Introducing Aptitude Software — Accelerating reader revenues

John Mahoney

For newspaper publishers, a world-class subscription management platform is a critical engine for future growth, touching on everything from the business model, to how content is packaged and sold, to subscriber acquisition and retention, the customer experience, revenue optimization and diversification.

Aptitude Software, formerly MPP Global, is pleased to become a Solutions Partner to America's Newspapers. Our Billing and Subscriptions Division is closely aligned with our Finance Digitalization Division. Both sides of the business create enterprise software solutions that empower teams to grow their revenue, drive business outcomes and increase operational efficiencies, while removing clunky, monolithic technology and replacing it with best-of-breed, cloud SaaS.

With a track record of over 20 years of implementing and supporting subscription applications for global media businesses, we believe that a world-class subscription platform that supports the future needs of publishers should:

• Significantly reduce technology costs — unifying print and digital in a single solution and enabling more efficient use of people resources, with the flexibility to offer combined subscriptions and a single view of all subscriptions.
• Automate manual tasks — driving agility and efficiency by removing the need for team members to spend time on routine tasks, freeing them to focus on higher value activities.
• Deliver powerful insight — offering near real-time insight across the entire subscriber base, to enable granular, rapid performance reporting and access to the rich subscriber data required to make informed strategic decisions.
• Put customers first — for instance, making it easy to launch customer self-care portals or expand payment options according to subscriber preferences.
• Provide powerful revenue expansion tools — supporting rapid innovation and reducing OPEX by enabling publishers to configure rather than build new offers, entitlements, promotions and products, as well as offering sophisticated anti-churn features.
• Reduce complexity — supporting the creation of "nested" granular entitlements (for example, sports, politics, culture) based on a single instance of the publisher’s core content, to enable revenue expansion without the management complexity that comes with product diversification.

Additionally, a world-class solution must avoid a technology lock-in. It should be open and extensible, enabling publishers to integrate best-of-breed third-party tools quickly and seamlessly, rather than relying on a single vendor or in-house team. 

A world class solution, in short, should support today’s strategic objectives — from cost cutting to revenue expansion and data unification — but also have the capacity to adapt to future priorities. Publishers seek to offer their readership not only print and digital products, but supplementary products such as audio, video, apps and puzzles alongside product bundles and a variety of price plans across both recurring and transactional models, to maximize their reader revenue. 

To learn more, visit us at Aptitude Software.

John Mahoney is vice president/publishing with Aptitude Software.