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It’s something all publishers are grappling with: how to best optimize your paywall strategy? After all, 47% of new subscribers report that running out of free articles prompted them to subscribe. This week we have lessons from three innovative publishers*: The Times & The Sunday Times, Mittmedia, and Le Monde.
Don’t be afraid of a hard paywall
Often head of the curve, The Times was the first
“It amazes me that people give away everything digitally and still expect people to pay for the newspaper.” – Alan Hunter, Head of Digital at The Times and The Sunday Times
To justify the paywall, The Times and The Sunday Times don’t chase breaking news as they know their readers are most interested in their in-depth analysis. This comes from a 2016 switch to an edition-based approach; in the first year they saw massive growth with users of the paid-for mobile app up 30% and the average number of pageviews up 300%.
This return to edition-based publishing has meant that the view of The Times and The Sunday Times as an authoritative voice has been strengthened. During the Westminster attack last year, The Times and The Sunday Times resisted sending breaking-news updates as other British dailies did (and which were sometimes misreported). Instead, they focused on providing a deeper analysis, something their readers have come to rely on them for. This reporting strategy led to a record day for smartphone traffic, making it clear that readers value the distinctive voice – and are willing to pay for it.
Understand which articles are the most valuable
In 2014 when Mittmedia, Sweden’s leading local media company, first launched their digital subscription initiative, they had the goal of putting 50% of their published articles behind the paywall. But the team wasn’t really committed in the beginning, it was more of a strategy to protect the print revenue, as they had just raised their subscription prices and were afraid to lose print customers to the digital content. The articles they put behind the paywall ended up being the least read articles. Robin Govik, Chief Digital Officer, explains:
“The content that we put behind the paywall was our worst content. Content no one wanted to read. Not even the customers that had access to it. They preferred our free content. And that content was made with a data-driven focus to get pageviews. The content behind the paywall was the content that originated from the printed newspaper.” – Robin Govik, CDO at Mittmedia
From this, they learned that they had to view print and digital as two different products with very different
Mittmedia does this with their “Homeowners Bot“, which writes a short text on every house that is sold in their local markets, identifying an interesting angle (such as the most expensive house sold in the year) and adding an image from Google Streetview. This is a fully automated process, as the names of buyers are a matter of public record in Sweden. Not only has this bot created content generating several hundred new paying subscribers
In all, Mittmedia has seen great growth, with the number of digital-only customers growing steadily, increasing 82% in 2017.
Earlier this year, Mittmedia CEO Per Bowallius explained that this great influx of digital-only customers outweighed the loss of print customers, and actually increased the total number of paying customers in many of Mittmedia’s regions.
Adapt for the ad-blocking world
Every year we hear about the increasing number of readers using adblockers–the latest figures put it at 27% of all readers using adblockers globally, and this figure is as high as 42% in Greece and 34% in France. French daily Le Monde knew it needed to take action, so in 2016 it coordinated with other French publishers to ramp up its efforts against ad-blockers. 80% of the top 40 publishers in France took part in a nation-wide push to reduce the number of non-paying, adblocking readers.
Readers with adblockers enabled were confronted with a message asking them to either whitelist the
Mary-Katharine Phillips
Media innovation analyst, Twipe
(*You can hear Chris Duncan (The Times), Louis Dreyfus (Le Monde), and Robin Govik (Mittmedia) speak at the Digital Growth Summit in Rennes next month – registration closes TODAY).
This post originally appeared on Twipe’s blog. It is republished with kind permission.
Photo by Hin Bong Yeung on Unsplash