French daily business paper La Tribune will start charging for more of its website, in a strategy to edge consumers toward a full-fledged subscription.
The title had already charged a flat €10 per month for online access to the print-originated stories that make up 60 percent of LaTribune.fr.
Now it is also beginning to charge for more individual bits of content, starting with opinion articles for €0.49 each, by introducing Cleeng, a payment mechanism that can require payments for smaller content fragments, including for components of articles and parts of video.
“The step between advertising and subscription is too large for consumers,” Cleeng founder-CEO Gilles Domartini tells paidContent. “The logic is that you can better convert people to subscription through CRM programs after a few successful individual transactions. That is the mid-term plan we have with them.”
LaTribune.fr will soon introduce a daily pass and charging for archive web-originated articles using Cleeng, Domartini says. The company is operating an 80/20 share from payments. A Cleeng user account can be paid using Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, SMS and phone bills.
La Tribune’s new media director says Thomas Loignon: “Consumers are willing to buy high-value content, such as music, games or news articles, but the key to success is: simplicity.”
Before LaTribune.fr, Cleeng says it was in use by 320 mostly small publishers, but had processed only 1,000 transactions. It just hired former Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) European education manager Alan Greenberg as its UK head.