Content monetization platform Piano launches Composer for content personalization and paywalls

An illustration from Piano’s website

Marketers who want to present customized experiences to segments of their website visitors — and possibly charge for them — now have another choice.

Content monetization platform Piano has released its second product, a rules engine called Composer that allows publishers to set up conditions for paywalls and content offered to segments of visitors.

Piano, a New York City-based company founded last year, also offers VX/Value Exchange, a commerce platform for handling subscriptions with such features as variable pricing or recurrent payment. Piano was formed from the merger of two other content monetizers, Tinypass and Piano Media.

CEO Trevor Kaufman told me that Composer is intended to handle business rules, while VX takes care of the subscriptions. Using Composer, he said, a publisher might want “people to see five videos and then have to register.”

Integrations with third-party platforms are now in the works, as is support for native apps.

Composer allows audience segments to be defined by geography, device attributes, types of page views, use of ad blockers and behavior. In addition to segmentation and content choices, such conditional features as paywalls, special offers, ad blocking and free content available after watching an ad can be set up without coding.

While there are a variety of visitor engagement platforms out there, CEO Trevor Kaufman said that Composer offers a wide assortment of capabilities that are “simpler to use and faster to deploy.” He pointed to Adobe Target as being Composer’s main competitor for similar kinds of enterprise-level publishers. Piano’s current client list includes Hearst, Time Inc., NBC Universal, News Corp. and The EW Scripps Company.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.