Overview
Sector: Media and Publishing
Organisation: News International (NI) is a subsidiary of News Corporation, which has more than 50,000 employees worldwide. Times Newspapers Ltd (TNL) is a subsidiary of NI, publishing The Times, The Sunday Times and associated properties. News Group Newspapers is another subsidiary of NI, and published The Sun and (until recently), the News of the World.
Audience: General public – existing and new online and print subscribers. There were approx. 200,000 paying digital subscribers as of November 2010, of which half are print subscribers activating online subscriptions, the other half are purely digital subscribers.
Background
In conjunction with the highly publicised announcement that News International’s online publications would no longer be freely available, a project was initiated to build a scalable and flexible platform to support paid access across all of the TNL and NGN online publications.
The first publication scheduled to move behind the Paywall was to be The Times (which was also at the time undergoing a redesign and re-launch of the Times Online web site). This was to be followed by the NGN publications.
Pioneering a shift in how newspapers sell to online subscribers, the Paywall solution was really a test of content’s capacity to be revenue generative. The project success was dependent on isolating the best subscription model without losing support of the customer base. The risk of damage should this project fail was potentially calamitous for the News International brand.
NI already had access controls in place for subscription-only parts of the existing Times Online website (such as the Times Crossword and Times Archive); however, this had been built for just the specific requirements of that one publication, and was not easily extensible.
NI’s revolutionary project was faced with the significant challenge of how to build a system with the necessary business agility; it would be essential to respond quickly with new licence models to best match and maximise subscriber behaviour.
At its heart, the core system requirement was for sufficient flexibility, enough to let NI test multiple subscription models without incurring large re-engineering costs. It had to be change ready to swap in new models quickly if subscriber numbers dropped. In addition it required the breadth to offer further monetising options in the future.
What they needed was a new solution to extend the much simpler Times Online access controls across all of the NI publications. The resulting new platform would create a more flexible service-oriented solution that could share core components across all publications, but also facilitate customisations as required for each individual publication.
After defining the core requirements in-house, NI looked to engage consultancy expertise with the knowledge in technical and business domains to design and construct the flexible platform they needed.
The solution providers needed be expert collaborators. Working with the incumbent platform development team, they were required to incorporate the needs of many internal and external parties.
The project had an aggressive timescale of six months.
Known for its strong history successfully delivering Rights Management projects in the publishing industry, Digirati was selected as the consultancy with the expertise and specialist knowledge to ensure successful implementation of a truly flexible Paywall system.
Digirati were engaged for two project phases, first for the core Paywall platform design and delivery for the TNL publications, and again to support further developments for additional requirements of NGN publications.
Solution
Digirati analysed the NI business requirements, with a focus on flexibility. This flexibility needed to be built into the core system to support multiple content licensing models across many different publications.
In continuation, Digirati advised how best to map these requirements to the technical components of the Paywall platform. They created detailed designs for system components delivering use case breakdowns, sequence diagrams, technical domain models and service interface designs to the NI development teams.
At every step Digirati worked closely with the NI development teams to provide estimates for project planning and, using SCRUM agile development methods, helped to implement the core platform and to integrate it with other in-house and external systems.
The NI Paywall solution was developed using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A set of services which meet the specific NI Paywall requirements have been built on top of a highly scalable core platform. These services are used by multiple content delivery systems and partner organisations to perform user management, access control, subscription and commerce functions.
Key features of the solution
- Content access controls – via access control gateway servers and explicit service calls from content delivery applications.
- Edge security – integration of access controls with Content Delivery Networks.
- Authentication services – login, including single sign-on within business domains.
- User Management – registration, email validation, forgotten password, user profiles, surveys/questionnaires, user data exports and reporting.
- Implementation of business domains – grouping/segregating users and products for different business areas (e.g. TNL publications form one domain; NGN publications form a different domain). Each domain can have different business rules, products, and users – but share the core platform and services.
- eCommerce catalogue, with products configurable through the GUI management application
- Catalogue query services - for selecting appropriate products depending on business domain, publication, partner organisation, user etc
- Product grouping/bundling – to allow sets of products to be sold as a single item with its own sales offer terms.
- Multiple currency support (initially supporting GB Pound, US Dollar and Euro).
- Shopping basket, modelling and recording of sales quotes and orders.
- Multi-stage subscriptions model – allowing for multiple auto-renewing trial, free and paid subscription periods.
- Promotional vouchers, claims, discount and offer codes.
- Variable pricing and offers depending on user status - e.g. discounts for existing print or online product subscribers.
- Automatically renewing subscriptions and taking of associated payments.
- Reports and reminders for subscription renewals, cancellations, payment processing (success and failure)
- Subscription renewal ‘grace periods’ for selected subscription types.
- Integration with multiple payment service providers – for credit and debit cards, PayPal, direct debit, cheque and mobile phone payment services.
- 3D payment verifications for credit card payments.
- Transaction logging.
- Automatic retries for failed payments (within constraints required for different payment types).
- ‘Light registration’ processes for mobile phone users.
- Prepay mobile ‘e-wallet’ functionality.
- Free credits into e-wallet for particular customer actions (e.g. completing full registration process)
- Consolidated billing support - combining multiple payments, billing on a particular cycle/date or when a payment limit is reached.
Challenges
- Support for differing requirements across publications and business units, while maintaining a consistent core platform.
- Defining core and extended user data, including unique user ids. A minimum amount of user data is required to be collected initially. Mechanisms were also put in place to allow collection of additional data (for specific publications and partner organisations, and triggered by a particular event, such as user registration or subscription to a new paid or free product). This additional data takes the form of extended user registration data, or surveys that the user can be required to complete.
- Varying rules for subscription types and payments processing between publications and business units. This was enabled by defining business domains which can have their own users, products and subscription rules, while still leveraging the core system capabilities for authentication, user management and access controls.
- Migration of existing Times Online users into the new system, while retaining their existing account data and subscriptions.
- Developing varied subscription and payment models for different publications and integrating with several different internal and external payment systems (requiring synchronisation of state between the separate systems).
- Working with many different business stakeholders and both internal and external technical teams to deliver a complex, scalable and extensible platform to aggressive timescales. A successful project required coordination with: product vendors, CMS platform developers, external partner organisations including fulfilment and distribution partners, the core NI Paywall development team, test teams, systems architecture teams, database management teams, data architects, data warehousing and reporting departments, infrastructure management teams , business sponsors for each publication and payment services providers.
Results
The NI Paywall was successfully delivered for use with the Times+ online products launch in 2009. This allowed users to subscribe to the lifestyle products online, and was also integrated with the Times and Sunday Times print subscription services, allowing free or reduced price subscriptions for print subscribers.
When the Times and Sunday Times websites were re-launched in 2010, they were also making use of the new NI Paywall. For an initial period this was to enforce registration for freely available content, and then subsequently to require paid subscriptions for non-free content.
Further development phases have provided support for additional requirements of the NGN publications and added mobile payments platforms and subscription models.
When first announced, the move by NI to implement their Paywall was widely regarded as a very risky move, with much scepticism as to the ability to retain a significant and valued user base once it was in place. However, the flexibility of the Paywall platform has ensured that a sizeable and growing base of more valuable users has been retained. Even the more cynical commentators are now acknowledging the success of the project, and many other publications are considering similar moves towards paid content platforms.
