How Historia grew transactions by 80x with Fewcents' Micro-Access solutions?

‍

About Historia

Historia is the oldest online history magazine in Indonesia.  They combine the discipline of journalistic work with rigorous historical research to present stories of the past in an engaging and memorable way for readers. 

‍

The Challenge:‍

Historia’s homegrown pay-per-article solution wasn’t having the desired results - the question was whether this strategy was wrong, or whether there is a better way to deploy micro-access:

• The technology solution was developed inhouse - requiring high effort from their centralized engineering team to develop and maintain the solution
• Had to contract and build relationships with local payment providers
• No simple way to administer, change prices, analyze performance, use first party data
• Transactions/conversions proved to be very low
• Low traffic

‍

The Solution:  Fewcents’ Micro-Access Solution

Fewcents Paywall on Historia.id

Fewcents Paywall on Historia.id

• Out-of-the box solution that easily integrated with their CMS (Webflow)
• Low tech effort to implement (2 days)
• Payment methods both within and outside Indonesia automatically enabled from day-one
• Consultation from Fewcents team to optimize pricing and content strategy based on best practices and performance
• Fewcents dashboard allowed the business team to administer, manage, analyze and use first party data
• Fewcents article recommendation module automatically recommended relevant, premium content to users

‍

The Results¹

• Monthly transactions increased by a whopping 82x, and first party data by 400x
• Revenue increase by 22x
• Average RPM (Revenue per 1000 pageviews) 15x vs programmatic ads 
• Drove 4.5x more traffic to premium articles via automated Fewcents content recommendations
• Low dependence on tech team:  Ability to easily paywall articles (eg premium, archives), change pricing based on performance data
• Motivated the editorial team to double the number of premium articles produced per month

‍

Learnings

• Publishers should focus on their core competencies (eg producing content, building audience), and find expert solution providers for other areas
• Tech teams at publisher organizations are incredibly stretched, so building their own solutions, while being very customizable, are not always the best approach, since they don’t have bandwidth, and they are not experts in areas like payments
• Use data well to further build the business - eg build communication strategy using first party data to further engage users, and potentially build a subscription business.

‍

‍ ¹_{Results based on April 2023}