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This week, we hear from Jo Holdaway, Chief Data and Marketing Officer at Independent Digital News & Media – home of The Independent and The Evening Standard. She talks about what sort of data is important to publishers, especially when it comes to subscription strategies, why it’s important to have a diverse team working with data, and how she’s preparing the business for the sunsetting of third-party cookies.
In the news round up, Peter and Esther are joined by guest host Adam Tinworth of OneMan&HisBlog to dissect the findings of the latest Reuters Digital News Report 2021. We look at how people prefer to access news, which existing trends have been accelerated by the pandemic, and whether a brief bounce-back in trust can be sustained.
Here are some highlights:
The benefits of an integrated data team
I think we’re quite unique in our setup. So we’ve always had editors that have been very commercially astute. There’s not really been that church and state operations in The Independent particularly. So we’ve always had commercially astute editors, and that just makes the whole thing much easier. So obviously, each side respects the other enormously.
But what helps is data facilitating that relationship a little bit more. We’ve always been quite lucky with that. And it’s quite uncommon to have that close relationship in publishing.
The centralised model works really well, because it’s really important for analysts to have support, and to have like minded people that they know that they can talk to; a cross fertilisation of ideas, and because it enables us to have an overview of how the whole business works.
Data is the heart of everything, whether it’s finance, or editorial, or commercial, or product, it just gives us a unique perspective over what our output could be and how it could affect the business.
Evolving a subscription product
In 2018, we launched a more popular subscription product, Independent Premium. What we were doing then is really experimenting in the subs space. And what we’ve found, and what hopefully I’ve driven, is a change of how we approach this.
So it’s now a serious reader revenue stream. It’s contributing nicely to diversification of our commercial strategy. But we’re still in early days. So last year, we really concentrated on setting up a solid foundation for subscription success in the future.
We had a transformational change in our culture, and our attitude to subscriptions, because before it was very much a marketing focus and responsibility. And it’s like, actually no, accountability for this revenue stream crosses multi-disciplines. So any team who contributes to this revenue stream, whether it’s editorial, or product, or data, or finance, CRM, etc, all need to have a stake in it.
So we’ve now got multidisciplinary task forces across the business. And it also meant building a really strong team with experience.
How the Google News Initiative’s Subscriptions Labs has helped shaped future strategy
Ultimately, it all comes back to the quality of the editorial and the value exchange with readers. So we’re hoping at the end of this fiscal, we’ll be in a position to be able to offer the business, ‘Okay, here are your choices. Depending on the level of content and the quality and mix of content you want to put behind the paywall, this is what we think we can give you as a return,’ because we balance our subs revenues with advertising. That still accounts for 65% of our revenues.
So we can balance that quite nicely because we look at segmentation – we only offer subscriptions to individuals, we think we’re on the cusp of subscribing. And because we segment our audience so heavily, it doesn’t affect the advertising revenue model, particularly the ads. The articles that we know do really well behind the paywall are not those that are necessarily driving the scale for ad monetization.
So it’s been a real learning curve over 2021. And we now think we’re in a position to really take control of the subscriptions space.
Preparing for the sunsetting of third-party cookies
After taking note of our own first-party data progression, the main thing that we’ve done is to have the thought of, we want to widen our opportunity, we want to make sure that our inventory is available to buyers, how they want to buy it.
We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket and go for one approach post third-party cookie blocking and then go, ‘Oh, well, that didn’t work.’ Put the whole revenue at risk.
It’s reminding me of when GDPR launched and everyone was milling around panicking without making definitive decisions, and it was all a bit of mess. So we’ve engaged with as wide a partner portfolio as possible.
