Startup Snaque enables
premium content without a payment barrier
Paid content is the predominant topic in the publishing industry – and rightly so. For far too long, media companies have relied solely on reach and free content online. Whether leading media or regional news portals: paywalls have now been established almost everywhere, allowing only registered and paying users to read articles. Has this solved the big question of monetizing journalistic content? Partly, partly. On the one hand, the rising subscription figures of recent years show that media companies are on the right track, but on the other hand, the highs experienced during the coronavirus pandemic have quickly brought them back down to earth. The fundamental problem is that subscriptions alone are not enough to meet the demand of the various readers. Only around two percent of online readers can be persuaded to subscribe at all. 98 percent of readers drop out at the paywall. There is therefore a huge gap between subscription users and occasional readers. MediaTech Hub startup Snaque is now closing this gap with new software. Snaque has implemented a paywall extension that allows readers to read premium content without a subscription. To do this, a short interaction with brand content is placed in front of the content.
Snaque was founded by tech PR expert Katja Waldor and software developer Henning Tillmann. Their idea for a paywall alternative also convinced the jury of the Media Founders Program, the media innovation center in Babelsberg, and they have since been seamlessly accepted into the MediaTech Hub Accelerator.
Swiping three times unlocks an article
If Snaque, which can be integrated as a simple widget on publishers’ websites, is integrated, users are now shown another option in addition to the usual paywall versions with a subscription model or 30-day trial version. The idea behind this is very simple: readers interact with brand content in the form of a short survey, which is a kind of digital sales pitch. The article can then be activated and read, financed by the advertisers. Advertisers can freely design the so-called “snack bars”, consisting of questions, images and a logo. For example, a travel provider could ask readers about their travel preferences: “Do you like city breaks”, whereupon they can swipe in one direction for yes and in the other direction for no. The answer given is followed by another question, such as “Do you like traveling by plane?” or “Is nice accommodation important to you?”, which relate to the previous answers. After two to three swipes, an offer tailored to the reader is presented, such as a short trip to Barcelona.
“It often flashes and flickers everywhere on websites. We asked ourselves: Who actually notices this and really clicks? That’s why we created a model with Snaque that allows readers to engage with us. We ask about interests and can present a targeted offer,” explains Katja Waldor.
If users want to access the article quickly and easily, they only have to answer a few questions. The advantage for publishers is that they can additionally monetize their content and advertisers can place ads that are noticed and with which users actually interact. With its advertising form based on personalized sales conversations, Snaque achieves average click-through rates of 15 percent. In comparison, conventional banner advertising only achieves click-through rates of between 1-3 percent. The average interaction or dwell time of the advertising format is also 22 seconds.
Cross-system integration of the widget
The handling for publishers is very simple: the widget is connected to either the publisher’s content management or paywall system via API. Publishers can decide for themselves which group of readers they want to display the Snaque Playwall button to. Segment-specific playout based on the publisher’s own data is the keyword here. Snaque itself does not collect any personal data and does not set any cookies. The ads can be created in the software’s own content editor and images and logos can be added using drag and drop. The complete performance (“Who releases articles and when?”) can be viewed because the widget is integrated into the publishers’ paywall systems. If no paywall is available, Snaque can also be used as such. Reach portals that aim to achieve as many clicks as possible with their content and therefore make it freely accessible can, for example, introduce a small barrier for more elaborate articles and display target group-specific advertising.
“We are not competing with the subscription model,” Waldor clarifies. “We are merely supplementing paid content with another offer and thus closing a gap.”
Easy access to information helps combat fake news
And this gap is not only being closed in terms of user-friendly reading access, but also with regard to free access to well-researched and edited information in times of fake news. The most important information is now often hidden behind paywalls, while false information is freely accessible everywhere on the Internet and is even deliberately disseminated.
One concern that the Snaque team can alleviate for media companies is that of falling subscription figures. “Publishers have complete control over how often they use Snaque,” says Katja Waldor. On the one hand, they can control when Snaque is placed in front of an article and, on the other hand, the use at the Sächsische Zeitung has shown that users who get the chance to look behind the paywall more often through individual articles are more likely to take out a subscription. Here, the probability increased sevenfold. The positive user experience makes it possible to keep readers in the sales funnel for a subscription for longer.
The response in the industry has been very positive since the official market launch: many media houses have requested the integration of Snaque due to the positive coverage in relevant specialist media and some of them are adding a playwall to their paywall right at the start of the new year. Snaque is convincing specialist publishers, national and regional publishers alike and shows how the monetization of journalistic content can be rethought.
More about the MTH Blog
The media technologies of the future are already being used today – not only in the entertainment sector but in a wide variety of industries. For our MediaTech Hub Potsdam blog, we talk to tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and researchers once a month and tell the stories behind their innovative business models, ideas, projects and collaborations.
