Cleeng’s ‘next generation paywall’ gets its first major customer

We’ve raved about Cleeng for some time and it looks like the mainstream media is starting to catch on.

The Dutch startup makes it easy for online publishers to charge for small pieces of online content, so rather than having to erect an all-encompassing paywall, individual articles, videos, and even parts of stories, can be made chargeable. It’s a more sensible, less draconian way of taking money from an audience.

Now Cleeng has signed up its first major client. La Tribune is France’s second largest financial newspaper and has integrated the plugin to charge for longer, featured pieces (example), rather than news, which seems sensible. Cleeng’s ‘Enterprise’ option allows La Tribune/Cleeng co-branding for the interface along with advanced reporting and CRM capabilities.

In all, Cleeng, which won Best B2B Startup at this year’s The Next Web Conference, seems to be building up momentum. Donald Res, VP Operations & Developer Communities, says that 320 publishers have signed up for Cleeng at a rate of around 25 per week since it launched in February. 70% of these are in the US.

Res says that over 1000 transactions have been completed so far, which may seem small, but many of the startup’s current customers are small blogs. It will be interesting to see how La Tribune’s traffic (1.5 million unique visitors per month, not bad for a French-focused financial title) helps to bolster the conversion rate.

For the future, Cleeng is looking into opportunities in the video market and is ready to make a concerted push into the UK, having hired Alan Greenberg, who was previously in charge of higher education markets in Europe for Apple, as its Head of UK Markets.