Eurozine Online Workshops

Financing cultural journals with online subscriptions

The Eurozine Online workshop on digital subscription models that was held on 3 October 2019, brought together 14 participants, including editors from Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Turkey.

Some cultural journals rely on online subscriptions and paywalls or freemium models to monetise digital content and create communities. There are several solutions already available, but are they designed to meet the specific needs of cultural journals? What are the financial, technical and legal requirements?

The webinar started with presentations by two experts: Katie Payne from Steady introduced their platform that allows publishers to earn revenue through paid subscriptions such as memberships, newsletters, podcasts or other content; Alexander Baratsits together with his colleagues from the Cultural Broadcasting Archive presented their plans to develop a subscription platform for community radios, podcasts, publications and similar cultural organisations.

Presentations were followed by a discussion between the participants, who shared their own experiences, plans and concerns with digital subscription and membership models.

Eurozine Online Workshops are part of the project “Eurozine – Network of cultural journals”, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.