Trevor Kaufman: We’ve focused a lot on developing our VX platform [the main Tinypass platform that lets publishers manage their digital content business], and Piano has developed a really great global sales team and client services team, so [the two are] very complementary. Piano Media has a big footprint in the newspaper business globally, and this enables us to leverage our software over that entire customer base.

A lot of our clients are interested in selling subscriptions, but they’re also interested in increasing engagement, and the moment you restrict access to content, you have a currency that you can exchange with your users. There are many activities that can constitute a value exchange between the publisher and the user, and only one of them is paying — [there’s also] watching advertising, turning off your ad blocker, registering, signing up for a newsletter, providing data. VX enables all these different value exchanges between the user base and the media company.

The merger unlocks the data and learning from all of those publishers around the world, which had previously been a bit trapped. Now, with our software, we’re really going to be able to take advantage of that [data] for our clients. Over the next several months, we’re going to push to migrate [Piano Media] clients to the [Tinypass] platform, so they can take advantage of a lot more functionality and better analytics.

Kaufman: I see two big trends.

One, they are not thinking about paywalls as binary. We had a time where publishers were thinking about paywalls the same way they thought about print subscription: Either you are a subscriber, or you’re not. Now, I think, publishers are getting more sophisticated. They have lots of different levels of engagement and commitment, and their job is to maximize value at every stage of the funnel and figure out how to move users through. They’re thinking about registered users, newsletter subscribers, users who might give gift subscriptions. It’s more elaborate and more nuanced.

The other thing I see is publishers saying they want to craft specific business models for specific groups of users. If someone is in a high-value advertising segment, for example, they might create a different set of paywall rules than if they’re in a low-value advertising segment. Or if someone is a frequent and loyal user, they might present them with a different business model than if they are a fly-by audience member.

Kaufman: We now have a really incredible base of data, not just in the newspaper industry, but in magazines, over-the-top, and sub-verticals of media as well. We’re going to be releasing a lot of syndicated data to the industry over the next year.