KEY INSIGHTS

MULTIPLE CONVERSION STRATEGIES

The New Yorker has used multiple strategies to drive subscriptions: Newsletters (17 of them!), niche topic coverage (politics, business, food), personalised subscription pitches, and targeting affinity groups on Facebook and Google with paid posts and paid search keywords to get their content in front of potentially new audiences. FIPP

PERSONALISED PAYWALLS

To meet its four-year goal of hitting three million global subscribers, The Wall Street Journal spent four years building a paywall based on a machine learning algorithm that measures reader activity across 60 variables and then adapts the wall to each reader's behaviour, delivering a free-story limit only in the areas of their interests. FIPP

SUBSCRIPTION FATIGUE?

Recent research has raised the concern that there are “potential limitations for the market with terms like subscription fatigue entering the industry lexicon alongside suggestions that the market for news and magazine media digital subscriptions is nearing a saturation point”. FIPP

NICHES LOOK GOOD

“Niche and specialist publications, as well as those with a marquee brand and a large base of potential subscribers to tap into, may well be best placed to ride the subscription storm.” — Damian Radcliffe, journalism professor/Univ. of Oregon, writing in WhatsNewInPublishing

REGISTRATION WALLS DRIVE CONVERSIONS

“Recently we have seen more and more publishers adding a new step to their subscription journeys: the registration wall. One reason is to better understand your audience and create more detailed user profiles. With this deeper understanding of readers' behaviours, publishers can convert them into paying subscribers. Piano's research found that the average conversion rate of registered users is 10x that of anonymous visitors, thanks in part to such tools.” TwipeMobile.com

REALLY, REALLY TIGHT PAYWALLS

“We know one of the common paywall mistakes is that simply not enough readers ever see the paywall. Industry-wide, the most successful paywall strategies aim to reach 5-10% of readers per month, as these are the most engaged readers who are in turn most likely to subscribe. In the past few years, we've seen the number of free stories/ month drop dramatically from 13 in 2012 to today's average of five. Some publishers like The Boston Globe are going even tighter, reducing from five stories over 45 days to just two!” TwipeMobile.com

FEWER PEOPLE PAYING MORE

“B2B publishers are increasingly moving from selling individual subscriptions to creating more tailored packages for large enterprises. Melcrum, which serves the internal communications community, concentrated on its few hundred best customers and developed packages of condensed content and personalised advice, including best practice insights, practical guides, strategic tools, training programmes and access to a professional network. Melcrum went from thousands of subscribers at $500/year each to having a few hundred members at $30-50k each.” WhatsNewInPublishing

CANNIBALISATION?

“The first argument against launching a new subscription vertical product is the fear of cannibalisation. Will full-subscribers who had previously been paying for the entire product downgrade to only paying for the subscription vertical content? The counter argument is that the alternative is actually churning entirely.

If a subscriber is looking to downgrade their subscription, isn't it better to at least retain them as a subscriber with the vertical than to lose them as a subscriber completely.” Folio