Jason Bade, Co-Founder of Pico, a provider of email and payment tools for audience management, talks to your host Vahe Arabian of State of Digital Publishing about the state of digital publishing CRM. Jason talks about the changes in publisher website monetization, how Pico fits into the changes of the publishing industry, and what it means to provide audience relationship management.
Episode Highlights:
- Jason Bade shares his personal background, as well as that of Pico.
- What problems does Jason Bade seek to solve?
- What examples has he seen of how publishers use CRM for subscriptions?
- Why does Pico’s website say that they offer audience relationship management as opposed to CRM?
- How did the outside investment in Pico happen?
- Has Jason been able to size up the market for how many potential customers can be served?
- What are some of the barriers that Jason faces to convince users of the value Pico can offer?
- What is the next wave of publishing monetization?
- How should organizations be structured for smooth implementation?
- What case do studies showcase how Pico has benefited customers?
- What is the future of CRM solutions?
- What advice for entrepreneurs raising money would Jason Bade give?
3 Key Points:
- Monetizing solution types include sites that accept donations, sites that accept a membership, and sites charging a subscription.
- The industry is transitioning out of a volume engagement ad revenue play to applying a paywall on content and notifying users when info is useful to them.
- The conversion point that Pico is focused on involves getting people that feel an affinity for a publisher’s website to register and join it, and to maximize those conversions.
Tweetable Quotes:
- “That whole customer tech stack does not exist for news or publishers, and that’s the gap we try to fill.” – Jason Bade
- “Imagine a journalist getting 300, 400, or 500 families in a school district to basically pay $4 or $5 a month for a professional journalist to cover all the school district meetings in that area for those families.” – Jason Bade
- “Some folks, we are really helping them transition from an ad model, which is predicated on volume, to a model that is based on closer relationships with your more valuable users.” – Jason Bade
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