WEEKLY NEWS ROUNDUP
1. Norway’s Dagens Næringsliv finds success with wine reviews behind the paywall – WAN-IFRA
In building a brand around Dagens Næringsliv’s wine journalist Merete Bø, and putting her wine reviews behind the paywall, the content achieved one of the highest conversion rates per article from free to paid this year.
“Looking at audience data, DN found that wine journalist Merete Bø, who had for years been writing wine reviews for DN, had the byline with the most followers. Digging a bit deeper, DN’s insights department found that the one special interest most readers had in common was, in fact, food and wine.”
2. Why Nordic publishing giant Schibsted joined the coalition lobbying for Apple App Store ‘fairness’ – Digiday
Nordic publishing giant Schibsted became one of 20 new members of the recently formed Coalition for App Fairness in October, lobbying for Apple to stop charging publishers a 30% fee for in-app purchases such as subscriptions.
“The group was founded in September by a group of influential app publishers including Fortnite owner Epic Games, online dating company Match Group and streaming platforms Spotify and Deezer.”
3. Apple begins rolling out Apple One services bundle including Apple News+ – 9to5Mac
Apple has officially started rolling out its new Apple One subscription services bundle to users. The bundle offers discounted rates when you subscribe to multiple Apple services, including Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple News+, and more.
“Apple One Individual and Apple One Family are available in over 100 countries at launch, but Apple One Premier is only available in regions where Apple News+ is available: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.”
4. Bloomberg Media wants to break down barriers between its ads and subscriber businesses with an in-house built tool – Digiday
ABBA, an A/B-testing tool built in-house to support Bloomberg’s subscription business is now used to support the ad team to optimize products and campaigns, in an effort to merge the two business sides.
“The data infrastructure that Bloomberg Media’s advertising team uses to identify audience segments for campaigns is now used to build segments used to market to would-be subscribers.”
WEEKLY ANALYSIS ROUNDUP
1. How the Washington Post is expanding its global subscriber base – Digiday
A regionalized approach to everything from marketing to pricing to bundling helped to keep Washington Post’s international subscriptions business growing when many of the publisher’s counterparts experienced a plateau in reader revenue after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Since the beginning of the year, the Post’s subscriptions business has grown by over 40% year over year, while its global subscriptions business, in particular, is up over 60% from last year […]”
2. Majority of income comes from the most loyal readers – WAN-IFRA
Newspapers could do well to focus their reader revenue strategies on their most loyal readers, since they generate a majority of the business, says Pepe Cerezo Gilarranz, a Spanish digital strategist and specialist in digital journalism.
“It is important to realise that between 10-15 percent of our audiences, the most loyal readers, are those who generate the most important part of the business, 70-80 percent of all income.”
3. Can engineers design better paywalls for local news outlets? – Media Post
A team of journalists, engineers, data scientists and designers are participating in a project between Columbia Journalism School and Stanford Engineering to develop a “smart” paywall aimed at small and medium-sized publishers that could be more adaptable to local publishers.
“While the product will indeed be a gate to the content, the intention is for it to be flexible enough to offer newsrooms the ability to use it in a number of ways that may not have anything to do with money.”
4. How Spokesman-Review increases subscriptions and decreases churn with better communication – INMA
The Spokesman-Review, a daily broadsheet newspaper in the northwestern United States, decreased its digital churn rate from 49.19% in 2018 to 32.62% in 2019 and is trending even lower for 2020. A key part was improving its onboarding experience with customized e-mails and increasing the number of onboarding e-mails to point out different billing options.
“This was one of the most important parts of our change, because it allowed us to use more specific verbiage in our communications. This change gave us the opportunity to speak with digital subscribers about the digital product and benefits, while simultaneously allowing us to speak about delivery and the physical newspaper with our print subscribers.”
