Guest Columns
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Google’s game-changing News Revenue Engine: The Media Roundup

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The News Revenue Engine aims to make it easier to support your favourite newsroom

Earlier this week, News Revenue Hub and Google News Initiative announced a new open-source product to help newsrooms with a technology that will make it easier to get support from readers. The product, called News Revenue Engine, will “make it easier than ever for mission-driven digital news outlets to steward and convert casual readers into sustaining donors.”

It’s essentially a set of marketing tools which make it really easy to ask for money from readers; something Google are calling a ‘contribution management system’. As more publishers turn to reader revenue, figuring out how to effectively monetise the 95% or so non-subscribers who visit sites will be the next big challenge (as the following article points out). A solution like this, baked into browsers and with the weight of the GNI behind it, could well yield some real results for publishers.

How news publishers are turning casual, infrequent readers into paying subscribers

The majority of subscribers will be light readers — and, as a new report from INMA argues, publishers should be segmenting and studying this audience. One happy statistic I particularly liked: publishers on average finished 2020 with 58% more online subscribers than they had at the end of 2019. But to sustain the growth, attention now needs to be turned to the drop-ins and skimmers.

This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here:

B2B without paywalls: how Industry Dive grew into $80m ‘journalism-first’ business

Industry Dive is expected to generate revenues of around $80m this year – well over double its 2019 figure – with a profit margin of roughly 30%. Press Gazette talks to CEO Sean Griffey about growth, the importance of a journalism-first approach for B2B, and covering ‘the heck’ out of industry trends.

Meet The Mini, the little puzzle that helped launch 930,000 subscriptions to New York Times Games

The Mini is a compact five-by-five daily crossword run by the New York Times. It’s free, easy to work (but not too easy) and is described as a ‘morning brain starter’ that can usually be solved in under two minutes. The game is one of the big stars of the NYT’s lucrative Games division, which has the million subscriber mark in its sights.

This week’s podcast:

The Information Reporter Kaya Yurieff on covering the sprawling creator economy

This week we hear from Kaya Yurieff, The Information’s Creator Economy Reporter. We talked about how she covers an industry that is so new and sprawling, some of the challenges of being a creator, and how it fits with The Information’s other coverage.

The Publisher Podcast Awards 2022 are now open for entries!

We’ve just opened entries for the third year of the Publisher Podcast Awards. The awards are designed to celebrate the podcasting success of publishers and media organisations, whether they’ve been in the podcasting space a while or have just launched their first one. Entry is free, so have a look at our categories and see if you’ve got anything that could be award-winning!

This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here: