by Ari Roth
Paystr Team (photo courtesy of Paystr)
Paystr is a new and on-the-rise service that allows its users to sell their content directly and easily from their own website. I sat down with cofounder Kevin Golob to talk about Paystr, and what it has to offer to artists and content creators of all sorts. Golob explains that the founders of Paystr came from a background of credit card processing, and they initially founded the company “to create a platform that anybody that created any kind of digital media, whether it’s music, videos, ebooks, anything, could have the ability to sell it, and also distribute it directly to their customers or their fans from their own website.”
The result is a “decentralized” model, contrasted to Amazon or iTunes, in which individual creators have control over their products, and “the customer or the fan and the creator of the digital media can connect more closely.” Not only do creators reap greater profits from sales from their own website, the customers also have a smooth and immediate buying and checkout process, leading to what Golob calls “an impulse shopping experience,” that leads to greater sales as well.
Crucially, the Paystr model, because it is a direct sale from creator to customer, gives the creators access to their customers’ data and information. This allows creators to optimize and adjust their content and sales accordingly. Golob tells me that Paystr was also inspired by Louis C.K.’s “direct to fan” comedy album, which sold for $5 directly from his site. The success of the special showed that fans are willing to buy directly from artists, and spurred the founders of Paystr to create a service to facilitate this process, “and also integrate in the merchant processing, the hosting and delivery of all the content, and most importantly, the customer service.” Paystr provides customer service to all customers of creators who use the Paystr service, easing the time and stress involved in troubleshooting that would otherwise fall on the creators themselves.
Golob stresses that Paystr is not a replacement for 3rd party services such as iTunes and Amazon, and acknowledges that services such as those are “great for discovery,” allowing fans to initially find out about artists and creators to become fans. Instead, Paystr offers an “exclusive digital experience” for committed fans, that “gives people a reason to go to your site, and rewards them for being a ‘superfan.'” From there, creators can sift through the data and determine who purchased what and for what amount, ranging from small, single purchases, to bigger, more expensive packages for hardcore fans. With this data and analytics, they can do everything from send specific thank you emails and cross-promote, to book tours based on the locations of superfans, and so on.
Paystr fosters “direct-to-artist connections” through a digital medium, providing fans with a sense that they are directly supporting the artists that they love. This is bolstered by the fact that Paystr allows artists and creators to create packages, encompassing videos, pictures, exclusive music, and more. The connection that this exclusive content fosters between the fan and the artist also allows artists to sell these packages at higher prices, much in the same way that a band’s t-shirt can be sold for a higher price at a concert than at a store. This “digital merch” is most valuable for independent artists, who can connect with core fans and offer premium content beyond what they are selling on iTunes and Amazon.
Paystr is a relatively new service, founded in August of 2013 and growing steadily since then, but Golob is confident that this model, and Paystr itself, will continue to grow in prevalence in the future. It is a distribution channel that offers the personalized, individualized element, data access and higher percentages of profits to the artists themselves that other 3rd party platforms lack. In this way, Paystr is a unique new model, filling a significant need for all artists and creators, from the smallest independents to the biggest of the big. If you are an artist who wants to take the next step in selling your content, then you should consider using Paystr to do it.
