You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #49 sent out on October 16th, 2024. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
The Audiencers’ 2nd Birthday
You might have seen the news that we celebrated our 2nd Birthday last week! 🥳 It’s been a whirlwind since the launch of The Audiencers, with 400 published articles, 49 newsletters, 7 Festivals around the world (and in 3 languages I might add) and most importantly an incredible community of 5,000+ “Audiencers” coming together to better engage, convert & retain their readers.
So, to celebrate this journey and the wonderful Audiencers’ community turning 2, and take our content strategy to the next level, we’re launching The Audiencers’ Collections:
Your library of frameworks, case studies, benchmarks and best practices to build a solid reader revenue model, covering everything from getting started with subscriptions, to continuous optimizations, life-time value and retention strategies.
Whilst some of these articles are available to all, many will be reserved for Poool clients, to provide them with both the tools & expertise to master their reader revenue model. If you’d like to hear more about Poool, drop me an email (or reply to this newsletter).
And now onto today’s newsletter:
- If you were to only read one of our new Collections, it should be -> How to implement user needs in your newsroom (open to all)
- Mastering the youth-friendly engagement funnel
- Media Time: the metric for driving conversions and preventing churn
- AI at Russmedia: enhancing human creativity
- Articles to add to your reading list
How to implement user needs in your newsroom
Media organisations need to become more audience-informed. And many are.
- The future of our industry lies in the value we provide to people. Creating that value is grounded in journalism that addresses the needs of people.
- This has become widely accepted within our industry over the past few years.
- Now, we’re at the phase of: “okay, how do we become more audiences-informed”.
The user needs model is one way for media organisations to become more audience-informed.
- User needs is a model that provides us with a set of needs that most people have when they’re consuming news content.
- It is not about telling the newsroom what it should or should not cover. It merely acts as a guide to do a story from an angle the audience values.
- The model captures people’s needs to: know what’s happening; understand what’s happening; be entertained or inspired; do something.
Khalil A. Cassimally, advocate for more audiences-informed approaches in the media industry and audience development expert, has built a free 6-week newsletter programme to kick start your user needs work, with actionable insights, frameworks, templates, and more.
> Subscribe here to get started today.
Mastering the youth-friendly engagement funnel
According to Vogue Business, the classic consumer funnel was built for the old world, and Gen Z doesn’t live there anymore. Consumption today is an infinite loop of inspiration, exploration, community and loyalty.
Specifically, we’re shifting from a linear model to a more dynamic, engaging approach that reflects the ways Gen Z and Gen Alpha interact with content, one that starts from a belonging perspective.
Which is why Danuta Bregula & Liesbeth Nizet, authors of the Youthquake and stuff newsletter, created an alternative, youth-friendly engagement funnel for media brands…
For instance, think about how successful news brands execute the stages (1) Inspiration and (2) Excitement: they put the personalities of their journalists and columnists first (meaning short video “commentary” formats) because they recognize that community needs a face.
> An article to read on The Audiencers, and a newsletter to subscribe to if you’re looking to engage younger readers.
Media Time: the metric for driving conversions and preventing churn
The list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for newsrooms and audience teams is never ending – conversions, reach, active users, clicks, etc – which often leads to a lack of focus or understanding of which KPI is best for achieving reader revenue goals.
At the German DRIVE Initiative, made up of >30 regional news publishers, data has proven Media Time is the most valuable KPI for driving conversions and preventing churn.
Media Time is defined as the total time a user gives you on your website or app. It’s particularly useful for publishers, as it:
- Contains various other metrics (no. of visits, session length, correlates with no. of articles read…)
- It can be analyzed at user level, article level, departmental level, etc.
- It’s easy to understand for editors and analysts
And, as you can probably guess, Media Time differs significantly amongst readers…
When applied to subscriber acquisition and retention strategies, this metric can be incredibly powerful – research has proven that Media Time can predict conversion and churn very well:
> Conversion probability increases by 130 times if the media time increases by 10 minutes per week.
> Churn probability is halved if the media time increases by 10 minutes per week.
> More on DRIVE’s study & recommendations on The Audiencers’ Collections (reserved for Poool clients)
AI at Russmedia: enhancing human creativity
One of the big concerns around AI is that it’s going to replace jobs. But for Georg Burtscher, Managing Director at Russmedia, the focus is very much on the inverse – that, in fact, human creative input is essential.
“Our AI initiative isn’t about replacing jobs. We’re using AI to augment human skills and free up employees for more complex tasks, new ideas and innovative projects.”
During my recent trip to Berlin, Georg shared 4 essentials for success in implementing AI whilst ensuring focus is on the employee:
1. Tool selection: a dedicated team evaluates and recommends AI tools for company use.
2. Employee acceptance: open communication and training addressed skepticism and job security concerns.
3. Clear guidance: two-page company guidelines provide clear direction on AI usage and data handling.
4. Go step-by-step: AI projects are categorized by 2 key metrics, impact and implementation complexity. The ideal scenario is high impact and low complexity, representing low-hanging fruit for immediate implementation. This categorization helps to prioritize projects and allows them to proceed gradually and effectively.
Should this article be free or premium?
There’s no magic, one-size-fits-all reply, we we can certainly help you find the answer! 🚀
Join Jennifer de Ruyter, Senior Manager of Customer Operations, at Mather Economics, and myself on October 30th to learn how to build a successful subscription model with smarter, more dynamic content-blocking decisions.
You can expect to learn about:
– The evolution of paywall models
– Leveraging content and audience insights to boost conversions
– Real-world examples with actionable takeaways to enhance your strategy
Save your spot just here
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