The latest version of the Adobe^® Digital Publishing Suite (DPS Sprint 27) provides a powerful new feature that supports a metererd paywall model. Version 6.6 R3 of the cross-media publishing platform vjoon K4^® was released just a few days ago and it already affords users access to this new feature.

Hamburg - vjoon GmbH, long a partner in Adobe’s strategic development alliance, was able to test the new feature ahead of time and enable it as part of vjoon K4’s DPS integration. Editors, agencies and publishing houses can now determine in vjoon K4 if articles will be free, accessible only to subscribers, or part of a metered offering that may be accessed up to a set limit. For example, readers could be granted free access to five articles. The sixth article is only accessible via a paywall so that the user will have to pay to read it.

Retaining readers with a variable paywall

Declining circulation and dwindling advertising revenue has newspapers and publishing houses scrambling to find a practical way to earn money with their online offerings. Today many publishers are banking on paywalls to pay for quality journalism in the digital realm. The metered model, a viable alternative to hard paywalls, appears to be a successful strategy that has been adopted by many online services. Users may read a certain number of articles per month for free, after which they will have to register and pay. The latest version of the Adobe DPS provides excellent support for this business model, and vjoon K4 streamlines the publishing workflow that underpins this model.

More efficient publishing with metadata

Another new feature in vjoon K4 version 6.6 R3 is a DPS metadata check. Administrators can now not only define the type of metadata, but also the text length of individual metadata text fields. This ensures K4 users are prompted to comply with Adobe length requirements as they enter data.

The current version of vjoon K4 has been furnished to integrators and is ready for installation.