By offering the power to purchase with a fingerprint, Piano makes signing up for subscriptions easier — and introduces the ability to sell web-based content in a whole new way.

New York, January 27, 2020 

Piano, the leading subscription, data management and customer experience technology provider with over 300 major media clients, today announces Piano Frictionless, a new revenue solution for digital media.

In the past, content businesses seeking revenue from their viewers on the web have required those users to create accounts and type in payment information. By contrast, Piano Frictionless leverages Apple Pay’s biometrically verified payments within the browser, providing web users with one-touch or one-glance access to paid content, without requiring account creation or typing of any kind. By eliminating all friction, signing up for subscriptions not only becomes easier, but new business models and price points are feasible for the first time.

“The cliff between users not paying at all on the one hand, or having to sign up for a $100 annual subscription on the other, isn’t an ideal revenue maximization strategy for digital content,” said Piano CEO Trevor Kaufman. “But a frictionless minipayment — say $3.99 for 30 days — provides an instant and commitment-free way for the viewer to support a publisher. An impulse minipayment on the web does not force the creation of a new digital wallet or the ‘taxi metering’ aspects of micropayments. And just like a purchase at a physical newsstand, it is an ideal step in the customer journey towards a full subscription.”

For years, the print newsstand has offered readers the chance to choose the content they want to purchase and to do so instantly, without the need for a subscription. This content purchasing experience in the physical world is one of the few where the analog version has remained more convenient than the web. In beta now, and scheduled to be in use by Piano clients in March, Piano Frictionless will use Apple Pay — and soon, other wallet-based payment methods — to make a digital version of the newsstand model possible.

By eliminating friction, Piano Frictionless takes the speed of an in-app payment and applies it to the entire Internet, removing the barriers to purchase for users and building new opportunities to drive revenue for businesses worldwide.

About Piano

Piano accelerates content businesses' ability to understand, engage and monetize their customers. Leading organizations around the world — including Hearst, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, NBC Sports, Business Insider, The Economist, Gannett, Le Parisien, TechCrunch, Ringier Axel Springer, Thomson Reuters, Prometheus, Singapore Press Holdings, MIT, The Telegraph, Mansueto, the Harvard Business Review and more than 300 other clients — use Piano to power their subscription, advertising, analytics and personalization efforts. In 2019, Piano was recognized as one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world by Red Herring, Deloitte and Crain, and was included in the top 1000 of the Inc. 5000 list for its second consecutive year.