You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #45 sent out on August 21st, 2024. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
In today's newsletter:
- Getting young readers to subscribe means changing how we define journalism
- Increasing acquisition with introductory offers – the experience of Scientific American
- The check-list for your unsubscription journey, with benchmarks from top publishers
- How do you decide which articles are free vs premium?
- To add to your reading list
Getting young people to subscribe means changing how we define journalism
One of the greatest disconnects that we see in the news today is that we're losing younger generations. Just look at Thomson Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 for instance, which shows that since 2008 online news sites have lost 50% of their youngest audiences, while the older demographics have remained fairly stable.
Of course, it's easy to conclude that this is because young demographics don't care about the news and just want to spend their time on TikTok. But according to Thomas Baekdal, this thinking is wrong – in fact, it's the youngest demographics who are the most active & worried about what's happening in the world
So why is it that the demographic who care and are the most active are the ones moving away from newspapers?
Maybe this illustrates that journalism needs to adapt…
Today, information is everywhere. Young readers are inundated by it.
They don't need journalists to tell them what different people are saying. Instead, younger demographics require a higher level of journalism. They require newspapers to figure out what the issues are and to put the effort and expertise into investigating this news, rather than just reporting on it.
Zetland is a great example of this in practice and, as a result, 65% of their readers are below 45.
> Thomas' article on The Audiencers is definitely worth a read
The impact of introductory subscription offers at Scientific American
76% of consumers say they're more likely to subscribe if a free trial is offered.
Over the past 2-3 years, news media subscription leaders like the NYT and Die Zeit have extolled the importance of these types of offers in expanding their subscriber bases. And, in April 2023, Scientific American developed a similar strategy, seeing promotional offers as a valuable opportunity to rapidly grow subscriptions.
The result of introducing promotional offers
> Close to 60% of the first trial cohorts converted to full priced subs
> The trials have positively impacted Scientific American's digital subscription growth: in April 2024, digital subscriber volume was up 25% from April 2023. Year to date, promotional offers have been the source of 41% of total digital ecommerce production
> 35%-40% of promotion subscribers disable auto renewal in their account before their renewal date, when they'd start paying a full price annual digital subscription.
Next steps: they're now testing $1 for 60 days of digital access and trying to answer questions like how to optimize ongoing use of trials to fuel growth and long term retention
> And the full story from Scientific American's Christopher Monello-Johnson here
The check-list for your unsubscription journey
After spending much of the past few weeks benchmarking subscription models, here are some of the most common steps in publisher's unsubscription journey that you should consider integrating into your funnel, with the goal of…
1) retaining as many subscribers as possible
2) not harming potential future re-subscription if they do churn
> Highlight the value loss
> Understand why a subscriber would like to cancel, but only if you're going to do something with this information (either within your team to improve subscriptions, or to personalize the user's unsubscription experience)
> Consider offering an alternative price or subscription offer, especially if “cost” or “don't have time” were the reasons why the subscriber wished to cancel
FT takes this moment to promote their lighter subscription offer
> Confirm cancellation, be clear on when they'll lose access, offer support and provide the opportunity to reactivate subscription
In summary: it's about finding a balance between being fair, making unsubscription accessible and not frustrating the reader, whilst also encouraging them to reconsider their decision and the value that cancelling means they'll miss out on.
If you're interested in unsubscription (and can't wait for my future benchmarks!) check out this article on the 3-clicks-to-cancel regulations.
How do you decide which articles are free vs premium?
It's a very common question we get here at The Audiencers and Poool, but unfortunately (like many things), there's no single magic formula reply that we can give you.
We can, however, tell you how to find it.
We've teamed up with Atlas to build an informed reply to this question, with benchmarks, KPIs and tests to find the optimal balance between free and premium on your own site. But we need your help!
If you can share just 5 minutes of your time, we've created a questionnaire to hear about your own experience and strategy around deciding which content is free or premium. The questionnaire is aimed at publishing professionals working at a media title with a digital subscription model. It'll only take a few minutes to reply to the questions, and it'll directly benefit you when we publish the analysis!
> You can complete the questionnaire here. Thank you very much for your help!
To add to your reading list
- 72k subscribers helping cover 70% costs of Denník N's 130-journalist newsroom
- How Axel Springer optimizes subscription pricing
- The Atlantic: bringing more value to readers and subscribers through our mobile app
I'm also excited to be speaking at Revenue Europe event in Berlin on October 1st. As usual, I'll be talking about subs, sharing some of the innovative strategies being employed by publishers around the world to better monetize their audience
My goal: for you to leave armed with the solutions to your audience conversion challenges, to feel inspired to test new strategies and to have a better idea of how others in the market are performing (did someone say exclusive benchmarks?!)
Registration is still open, it'd be great to see you there! And Berlin friends, drop me a message:)
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