Subscription publishers wrestle with password-sharing - Digiday

"Subscriptions are a great way to draw a steady stream of revenue from readers — unless readers share their login credentials with everyone they know. As publishers try to grow subscription businesses, they have to figure out how to handle password-sharing, a phenomenon that subscription services like Netflix and Spotify have wrestled with for years. On one hand, subscribers are often the most enthusiastic members of a publisher’s audience, and limiting access cuts into their ability to proselytize. But allowing flagrant password-sharing disincentivizes would-be subscribers, and it’s hard to limit it without aggravating your users. Password-sharing is a well-documented problem for subscription content companies, particularly in digital video. Reuters/Ipsos research released last summer found that more than one-fifth of 18- to 24-year-olds had used a login from somebody outside their household to stream content; overall, 12 percent of adults said they’d done so...."