Publishers who wish to add their newspapers and magazines to our network just have to send us a quick email to us at digital@newspaperdirect.com.

There’s no cost to them to add their publications to both of our digital (PressDisplay.com & SmartEdition) and print-on-demand networks. In fact, the sooner they do that, the sooner they can gain access to our vast distribution network and technology and revenue.

All a publisher needs to do is send us their PDF and we’ll take care of the rest.

Gayle

I read your post with a lot of interest because it is good to test the program with some real examples. I have included below examples of our commission structure and some of the 1 year subscriptions you mention as a comparison. I believe we still seem to come out on top.

The 1 year commission for all PressDisplay subscriptions are as follows:
Economy: $11.95
Personal Unlimted: $35.94
Corporate: $179.91
Professional: $359.91

Now remember, we pay that to you every year for up to 3 years after only 1 sale by you.

The 1 year commission on the WSJ, Financial Times and Magazine.com are:
$11.85
24.75
6.00

You have to make those sales 3 times each to get the 3 years we offer.

I don’t understand why you think those plans are better. Our 10-15% commission is a recurring income, not a 1 time subscription commission. And we continue that for 3 years.

And our higher priced plans like corporate (which you can now sell but couldn’t under the old plan) are particularly lucrative for affiliates. Our current partners/agents who sell them are quite successful. In fact, those plans have an excellent recurring rate with customers often increasing their licenses every year.

As for Adsense, we use it ourselves. I have to tell you, however, that we pay less to Google than we pay to any of our affiliates. If you are having more success with Adsense for revenue, then that’s great and you should continue using that service. But we believe that the long term revenue benefits to everyone will come from sales, not on clicks.

I hope you will continue with us and see how much more you can make with this new plan than you did with the old one.

Alex

Thanks very much for your comments on our new Referral Program. One thing I should have mentioned in my post was that for existing Affiliates, we will count their previous sales in the recurring commission, so that they will have an immediate foundation and can continue to build from there.

As for the terms – recurring commissions are the key and while there was a drop in conversion rates for subscriptions with the new plan, in fact PressDisplay revenues demonstrated a healthy growth with the introduction of the pay-as-you go plan. The new Referral Program will be counting single-copy purchases as well as subscriptions and we are getting quite a number of those sales every day.

So far, our retention rates have been quite good and 3 years of continued subscriptions is a reasonable estimate.

Also, I should also mention that we introduced a number of more expensive plans on PressDisplay in Sept (e.g. corporate and professional) which were previously only available for our direct resellers/agents. This should help with recurring commissions for you as well. Resellers such as ProQuest, EBSCO and SWETS have been quite successful marketing PressDisplay to libraries and the corporate sector. So we believe these new plans will open more opportunities for Affiliates.

One thing we need to do together is find ways to improve PressDisplay so that more of our visitors purchase a plan and generate a better return for our Affiliates. I really would appreciate it if you and our other Affiliates would share your recommendations on new features, etc, so everyone benefits.

A quick search for affiliate programs in the newspaper sector shows these figures:

Financial Times: 25 USD pr. subscription
http://www.amwso.com: 25%
http://www.magazineline.com: 30%
WSJ 15% commission on an average sale price of $79

Personally I also have to compare Pressdisplays affiliate program with my main source of income online Google Adsense. Here my average income per click is 0.12 USD. (This is very normal stats for Adsense)

Considering this, leading my visitors to pages with Pressdisplay affiliate code on is simply bad business. I could give you ten times more clicks by changing a few lines of code, but it is not worth it now – and absolutely not when your new affiliate system is introduced.

I think you should reconsider the concept by asking yourselves: What is a click from an affiliate worth to us? Then set a fair price and watch how your affiliates can generate loads of quality traffic.