If you produce content for a blog or other Joomla website, you might want to charge for some of or all of the content. This business model has been successful for many WordPress blogs out there. The blog owner gives away a lot of free content, and then produces premium content that you can pay to access. Now, this funcionality is available for Joomla websites as well.Partnership with iJoomla
MediaPass™ a leading web subscriptions solution, has released the extension in a partnership with iJoomla.com for its official launch of MediaPass for Joomla. Joomla publishers will be able to easily charge for premium articles or video content with MediaPass’ multiple implementation options.
Merav Knafo, Founder of iJoomla.com is excited about the release:
The Joomla community has been asking for a simple and powerful subscription solution for years now. By partnering with MediaPass, we’re happy to be the ones to provide them with this excellent product. Many of our customers are publishers of magazines and news portals and they will be delighted with this extension.
Matt Mitchell, CEO of MediaPass, says:
We are thrilled to partner with iJoomla to give Joomla publishers more than just a traditional paywall tool. Now Joomla users can monetize their content with a subscription service that’s fully customizable without having to touch code. Because of Joomla's wide reach, we want to ensure the experience with our subscription service is seamless and extremely easy to use.
Screenshots
This is what the MediaPass extension looks like in the Joomla front-end:
Choose which categories to add automatically:
MediaPass back-end settings view:
Implementation
Using MediaPass on your site involves a few steps. First, you need to install the extension. Then, you need to register an account with MediaPass. After registration, you get an ID with MediaPass that you enter into the extension settings. You are now ready to use the extension.
You can choose to enable payment for entire categories automatically, or you can add MediaPass tags to individual articles manually. You can also choose to show the login / register box as an overlay on the page or integrated into the page.
Lastly, you can choose to charge for the complete article, or everything that appears after the Read More tag.
Payment model
The MediaPass extension itself is free. However, the solution requires you are a member of MediaPass, as you use their system to administer the payments and subscriptions. The cost of this is that you give MediaPass 35% of the subscription price. I use a similar type of pricing with the buysellads advertising system I use here at JoomlaBlogger. They charge 25% of the advertising revenue to administer the system. I think that's quite high, but the service is good and the system works flawlessly. The 35% that MediaPass charges is high as well. You will need to determine for yourself if it is worth it or not. I guess it is worth quite a bit of money to have these things taken care of by someone else.
The positive thing about this is that MediaPass charges no monthly fees. That means you will be able to start selling content without any expenses. For smaller publishers, that is really a good idea. Maintaining a system for selling subscriptions yourself can be costly and time-consuming. That's why I decided to use Buysellads.com for my advertising needs.
For larger publishers, giving away 35% will be too expensive.
Ads in the administrator
One thing I don't like about the free extension is that iJoomla has placed advertising for their products in the administrator. Whenever you are in the MediaPass component, you will see 250x250 pixel ads for other iJoomla products. I think that's a bit intrusive, and there's no way to turn those extensions off. I guess iJoomla should have negotiated a different way of monetizing the extension...
Conclusion
All in all, I think this extension is a great thing for the Joomla community. Even if the cut MediaPass gets is a bit high (35%), it will enable smaller publishers to charge for content easily. And to build businesses around their Joomla websites without taking on any monthly expenses.
Download the MediaPass extension
You need to register at the iJoomla site to download. There are version for both Joomla 1.5 and 1.6/1.7 available after registration.
About MediaPass
MediaPass is a full-service subscription solution with customizable features and secure billing management. Merchant processing, fraud protection, and customer service are provided to all MediaPass publishers, and will also be available for any site using MediaPass for Joomla. The extension can be downloaded at http://mediapass.ijoomla.com and is free for all users.
