Making money with your content app

You sell access to your premium content: articles, videos, podcasts, courses, or whole sections reserved for subscribers. Your readers subscribe from within the app, and payment goes through the store, Apple StoreKit on iOS and Google Play Billing on Android.

From your reader's side, it's one gesture. No payment form, no card number to type, no billing address, no account to create on a site they don't know. The store already holds their payment method, and the subscription is concluded with one confirmation.

You define the offer: a name, a description, a duration, a price, and if you want a free trial period. The rest isn't your concern. Registering the products with both stores, validating receipts server-side, renewals, refunds and each store's special cases are handled by the platform. No payment SDK to integrate, no server to run, no compliance code to write.

Keep that in mind for the next section: part of what the stores take pays for work you don't have to do.

Apple and Google take 15 to 30% on each subscription, depending on the program you qualify for and your history with the store. It's a real cost, and it deserves to be looked at squarely.

What it buys is the shortest purchase path on mobile. The alternative is to send your reader to a payment page on the web, where they have to open a browser, enter a card and create an account. On the audiences that matter here, a decision made on the spot, on mobile, for content, the gap in conversion between the two paths is considerable. The commission isn't a tax on the feature, it's the price of the single gesture.

The trade-off is yours to make, but make it on both columns, not on the commission alone.

Three ways of charging coexist at GoodBarber, and they're often confused. They don't sell the same thing.

You need an app on the stores. Memberships rely on Apple's and Google's payment mechanisms: without an iOS or Android app, there's nothing to plug them into. The Standard plan only produces a Progressive Web App, so it doesn't allow selling memberships. That becomes possible from the Premium plan up.

The in-app membership is an extension: its listing shows the price that applies to your app.

And above all, it commits the rest of your app. The in-app membership rests on an authentication flow of its own, and that flow is mutually exclusive with the other one. An app uses one or the other, never both at once.

So switching the in-app membership on makes everything described in "Building a community with your app" and "Creating a loyalty program in your app" unavailable. The back office warns you explicitly at the moment of switching, so that the choice is deliberate.

Settle it before you build, not after: changing flow undoes what you've put in place.

You don't lose your registered users, though. If you do switch, we migrate the accounts created with an email address to the new flow: your list follows you. Only accounts opened through a social network don't migrate.

Once that decision is made, the guide "Charging for access to your content" takes over: choosing what goes behind the paywall, gauging what non-subscribers see, building your offer and making it visible.

You switch advertising on in your app entirely on your own, through two routes that complement each other very well.

External ad networks serve advertising through a third party. You sell them your space, they fill it. Depending on the service and the settings you choose, you refine contextual targeting to a greater or lesser degree.

One temptation to avoid: widening your criteria so as not to leave any ad space empty. A well-targeted campaign, even with limited reach, generally earns more than a massive unqualified display.

GoodBarber lets you improve that yield further by choosing several networks and ranking them by priority. If the first one has no ad to serve, the second takes over, and so on.

An ad network's profitability depends on your traffic and on the network itself. That's precisely why you're free to change: don't hesitate to test them to identify the one that pays best in your case.

The internal ad server hands you control from end to end. You serve your own advertising, set up from your back office, and you track your campaigns' performance there.

The principle is the same as with a network, except that you sell your space yourself and negotiate your own terms with your partners. The benefit goes beyond the revenue: you choose what appears, so you guarantee that the advertising fits your editorial line. Advertising that fits holds your readers' attention, which translates into clicks.

Switch on the extensions you want first. There are two of them, one for external networks and one for your own campaigns, and each shows in the store the price that applies to your app. You then get Monetization › Advertising, which holds the three dedicated screens.

For external networks, go to Monetization › Advertising › External service. There you switch on the networks of your choice by filling in the details they will have given you.

The available networks depend on the type of app:

• Native apps: AdMob, Ad Manager, Meta Audience Network
• Progressive Web Apps: Ad Manager, Google AdSense

Your networks then serve as interstitial screens or banners.

For your own advertising, go through Monetization › Advertising › Internal ad network.

You create a campaign by giving it a title, selecting the platforms it runs on and setting its display rules:

• no rule
• display over a given period
• number of impressions
• number of clicks

The second tab lets you add the visuals, choose their format and put a link on them.

To combine several campaigns, use Monetization › Advertising › Strategy. If you mix external networks and the internal ad server, all your campaigns appear there together.

There you set the display order, bearing in mind that only one campaign is served at a time. If the campaign in first position has nothing to serve, the second takes over, then the third, and so on.

For internal campaigns, the same cascade applies to the limits you've set: as soon as a limit of duration, impressions or clicks is reached, the next campaign takes over in priority order.

Serving advertising in Europe means having collected your users' consent beforehand. This isn't an end-of-project formality: an app serving ads without that collection risks a rejection at submission, and puts itself in breach of the GDPR.

GoodBarber builds the consent management platform into your back office's Privacy center, EU Consents tab. It supports the IAB TCF v2 standard, which is the common framework for collecting consent for ad networks, and Google Funding Choices for apps monetizing with Google's advertising tools. Your users see a clear choice screen, and the app records then respects their decisions.

The screen separates two things. At the top, the consent alert for native apps, switched on platform by platform, with your advertising account identifier. At the bottom, the Progressive Web App's alert, which is the cookie one, with a preview of what your visitors will see and where your logo goes. The text on the screen is unambiguous about the stakes: without this alert, your ads stop being served to European visitors.

Set it up before you launch your first campaign, not after.

First, a question to answer honestly: what value does your app bring your users? The paid download only becomes a serious lever if your app offers something they can't find for free elsewhere on the store.

Two conditions to meet:

• A user base that's already loyal. That's the case for some magazines, newspapers, specialist blogs, journals and scientific publications.
• Content that meets a real need, uncovered and hard to replace. Exam preparation apps are a good example.

Be aware that a paid app will probably cut your download numbers considerably. Before deciding, go and look at the strategies your competitors have adopted on the stores.

The business model of paid applications remains precarious. Games aside, and a few niche applications such as exam preparation, charging for your app on the store is risky.

Do the maths: at one or two euros a unit, it takes a considerable number of downloads just to break even. A low price doesn't protect you from the risk, it moves it onto volume.

It's up to you to decide, knowing all that, whether your app will be free or paid.