Every week, we bring you the top stories and analyses from the global Subscription Economy.
A month of coffee for $5? That’s Burger King’s plan to rule breakfast.
Excerpts from an article by Rachel Siegel in The Washington Post.
Burger King rolled out its own coffee subscription service: a cup a day for $5 a month. The chain is betting on the service to get early risers in the door — and away from other big names in the fast-food breakfast game.
The calculus is simple: Sell cheap coffee, sell more breakfast. If subscribers ordered coffee every day of March, they’d pay roughly 16 cents per piping-hot cup. And while they’re at it, they might just pick up a breakfast sandwich or pancake platter on their way out.
Read the full article in The Washington Post.
How Wired’s Multiplatform Strategy Is Increasing Engagement and Revenue
Excerpts from an article by Kayleigh Barber in Folio.
Between launching its new Get Wired app in October of last year, leading Condé Nast in its first OTT video venture and building up its newsletter offerings, the 25-year-old magazine brand is strategizing for deeper engagement. And while most of the platforms require users to open their wallets to gain access to more than a limited selection of content, the brand’s leaders want to make sure that those who are buying in are getting their money’s worth.
“Wired’s audience is a little more tech savvy, they’re a little bit more likely to know how to get around porous paywalls,” says Thompson. “They’re also a little more likely to ideologically be opposed to paywalls.”
And while that fact didn’t directly influence the decisions going into building the paywall, one difference was that Wired’s included the subscriber benefit of getting an ad-free digital experience, which is something that the brand’s readers explicitly expressed they wanted—and has, so far, worked.
Read the full article in Folio.
Google’s Stadia looks like an early beta of the future of gaming
Excerpts from an article by Tom Warren in The Verge.
At the heart of Google’s Stadia cloud streaming service are YouTube and Chrome. Google is leveraging YouTube to lean heavily on the popularity of gaming clips and creators who regularly stream games to millions of people on services like Twitch. These communities and games like Fortnite have turned into virtual places where kids hang out to chat, play, and watch streamers. It’s a big business, too. Fortnite made around $2.4 billion alone last year, and one of the most popular streamers makes more than $500,000 a month.
The Stadia premise is that you’ll be able to watch a clip of a game and then instantly play it or even launch to the very same point in the game of the clip you were watching. Streamers will be able to create lobbies for fans to join and play with them on YouTube, and Stadia will support instant clipping to the video service. This is a game console running in the cloud and built for the YouTube generation, and it’s Google’s big push here.
Read the full article in The Verge.
FabFitFun Takes Alternate Path To Subscription Success Via Live Streaming Videos, Communities
Excerpts from an article by Glenn Taylor in Retail Touchpoints.
At the center of the FabFitFun membership is the brand’s flagship product, the FabFitFun Box, which delivers an assortment of eight to 10 full-size products across beauty, fashion, wellness, fitness, home and technology, four times a year. The company’s membership plan comes in two options: seasonal, in which a shopper can sign up to get an individual box for $49, or annual, where shoppers can get one box per season for a total of $180.
“We made a huge effort to personalize the entire platform; we think anything that’s going to gain great scale on the Internet needs to take personalization seriously,” Broukhim said. FabFitFun has focused hard on personalization, and “now there’s hundreds of variations of the boxes every season.”
The membership also offers exclusive sales from brand partners and full access to FabFitFun content, and the company fosters a community where members can share tips, recipes, and highlights from their purchases. Upon hitting the 1 million subscriber mark, FabFitFun invited members to submit a video explaining why they love the brand, and what about them best represents the spirit of the FabFitFun community.
Read the full article in Retail Touchpoints.
For more Subscription Economy resources and events, head to www.subscribed.com