Editorial, product, marketing… Bridge roles, squads, mission teams, forums, stakeholders… Acquisition, conversion, retention… There's certainly a lot to consider when organizing your teams. And with digital transformation comes to the need to reconsider siloed teams to ensure everyone's working together, cross-functionally (yes, we're talking to you editorial!) towards new goals, including acquiring and retaining subscribers rather than simply searching for clicks.
To help benchmark how other publishers are organizing their reader revenue teams, we spoke to 5 publishers on their team structure, KPIs and how this links to their overarching business model.
Le Figaro
Laurent Suply, from Le Figaro, shared that their team is divided into two divisions. The ‘Content side' team works on the tools used to publish and distribute all types of article (whether editorial or advertising). Their role is to generate an audience.
Alongside this is a ‘Reader side' team. They work on converting anonymous users into paying subscribers, and includes the classic marketing teams, as well as Data and Product Management.
DIE ZEIT
Jannick Weißel, Director of Marketing, builds his teams based on steps in the funnel – Reach, Acquisition, Retention and Upsell. Each team includes a representative from the more traditional teams – Marketing, Data, Editorial and Product.
These Mission Teams meet every second week to share ideas and build a priority list with the biggest projects that need collaborative thinking to generate more business success.
This priority list is then presented to a so-called advisory board (members of the management board) every 3-4 months in order to align on the most important strategic cross-functional projects.
Clarín
According to the book “Clarín, updated” by Ismael Nafria, the editorial team at Clarín is divided into 4 areas, with an editor-in-chief for each. 3 of these have the primary goal of creating content for registration and subscription (both acquisition and retention) whilst the 4th works on content to attract the biggest possible audience.
- Politics, Economy, World and print
- Society, Sports, Shows and Zones
- Loyalty: “sections with high impact on subscribers whose contents are not linked to urgent news”
- Mass audience: includes breaking news, SEO, social networks, cover art, video and photography, among other sections
According to the chief editor, Ricardo Kirschbaum, this revised working structure helps them pursue the goal of “increasing the quality and originality of their publication”.
> Ismael dives deeper into this topic in his article, “Decisive notes” – The articles that convert for Argentina's Clarín
Gonzalo Abascal, the secretary general of editorial, completed this with information on how these teams link to subscription teams
- The Product Owner (PO) is in a bridge role, in charge of communicating to the stake holders the developments that have been made, those that are ongoing and those to come. Their priority is the product roadmap for digital subscriptions, accompanied by the Scrum Master and IT/UX development
- Each development or improvement has its own KPIs. But at a general level, each area has quarterly, half-yearly and annual objectives. Among which there are minimum, average and maximum targets and these are related to: Number of users registered on the site; Number of users browsing logged in; Number of new subscribers; Number of subscribers browsing logged in; % churn of subscriptions; Revenue per registered user (non-subscriber) and revenue per subscriber; Total revenue from subscriptions; etc.
- Squads are generated to address certain developments or issues. For example: if you want to develop a new functionality in the news site, you create a squad in which the PO, after an analysis with the BI team, prioritizes the task and the UX team together with IT, develop the required functionality and launch it to production as quickly as possible. Then the main KPIs and feedback from users who used the new functionality are evaluated through NPS measurements.
Berlingske
The Danish current affairs publisher is composed of 4 titles – Berlingske, B.T., Weedkendavisen and Euroinvestor – but with only a single marketing, advertising and IT team across the 4. In terms of reader revenue teams, all editorial, audience and IT staff now work in the same room to create physical connections and ideas sharing.
Audience heads regularly meet with editorial heads, analytics specialists and product managers from each title to identify where solutions can be scaled across the organization, focusing on what drives traffic and registration.
FAZ
In 2021, the FAZ merged two teams: Product, with 30 employees, and the Reader Revenue Marketing side, with over 50 employees. Together they now form the “Product + Sales” department.
Why this makes sense can be seen very clearly when looking at the paywall. It's part of the product and must be technically integrated in the right places for the right user segments. At the same time it is the most important sales point for paid content, i.e. the messages must be right and the purchasing process must be as convenient as possible.
The new structure breaks down silos and improves communication between the different teams. It also clarifies the goals and responsibilities of everyone involved.
Another advantage is that it avoids duplicate structures; where developers, UX designers or data teams used to be in two separate departments, they are now one common unit.
Missions along the customer journey
The department is organized in a matrix structure that is aligned along the user journey. They distinguish between seven phases that differ in customer value: Prospect, Lead, New Customer, Customer, Customer at Rist, Churn and Win-Back.
Four teams are responsible for the phases, each responsible for different missions. Depending on the mission, the teams then focus on different touch-points with the users that are most important for the respective goal.
- The “Audience Development” mission is there to increase reach and convert visitors into leads. Accordingly, they focus on external channels (SEO, social media, advertising, …) and low-threshold offers for which users provide an email address (newsletters, games, …)
- The “Subscription+Win Back” mission then turns these prospects and leads into new customers and tries to build habits during onboarding. The goal is not to convert users into subscribers, but to get active subscribers after 90 days. This creates incentives to acquire the “right” customers who potentially have a high lifetime value, rather than to use price campaigns to attract large numbers of customers who then cancel immediately. This team is responsible for paywall and checkout optimization, as well as email and performance marketing and the subscription shop. It is also the largest of the three teams.
- The same team also takes over later in the funnel when it comes to recovering canceled customers, because similar actions play a role there as when acquiring new customers (but perhaps with a more targeted approach and optimized offers).
- The “Engagement” mission is to inspire and retain customers. This begins at onboarding, where they overlap with the subscription team, but the focus is on subscribers who are at risk of canceling and those who are currently in the process of canceling. They work with all the mechanisms that encourage use of the various offers, identify subscribers at risk using churn scores and create exclusive benefits.
- In addition to these missions along the user journey, there is also the “Partnerships” mission, which is responsible for cooperation, e-commerce and retail sales.
> Read more about FAZ's organizational structure on Lennart Schneider's site, Subscribe Now
Le Parisien
At the Parisien.fr, teams are organized into 3 squads:
- Audience: with KPIs being visits to news content, visits to non-news and log-in rate
- Subscription: KPIs are conversion rate and number of subscribers
- Revenue: focusing on e-commerce and developing CA
The “Apps” squad lies across the audience and subscription teams.
Interested in sharing your team's organization? Or have further questions for our interviewees? Add a comment below or contact [email protected]
