Monday 25th July: Acast's co-founders want to revolutionise subscriptions.

July 25, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Esther, and it's great to be back with you after a break.

Just before I went away, I had a chat with Acast co-founder Måns Ulvestam. Along with fellow co-founder Karl Rosander, he launched a new company last year offering single purchase audiobooks and eBooks.

They've just expanded Sesamy to allow single-purchase podcasts. But that's not the most interesting part. Ulvestam is so committed to the belief that a la carte payments for content are viable that they're developing their own smart paywall. This will assess a reader's propensity to pay for either a subscription or just to pay for the one article.

Micropayments and single payments are a touchy subject for the industry. I grilled him on some of the most common issues, and he was confident in his vision. Sesamy might well be the Goldilocks solution to the two extremes of full subscriptions and micropayments.

I remain optimistic - albeit with a healthy dose of scepticism. As always I'd love to hear your thoughts (is this something you would try?) - just reply to this email.

The entire editorial staff of Mel Magazine was laid off on Friday, one year exactly after the title was acquired in July 2021 by Recurrent Ventures. This is our main story on the podcast news round-up this week, so do give it a listen for our (unfiltered) thoughts.

The latest instalment of Peter's Magazine Diaries is up on the site. This time he suggests bringing back glossy magazine cover stars for digital content, finding an Instagram influencer to sell your mags, and cutting down on ads for better performance all-round.

Getting subscribers to interact with content can be a perilous battle. To avoid subscribers churning, becoming zombies or worst of all unsubscribing, publishers are turning to triggers. Twipe's data and experiments have found that these triggers can boost engagement.

This week's podcast:

In our final episode of the season, we hear from Medium’s VP of Content Scott Lamb. Scott leads the content and creator relations teams at the platform, so we talked about Medium’s famous pivots, the importance of putting creators at the core, competing with Substack, and Ev Williams’ departure.

Tickets to the inaugural Publisher Podcast Summit are on sale! Take advantage of an exclusive pre-agenda discount code just for our newsletter subscribers: enter MVNL20 at checkout for 20% off all ticket types. We'll be releasing some speaker details over the coming weeks, so keep an eye on @mediavoicespod or @pubpodawards for more.