From commercialising traffic to growing customers.

What are casual payments?

Casual payments is our description for pay as you go, and an alternative to the term micropayments, which we feel is somewhat loaded and, by implication, small and insignificant. But most consumer purchases are casual. You buy one or two items as you need them. When you buy your morning coffee, you’re not required to sign up for a year’s worth of coffees. We want to bring that experience to the consumption of digital media, to align it with natural consumer behaviour: casual purchases at the time of desire, as opposed to subscriptions, which lock consumers into a recurring obligation. Axate makes casual, pay as you go, shopping possible for digital media.

Will PAYG cannibalise my subscriptions?

No. Quite the opposite. The biggest thing which cannibalises subscriptions is discounts. Publisher after publisher tells us about full-price subscribers who are cancelling in order to immediately re-subscribe at 90 per cent off. Triallists who cancel on day one to avoid accidentally paying a higher rate later. Axate replaces discounted prices with reduced commitment. If PAYG sounds riskier than monthly recurring revenue (“MRR”), remember that each time someone comes back, they pay again. Axate makes payment a low barrier, meaning your readers will come back again and again, building the habits that could lead to subscription. If you knew that every visit earned you direct money, what more might you do to your product to drive repeat visits and multiple transactions? (If that question intrigues you, ask us for some ideas – we can help.)

Axate gives you a third option for your cancelling subscribers. Instead of deeply discounting your subscription (and devaluing your content) or losing that reader altogether, Axate gives you the opportunity to convert them to a PAYG reader, welcoming them whenever they want to snack on your content. And one final point: if you really fear that your subscribers would, en masse, choose to convert to PAYG, you’re worrying about the wrong thing. If it’s true* that they’re reluctant subscribers and would prefer something else, your refusal to offer that alternative to them probably explains a lot about subscriber growth and ARPU. Ignoring user needs risks condemning your business to a continued trajectory of high churn, high discounting, falling ARPU and subscriber decline.

*By the way, it probably isn’t true. Our experience is that core subscribers stay loyal. This is about everybody else.

Will they reduce my ad revenue or traffic?

Traffic and ad revenue have been under pressure for years. It has recently been turbo-charged by AI. Introducing Axate won’t make that worse, and doing nothing won’t make it better. The ad-funded model is being undermined by the big platforms; developing independence from them is the most value-creating action you can take.

How can PAYG increase my ARPU?

At least 90 per cent of most publishers’ audiences generate £0 direct revenue right now. Axate offers you more customers, spending more money, more often, without the concept of churn and driven by the habits they form around your product. This creates a compounding revenue model, in which both revenue and ARPU can increase indefinitely.

How do I decide what price to set?

You keep total control of pricing. We help you get price and deployment right, because that is what makes the product work, and the assessment tool is built to model it against your own figures. It’s not the same for every publication: the right price is one which the majority of your audience will accept impulsively and frequently.

How do I build an internal business case to trial this?

Start with the assessment: a small number of inputs about your audience produce a headline model you can take to your team. PAYG revenue is incremental to what you earn today, and the full-price base is protected.

Is this not just micropayments, which everyone knows do not work?

It is not micropayments. It is PAYG payments which, in most cases, happen to be quite small. And if “casual payment” sounds strange to you, remember it’s something that most of us do multiple times every day. Buying coffees in shops, paying for bus fares, even buying newspapers. Nearly all of our discretionary spending is casual, with no commitment or promise to buy again. If we keep buying the same things over and over it’s because we like them. Coca Cola didn’t get big by being expensive, or refusing to sell less than 30 drinks at a time. They got big by being popular. Be like Coke. Be popular and the money will follow.

How hard is the integration, and how long does it take?

Axate is implemented on your website, not on apps. Axate’s implementation processes include a staging environment, dual QA, an implementation site, GitHub documentation and hands-on post-launch support. See the integration page for specifics.