What are offer prices?
Offer prices are what your customers will pay to have access to a content offer. How a price works depends on your monetization model.
For recurring offers (eg. subscriptions), a price will be automatically paid by a customer at the start of every billing cycle. For transactional offers (eg. VOD or temporary passes), the price represents a one-time payment for the customer.
Different price points and pricing models allow you to:
- Experiment with monetization strategies
- Find the best way to package and market your content
- Capture different types of customers with different price points
Where do I create prices?
Prices are created in Cleeng’s content monetization tool. Each pricing model (subscriptions, passes, VOD, Live PPV) represents a slightly different pricing strategy. For passes, it is also possible to create multiple price points per offer (eg. early bird offers or mid-season offers).
After selecting your content offer type, and defining the basic offer information, the next step will be to define your pricing.
How does pricing work for different types of content offers?
Subscription pricing
Subscriptions use recurring billing. This means that you will create a price that the customer pays to both start the subscription, and renew the subscription for each new billing cycle.
The frequency of billing depends on the billing cycle you define, which can be any of the following:
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Every 3 months
- Every 6 months
- Annual
When using coupons for subscription offers, you can choose how many billing cycles a discount will apply for.
Pass pricing
Passes can have either one-time purchase or recurring pricing. When creating a one-time purchase price, you can select your price based on the length of access you provide your customer (eg. day passes, monthly passes, season passes).
A second option is to define a common expiry date that will apply to this pass regardless of when the customer purchases it. This is most used by sports broadcasters to package seasons.
Renewable passes provide a lot of flexibility for content pricing. Just some of the options available are:
- Defining multiple special price points in a season (eg. early bird or mid-season prices)
- Automatic renewals from special prices to the full season price
- Defining renewals prices based on the customer’s initial payment price
These options help you continue to attract new customers over the season, while retaining and renewing them at full season prices.
Live Pay-per-view pricing
Live pay-per-views (PPV) are one-time purchases. The price you define will be the price the customer pays for full access to your event. The length of this access will depend on how long your event runs for.
Transactional Video-on-demand (TVOD) pricing
TVODs can be used with two main types of pricing strategies. The first is for unlimited access VODs. These work as a one-time purchase. Your customer pays the offer price, and will then have continuous access to the video you are offering.
The second TVOD strategy is for rental offers. Here you can create different price points based on how long you want to grant access to a video for:
- Short term rentals (48 or 72 hours)
- Longer term rentals (7, 30, or 90 days)
How can you use prices effectively?
For media and entertainment brands, it’s important to use pricing strategies that spark curiosity and excitement. This means balancing your long-term offers with appealing entry points and free-trials.
Here are some factors to think about.
Provide multiple price points
Having multiple price points is effective, even for sports broadcasters with highly seasonal content. To maximize growth, you should try to accommodate low, mid, and high motivation customers. Align your billing cycles with these price points (low = monthly, mid = 3-month etc) and focus on incentivising longer term commitments.
Aggressive pricing with longer term commitments
The New York Times used very aggressive discount pricing ($0.50 a week for one year) to convert unconvinced users into subscribers. You can try this by generating long term discount campaigns for monthly offer, eg. 50% off a $5.99 offer for 12 months. Such offers boost signup, but have the added benefit of creating stickier customers thanks to the long term discount.
Clear premium choices
Make sure to facilitate your super-fans. These customers will want to pay more for your service and you should think about how to create premium level value for them. This can be achieved in a simple way through Annual plans, with special messages for these customers. You can also use tools like Cleeng’s Session Control to create special multi-screen premium offers for these customers.
Do my prices include tax?
Cleeng adapts to your location when setting up offer prices. For most European broadcasters (excluding Norway), prices will include tax (VAT). So the price you create will include tax if you are a broadcaster in any of the following countries:
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Crotia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Germany
- Finland
- France
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovenia
- Slovakia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
For all other countries, including the United States, the price you create will not include taxes. Therefore national or local sales taxes will be added to the price you create for your offer.
Can I update prices after my offer is created?
You can update the prices of your Pass, Live PPV, and TVOD offers at any time.
Subscription offer prices can only be updated before they are first purchased. Changing prices beyond that point has implications for recurring billing. If you wish to update the price of a subscription offer, please contact Cleeng broadcaster support.