Subscription management service and Adobe DPS

[Davd_Spivak_-_A]

Hi all - I'm a new client with Adobe DPS and I can't wait to get started in publishing. Honestly, DPS is the best there is in my opinion. I'm very happy to be moving forward. So we're looking to avoid Apple's mandatory 30% as much as we can and we're going to offer subscriptions on our website for people who want to access our content. The question is - is there a subscription management service (for digital only) that integrates and/or replaces Adobe Entitlement Server for DPS 2015?

[Bob_Bringhurst_]

Hi David. As you know, the existing Adobe Entitlement Server for DPS 2014—which is a proof of concept service only—doesn't work with DPS 2015 because it relies on DPS 2014 accounts and folio names. The roadmap includes plans to offer an Adobe Entitlement Service for DPS 2015 that can be used for production apps. It's not yet available, and I'm not certain that it will work with your website. Until then, you can use a third-party entitlement service. Adobe has several partners that can help you set up an entitlement service.

[Neil_Enns_-_Ado]

I suggest reaching out to companies like Ensemble or MEI, I believe both have entitlement systems you might be able to take advantage of. The work we are planning on our roadmap is geared towards enterprise use, not retail sales use.

For what it's worth, attempting to avoid Apple's 30% cut on sales by doing your own entitlement system is, in my opinion, not worth the effort. You will spend far more maintaining the system, dealing with customer service requests, etc. than you'll ever save in expenses by trying to get around the 30% fee. Furthermore it's a poor experience for your readers: an in-app purchase is seamless, compared to having to go to some website, sign up, provide credit card information, etc. just because you don't want to pay Apple some money.

Neil

[Davd_Spivak_-_A]

Bob, thanks. Can you send me a list of partners that would work with me for an entitlement server for DPS 2015?

Neil, also thanks. I'll contact MEI tomorrow. For our platform, Apple taking 30% means losing an average of over $40,000 per year per 1,000 users. A great deal of our previous subscribers from other platforms are coming from a web-based viewer where they read PDF-replicas of some of our titles. We've always made about 30-40% of our sales from a web-based system with third party newsstands and want to offer that same opportunity. Plus, since we can update an article on the website and our app at the same time through either Drupal or DPS, the small amount of extra time that it takes us to manage the app  vs. the website is worth of the effort. In addition, recent marketing statistics show that mobile website traffic is growing faster than mobile app traffic. The key is to have one content management system that pushes content to all of the platforms, web, iOS, Android and Windows.

Of course, for the digital publishing solution, the best way to go is Adobe DPS.