Posted by: Matt Shanahan
Okay, let’s get ‘real world’ with Demand Rating™. What can you do with it? More importantly, how does it help publishers and information providers monetize opportunity? Let’s first take a look a very common subscription service concern, account sharing.
Account sharing for subscription services is often a given—for some industries it’s rampant and understood, in others it’s less common, but still done. Let’s assume for now, that with every subscription service, some account sharing is occurring. As a business leader in that organization, do you care? Do you chase each and every case of account sharing? Can all be successfully monetized? The answer is: It depends.
If the subscriber is sharing one account but not using the other 99 of their 100 paid accounts, do you care? Probably not. The real problem might be risk of losing the subscriber, not sharing. If a long term, large subscriber had significant sharing in a single office for a 3 week period, do you care? Probably not. The sharing may have been due to a specific project or to a logistical issue—nothing worth damaging the long-term relationship. What if you discover that over a half of all of your accounts are being shared? Which accounts do you chase first?
Demand Rating helps publishers and information providers determine whether account sharing can or should be monetized. It helps qualify opportunities that are ripe, and helps sift out those that aren’t. Subscriber usage, cost and value are intrinsic to the formula—normalized—allowing customers with identifiable sharing to be ranked, compared and rated. Our work with providers shows when sharing is occurring, about half of lost revenue can be monetized successfully. Demand Rating lets you know which half.