The Toronto Star will begin testing micropayments for its website content in the next few weeks, making the Canadian publication one of the first major news outlets to experiment with the monetization approach in a meaningful way.
Readers who don’t subscribe to the Star will be prompted to purchase access to single pieces of premium content for 75 cents each, and purchasing access to two articles in a day will grant them unlimited access for the remainder of that day. The functionality is being marketed to Star readers as a "pay as you go" alternative to a subscription and is powered by micropayment technology firm Axate. The Star’s parent company, Torstar Corporation, said it also intends to test it across its regional news titles.
Torstar’s chief revenue officer, Brandon Grosvenor told Toolkits the company hopes micropayments will help drive more of its audience towards long-term subscriptions, but it also sees an opportunity to extract revenue from users who may never purchase full subscriptions.
“For most publishers, the subscription model has basically become to offer a deep initial discount and then hope that subscribers stick. We want to find out if there is a more organic way to grow subscribers versus just deep discounts,” Grosvenor said.