Subs model pays off for Macmillan Education

Macmillan Onestopenglish

Macmillan-owned onestopenglish.com is regarded as the world's number one resource site for teachers of English language.

In 2006 the site needed redevelopment and a more commercial footing, and hence the radical decision to move to a subscription model was taken. This maintained a free access level but introduced a paid "Staff Room" access level which gives subscribers access to premium content.  The new site was developed by Abacus e-Media and is based on its Webstructure content management solution. 

Claire Pye, onestopenglish.com publisher:  "We are experiencing substantial growth in the number of subscribers each year, and this is still going up.  There are no signs that our growth is plateauing."

Webstructure delivers

Some forty new resources are published by onestopenglish.com each month.  including videos, interactive games, lessons at three different levels as well as specific material for young learners and business students.  The onestopenglish database now contains more than 7,000 resources. 

"We wanted a content management system that would be easy for editors to use, and in Webstructure we have exactly what we asked for.  It's the ideal user friendly way for non-technical people to manage an extremely busy publishing environment.  Three editors use it every single day to create new pages, whilst two additional members of the team use it to handle subscriptions and the Abacus Dispatch module (which is used to manage e-marketing activities)."

New subscription options have also been introduced including institutional subscriptions, prepay and automatic credit card renewal.

Claire Pye:  "Not only is Webstructure the ideal product for us, but the people at Abacus also do a great job for us.  Given their strong publishing background, they are able to draw on this experience to suggest innovations or better ways for us to do things on our own site.  And in terms of the major developments which they have undertaken for us, they have been, quite simply, fantastic."