Subscription Economy News - Week of 7/8/2019

Every week, we bring you the top stories and analyses from the global Subscription Economy. 

Microsoft, Sony, and Google are investing in subscriptions and streaming to give gamers more choice — but the real challenge is changing the way people play
Excerpts from an article by Kevin Webb in Business Insider

    Subscriptions are the latest way for the industry to find and monetize new players, and they will help lower the barrier to entry for prospective gamers.

  • Paid online services like Xbox Live Gold and PlayStation Plus have become commonplace in the video game industry, and more companies are starting to introduce their own subscription services for gaming content.
  • Apple and Google are making major investments into new gaming subscriptions, but they’re unlikely to change the way people play their games; they’ll just change how we pay for them.
  • “Netflix for video games” has been a popular concept for more than a decade, but the popularity of free-to-play games will make it difficult for a Netflix-style, on-demand service to succeed.

Read the full article in Business Insider

With Sports, Local Newspapers Try ‘Unbundling’ the Subscription  
Excerpts from an article by Max Willens in Digiday.  

The rookie campaigns of many newspapers’ digital sports subscriptions are over. Now comes the work of developing the standalone subscription products into long-lasting sources of revenue.

After the success of The Athletic proved that sports coverage is a passion area that can drive people to take out their wallets, newspapers carved out their sports coverage as discrete subscription products. The bet is these products, while priced lower than a full digital subscription, will draw in sports fans who primarily rely on the publication for sports coverage versus, say, city hall reporting. Newspaper publishers ranging from Hearst to McClatchy to The Dallas Morning News all piled into the space, and upstart news publications such as the Daily Memphian, which launched in the fall of 2018, did too.

Read the full article in Digiday.  

Amazon Expected to Have 63M Prime Subscribers Going Into Prime Day
Excerpts from an article by Larry Dignan in ZDNet.  

Amazon is estimated to have 63 million Prime subscribers in the second quarter with 44% of them planning to make a purchase during Prime Day, according to a Cowen & Co. survey.

Cowen has been tracking Prime subscribers, which are critical to Amazon’s e-commerce recurring revenue and lifetime value of a customer, since 2016 via a proprietary survey.

In its latest racking survey of 2,500 consumers, Cowen found that 56% of respondents said they live in a Prime household. That rate would indicate a Prime subscriber base of 63 million, up 8% from a year ago. This stat is notable given that Amazon is likely to see a boost in Prime subscribers when its 48 hour Prime Day sale starts July 15.

Read the full article in ZDNet.

For more Subscription Economy resources and events, head to www.subscribed.com

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