site platforms — is based in the UK. (Strangely, the programmers for SubHub’s most direct competitor, US-headquartered Membergate, are also UK nationals.) And there’s – old but presumably somewhat good- data showing that Europeans using online dating sites view 44% more pages (that’s 310 pages each per month) than their American counterparts do. Lastly, Europeans are far more accustomed to using their phones for paid mobile apps (for example, in Belgrade you pay for city parking with your cell phone, not change in a meter), so the likelyhood paid content on phone will be profitable easier and faster in Europe is , well, very likely.

We’ll be tracking launches on the main part of the site when it’s launched in January 2010… so there’s something to look forward to. I guess I’ll place a personal bet now that European and Canadian sites will be, oh, let’s say 34% just for the heck of it.

Paywall Times » international

34% of Subscription & Membership Site Benchmark Reports Are Sold Outside the USA