Entrepreneur Wins Award for Letting Customers Pay Whatever They Feel Like

NEW YORK – May 2006 – What would happen if an e-commerce Web site let its customers pay any amount they wished?
The site would win an Entrepreneur of the Year award for its creator, that’s what.
The award was announced at the MarketingSherpa's Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content Summit, an industry gathering being held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel today. Brian Livingston, the co-author of 10 books on Microsoft Windows, won the award for WindowsSecrets.com, which he edits. The site makes all of its paid content available to anyone who makes a monetary contribution of any amount.
Anne Holland, President of MarketingSherpa, the research firm behind the Summit, says the award recognizes the ingenuity of selling subscriptions to Internet content with no fixed fee at all. The subscribers’ contributions are used to finance the Windows Secrets Newsletter, a twice-monthly e-mail publication on the latest Windows tips and tricks. The newsletter has 140,000 subscribers, more than 17,000 of whom have made a financial contribution.
MarketingSherpa’s annual summit brought together 250 executives from paid-subscription Web sites this week. Speakers represented the New York Times Company, Reuters, Time.com, ConsumerReports.org, Match.com, Hoovers, and other sites with paid-only content.
“If you trust people, they’ll support good journalism,” Livingston said. Readers of his newsletter, which is sort of a survival guide for Windows users, pay anywhere from $5 to $100, he says. “The more affluent readers subsidize those who may be on unemployment but still need to keep up their Windows skills,” Livingston added.
“For the past six years during this annual Summit, we’ve provided the Entrepreneur of the Year Award to those who excel with paid content marketing tactics,” according to Anne Holland. “By allowing anyone to pay any amount they determine, Mr. Livingston has impressively grown his membership base, and we hope his case study helps others.”
About Brian Livingston
Brian Livingston is the editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter, a twice-monthly e-mail publication on the latest tips and tricks about Microsoft Windows. The newsletter has more than 140,000 subscribers. Mr. Livingston also writes Executive Tech, a weekly column for Datamation. For 12 years from 1991 to 2003, he wrote a weekly column on Windows for Infoworld Magazine. He has also been a contributing editor of CNET News.com, PC/Computing, PC World, Windows Sources, and Windows Magazine.
Mr. Livingston is the author or co-author of 10 books. His latest books are Windows Me Secrets (with Davis Straub) and Windows 2000 Secrets (with Bruce Brown and Bruce Kratofil), published by Wiley Publishing. His books have sold 2.3 million copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages. At one time or another, a Windows Secrets book has been the No. 1 best-selling computer book in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand.
For more information about Brian Livingston, visit www.windowssecrets.com .
About MarketingSherpa, Inc.
Based in Warren, Rhode Island, MarketingSherpa, Inc. is a research firm publishing case studies, benchmark data, and how-to information for marketing, advertising, and public relations professionals. For more information about MarketingSherpa, visit www.marketingsherpa.com.