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Media Company GigaOm Reinvents their Business with New Pricing & Packaging

GigaOM has a reputation for delivering breaking news and in-depth analysis on the business of technology, serving over 4.5 million unique visitors per month. GigaOM Pro is GigaOM’s subscription research service that provides reports and access to over 110 independent analysts covering infrastructure, mobile, connected consumer and green IT technologies.

As many media companies are doing, GigaOM was looking at new opportunities, reevaluating various aspects of its business and how media could be delivered, packaged and promoted differently. In an effort to grow its media company, GigaOM created GigaOM Pro an innovative research service which would require flexible pricing and packaging back-end support.

GigaOM’s core competency is in knowledge creation and fostering an analyst community, not in back-end credit card processing and subscription commerce management. GigaOM had limited internal resources to dedicate to billing operations, and their plan to offer varied pricing and packaging models meant they had to move faster than their current billing system could support. GigaOM realized just how complex a back-office becomes with subscription commerce. They needed a system that would make it simple to adjust pricing on-demand.

Part of being a modern day company is depending on partners to serve different aspects of your business outside your core expertise. For GigaOM, finding a partner to manage their subscription commerce meant relying on a trusted platform to handle financial information and fully automate the quote-to-cash process.

GigaOM uses Zuora to not only process credit cards on its safe and compliant platform, but also now has a fully automated quote to cash process converting customers from trial to subscription. And because they’re able to offer variable pricing and packaging models, they have the flexibility to experiment with different offers to gauge impact on conversion rates and renewals. GigaOM has also taken advantage of the ease and speed in which they can adjust pricing via Zuora by offering special promotions over a limited time period, for instance in conjunction with a conference. In fact, GigaOM had not found a pricing model that isn’t supported by Zuora.

“The writing is on the wall for media companies — ‘free’ is not a sustainable business model. It's time to evolve the way we distribute content online, offering customers premium subscription products, in addition to high-quality ad-supported content and Zuora has a deep understanding of what it takes for all companies to make money in the cloud.” — Paul Walborsky, CEO