Pico is the system of record for a reader to establish a relationship through registration, and then if they choose to do so, become a paying reader. As such, Pico is also the system that is managing the payment process (via Stripe) and passing this information on to other platforms for subsequent actions, including SimpleCirc for addressing and print subscription fulfillment.
The options presented to register and become a paying reader are established and defined by the client, and then configured in Pico by BlueLena.
An example of registration rules are as follows:
A publisher wants to require a site visitor to register in order to continue reading after three articles within a month.
Within Pico, BlueLena would create a registration rule that “locks” content to three articles per month, unless a site visitor has registered and logged in.
Pico further allows for specific content to be “excluded” from the article count. For example, if content related to COVID-19 should be exempted from the 3-article limit, we would exclude content tagged (e.g. “COVID-19” or “coronavirus”) while setting up the registration rule inside of Pico.
Similarly, an example of monetization rules could be as follows:
A publisher wants to require a site visitor to be paid in order to continue reading after five articles within a month.
Within Pico, BlueLena would create a monetization rule that “locks” content to five articles per month, before the site is locked down – requiring payment from the reader to continue reading.
We can also exclude certain content from the article count, or alternatively we can only apply the article count to specific type of content (for example, anything tagged “premium” inside of the publisher’s content management system).