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You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #33, sent out on March 6th, 2023. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
In today's newsletter:
- How Brazil's Globo measures audience engagement across its portfolio
- Increasing ad revenue through registration: the case of the leading French free publication, 20 Minutes, who doubled registrations through implementing a wall into content and the comment section
- The Guardian launches a “Most deeply read” section, alongside the “Most read” section
- From newsletters to predicting possible cancellation: tactics to reduce churn from The Audiencers' Festival Madrid
- Content to add to your reading list
How Brazil's Globo measures audience engagement across its portfolio
Unfortunately, there's no single way to measure engagement that will work for every publisher & their unique audience…
For Brazil's Globo, one of the most influential media and technology organizations in Brazil, traditional engagement segments lacked the necessary metrics to capture the complex relationship between a consumer and their varied portfolio of products.
So, the Digital Products and Paid Channels team initiated a project to develop a new framework that could accurately measure the level of attention and user retention across the portfolio.
> The primary goal: devise a metric that was not only interpretable but also actionable and correlated with primary indicators of success, such as monetization
> The first step: a comprehensive evaluation of what could be considered as consumption. To be more precise, what frequency of consumption is necessary for a user to be classified as ‘engaged'?
“This understanding was particularly crucial given that our products didn't have formal contractual relations with consumers. The vast number of digital products available can result in diluted consumer attention.
Consequently, the first step involved establishing a structured user life cycle, meticulously identifying the various behaviors exhibited at each stage of their journey:
Daniel Loureiro and the data team at Grupo Globo share the details of this ‘engagement metric' project in the latest article on The Audiencers.
Registration for increasing ad revenue
Converting anonymous visitors to known readers has already been recognized as an essential goal for publishers in 2024.
Not only to increase propensity to subscribe, but also for publishers monetizing from advertising alone, like the French leading free newspaper, 20 Minutes.
We spoke to Head of Data and Engagement, Constance Martina, who shared that logged users spend 2 times more time on page compared to anonymous readers and have 4 times higher page views. Given that 20 Minutes monetizes each page through advertising, it's easy to see the importance of a strong registration model!
However, despite offering registration through a variety of channels across site (e.g. access to certain UX features such as saving content for later), the number of accounts created reached a plateau and a new strategy was needed to reignite conversion rates… thus the move to a registration wall model in March 2023.
Even a soft, metered registration model, blocking after 5 articles to balance frustration and engagement, has allowed 20 Minutes to double their registered user base.
The Guardian launches “Deeply read” section
From newsletters to predicting possible cancellation: tactics to reduce churn
During The Audiencers' Festival in Madrid several media professionals revealed their strategies for retaining subscribers and reducing churn.
> Offer other products such as newsletters to enhance your value proposition
Continuously reminding readers of the value of subscription is essential to brand loyalty. That's how it's always been. And one of the simplest but most effective ways to achieve this is through newsletters.
- Subscribers to El Pais who receive one of the editorial newsletters have 22% lower churn rates, whilst those receiving a subscriber-only newsletter have 29% less churn
- At El Confidencial, subscribers who sign up for any of the newsletters have a 15% higher renewal rate than those who do not receive any newsletters
- Whilst at La Vanguardia, churn of subscribers who read a newsletter is almost 50% lower than others…
But commenters on LinkedIn reminded us that this is potentially a “chicken or egg” situation – Do the more loyal subscribers, who are less likely to churn, have a greater tendency to subscribe to newsletters? Or is it the newsletters that cause an increase in loyalty?
> Apply cancellation propensity models
Unidad Editorial employs a propensity model that expertly predicts the likelihood of that a subscriber will churn, implementing adapted retention strategies. According to the company's estimates, their powerful formula, which identifies both risk and reason, has impressively cut churn by 25% in a mere three months.
> Develop a dynamic pricing plan
“I believe that in the future the market has to evolve towards more sophisticated models, as airlines do for example, in which pricing is based on exhaustive knowledge of the user that a publisher gains through first party data. With this, dynamic pricing offers can be made based on propensity not only for conversion but also to increase ARPU. This variable pricing strategy will have to take into account not only subscription revenue, but also advertising revenue per user, as Netflix is currently doing.”
Pepe Cerezo, independent consultor and moderator at The Audiencers' Festival
> Full article on The Audiencers
Content to add to your reading list:
- How we introduced group subscriptions at The Atlantic
- The Telegraph's Michelle Brister: Why bridge roles are essential in media organisations
- Bloomberg: How We're Keeping Our Audience First by Creating a Homepage Designed for Them
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