Sell or license digital content

  • Resolved topher4096

    (@topher4096)


    5 years, 10 months ago

    I manage a website for a client that sells print publications for dealing with emotional health, grief and elder-care support. Most are short (8-12 pages) and are relatively cheap ($5.95 to $12.95).

    Several customers (mostly hospitals, churches, university mental health departments etc.) have asked if they could license the content to place on blogs and in resource sections of their websites.

    We already have another site using WC subscriptions and membership plugins to control access and duration of a purchase. What we’re struggling with is how to deliver the content to the third party websites AND maintain some semblance of control over it. Our idea was that once a customer buys the license, they’d receive a link to a feed of the article. That way they don’t download anything permanent to copy/paste.

    So the workflow would be, add the publication title and content to a page or post, which becomes the product. Utilize a plugin or code snippet that allows us to feed ONLY that page to a buyer (we’ve found plugins that do this well). The product feed link is provided in the email receipt once subscription/membership is purchased. All that is doable and has been tested.

    Of course the problem is the membership/subscription plugins are designed to control access on the sellers website pages. So we’re not sure how we can keep track of license duration/terms once they have the feed link. The ideal solution would be when the license ends, the feed is no longer authorized to the end user.

    Apparently this is a LOT MORE complicated than we had envisioned. Has anyone done this or know of services that are affordable that could do the delivery and authentication part?

    Hope all that makes sense.

    Chris Blair

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Support Fernando a11n

    (@fhaps)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hi Chris,

    I’m thinking you can achieve this by using just the Subscriptions and Memberships extensions.

    The Memberships extension allows you to restrict access to content, including products, downloads, blog posts and, more importantly, pages.

    I’m thinking you could use pages to distribute the content that you described above in the “feeds”. This would require you to create three things fore every publication you want to sell:

    1. A membership plan.
    2. A product, which grants access to the membership plan when it is bought.
    3. A page in the website, with the actual publication content, which users can access once they are active members of the corresponding plan.

    When someone let’s their subscription expire, they will lose access to the membership, and thus lose access to the page with the content.

    I hope this helps!

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • The topic ‘Sell or license digital content’ is closed to new replies.