Aeris® uses Vitrium Security Enterprise Content Security and Digital Rights Management (DRM) software to protect subscription revenues and prevent content sharing. Ensuring their Ratings Reports are only accessible to paying customers and authorized rated organizations.
SourceMedia uses Vitrium Security to protect revenue generated from its editorial content that serves senior-level professionals in the financial services and related industries.
By Santiago Henderson | January 11, 2019
“Vitrium gives us the controls to secure our digital content with minimal impact to the customer experience. We have had great success converting our subscriber base to digital files.”
-Mick Wurster, Project Manager
Company Overview
SourceMedia, an Observer Capital company, is an innovative, growing digital business information and performance media company serving senior-level professionals in the financial, technology and healthcare sectors. Brands include American Banker, PaymentsSource, The Bond Buyer, Financial Planning, Accounting Today, Mergers & Acquisitions, National Mortgage News, Employee Benefit News and Health Data Management.
Key Challenges
SourceMedia publishes and distributes research reports and editorial publications to senior-level professionals in financial services and related industries. The reports containing SourceMedia’s intellectual property are marketed through various subsidiary brands and websites, sold as individual reports or through membership subscriptions to groups of content files. “We needed to reduce print distribution and transition our customers to a library of digital content,” says Mick Wurster, Project Manager at SourceMedia, “Our goal was to cut costs and enable timely delivery of our research reports and editorial publications to customers.”
Prior to procuring an Enterprise Content Security Solution, SourceMedia operated mainly through a print distribution model, with its digital content relying on basic Adobe Acrobat PDF security features. “We wanted to provide a digital product that replaced print publication, and gave us control over our content and its distribution,” states Mr. Wurster, “We considered leveraging our shift to digital distribution with Adobe Acrobat’s PDF security, but we found it to be too limited to be effective as a long-term solution to replace our print product.”
“We wanted to provide a digital product that replaced print publication, and gave us control over our content and its distribution.”
- Mick Wurster, Project Manager
The Solution
“We were searching for a content security solution that empowered us to deploy our business model and gave us flexibility to configure content security,” says Mr. Wurster, “To do that, we needed to integrate security with our Content Management System (CMS) and customer database.” Lead by Mr. Wurster, SourceMedia’s Editorial and Technology Departments, as well as its Subscriptions team set out to find an Enterprise Content Security and Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution that fit with the company’s content workflows. With a dozen subsidiary brands servicing thousands of SourceMedia’s customers and a flexible digital sales model for publication distribution, the company had a lot to consider. “The software solution had to fit to our business needs, integrate with our systems and workflows, offer minimal friction to our end user, and come from a provider that had strong customer support,” states Mr. Wurster, “Vitrium delivered on all of these priorities.”
SourceMedia deployed Vitrium’s Enterprise Content Security solution within their existing technology infrastructure. “We wanted minimum disruption for our editors and administrators and for them to be able to work with the tools they are familiar with,” continues Mr. Wurster, “Vitrium’s APIs and their ability to communicate with our customer database made us able to publish protected content within our CMS workflow and authenticate users against our customer database.”
“Vitrium’s APIs and their ability to communicate with our customer database made us able to publish protected content within our CMS workflow and authenticate users against our customer database.”
-Mick Wurster, Project Manager
The Results
Vitrium Security was an important part of taking SourceMedia’s reports and editorial publications from a primarily print product to a digitally delivered service. “Since implementing Vitrium Security in our systems we have fully transitioned publications to digital and significantly converted our other daily publications,” summarizes Mr. Wurster, “We have also introduced to our product mix research reports that are only available in digital format.”
SourceMedia was able to leverage Vitrium’s Secure Web Viewer functionality to digitize their content and deliver it to customers, making reports available on any device without them needing to download plug-ins or applications to view the content. By applying device and browser limits they are able to limit the reach of their reports to paying customers within their customer database. “Vitrium gives us the controls to secure our digital content with minimal impact to the customer experience,” concludes Mr. Wurster, “We have had great success converting our subscriber base to digital and introduced new digital products using Vitrium Security.”
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