TLDR: 
- Engagement elements, such as commenting, as well as soft conversion steps like newsletter sign-up and registration are essential for publishers to move anonymous visitors through the funnel towards subscription
- Registration can, however, also be incredibly valuable for revenue diversification given that desanonymization allows for targeted advertising spots
- For this audience-focused approach to be a success, you should place ARPU as your north star KPI

What engagement actions are the most effective in increasing the value of each individual reader, or ARPU (average revenue per user)?

First, note that moving readers through the conversion funnel increases ARPU. Why? Because, at each stage of the funnel, we see the metrics that drive monetization increase:

• Page Views (PVs)

• RFV engagement metrics: Recency, Frequency, Page Volume.

The graph below shows the key stages of engagement according to user status, revenue generated by each… and audience size.

1. From anonymous to registered

When looking to drive up the average revenue per user (ARPU), the first step is to move the reader from Anonymous through to Registered. This is a fairly large leap, especially given that up to 90% of your audience only visit once a month (Poool data).

What can you do to make this step more accessible?

A) First, engage with your anonymous audience so that they’re ready to register

Engaged members are users that, although remaining anonymous, are now interacting with engagement elements across the site, spending more time on site and becoming increasingly more loyal to your brand. Viafoura data suggests that readers who interact with your engagement features are 51x times more likely to register than an unengaged user (Viafoura data).

How do you engage this audience? Make your community discoverable. 

Place discoverability elements in areas that readers are familiar with: 

• Integrate comment counts into the byline of the article header on both homepage topic pages and article pages
• Add a sharebar onto the sides of articles
• Add a mid-article unit to draw attention to your community, highlighting community opinions and sparking curiosity through polls
• Consider a notification bell in the top right corner of the sticky header to alert readers of a new comment or article

Top tip to make the most of your notification bell:

• For push notifications, preload at least one notification onto the bell to increase engagement from the moment a user arrives onsite. Large Canadian publishers saw a 30% lift in active conversations attributed directly to the bell.
• Use the notification bell to drive users to a live event such as an “Ask-Me-Anything (AMA)”

B) Second, use a dynamic registration wall to adapt your strategy to your users

Publishers can present dynamic registration walls that are adapted to an anonymous user’s behavior, factoring in their average dwell time and their Recency, Frequency and Volume (RFV) score.

So, even without knowing the users, just understanding the reader’s behavior onsite and having their time in comments as a factor in that propensity score can significantly drive registrations.

Case study example: ELLE Magazine

When launching their digital subscription strategy, ELLE Magazine chose to increase engagement through a registration wall, offered as a first step in the conversion journey prior to the paywall.

This model not only reduced the risks of launching a premium model but also allowed for first-party data collection, targeted advertising and increased subscriber conversion rates by 10x.

2. From registered to subscribed

A) Increasing propensity to subscribe

At the point of registration the user has a custom reader ID, and any data collected prior to this point now becomes tied and identified to the single user. This gives you a hugely valuable opportunity to personalize the user experience, and build dynamic journeys based on their profile or context. However, it’s also essential to ensure that these members remain engaged so that they will continue to increase in propensity to subscribe.

How do you achieve this? Ask users to provide user generated content (UGC).

UGC contributors are critical to driving subscriptions, revenue, and retention. One way to drive your registered users to create UGC is to use the notification bell, letting a commenter know when other users are interacting with their content, when new content is published, when their own UGC has been featured in an “Engagement Starter” unit (mid-article unit) or when they have received a badge. 

B) Increasing readers’ ARPU with targeted ads

De-anonymization supports both advertising and subscription revenue streams. Thanks to the first-party data collected during registration, publishers can sell advertising spots at a higher cost, whilst simultaneously presenting users with ads that are more suited to their interests. Trade Desk, for instance, found the following ad revenue increase (CPM) that a publisher can expect with first-party data. 

Conclusion: placing ARPU as your north star KPI

Subscription is the end goal. However, a great deal of work is required prior to the paywall to increase profitability of non-subscribers as well as their propensity to subscribe in the future. Registered users are indeed far more likely to become a subscriber. For instance, at The Independent, registered users are 45 times more likely to subscribe.

Collecting first-party data through declarative data, offered at the point of registration, as well as engagement, interest, and sentiment data at every point of the user’s online journey (progressive profiling), enables publishers to build engaged and thriving online communities.

We’d therefore recommend placing ARPU as your north star KPI, ensuring all teams are aligned and working collaboratively to move users through the value stages of the funnel towards newsletter sign up, registration, subscription and beyond.

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What we learnt from the event:
- How inhouse structure impacts subscription growth 
- What framework proved efficient for publisher’s sustainable subscription model
- How experimenting helps you learn faster
- How engagement is at the core of subscription

With 1,163 participants from 89 countries around the world, last week’s INMA town hall event was the world’s largest annual event covering news media subscriptions. 

The conference started well with optimists setting the trend. When asked about their confidence in the future of subscription growth, the vast majority of attendees answered positively:

• 54% expected a slow down in the subscription growth for 6-12 months but were confident in future recovery

• 39% were optimistic and believed they will grow the same or faster than before

• Only 7% were pessimistic, expecting a long-term negative impact and recession

So, what are the keys to a striving subscription economy, despite the rising costs of living, inflation and global crisis? 

Here are our main takeaways from the conference:

1. Planning strategically for high-performing digital subscriptions: structure, accountability and a way of measuring success

It’s not just another framework. 

FT Strategies’ Principal Consultant, Daisy Donald, and Senior Manager, Tim Part, underlined the necessity to have a north star to organize for subscriptions growth.

This should involve a 3-4 year vision for your digital subscription strategy. Defined with a clear framework: long term perspective and target results should be identified by management, while cross functional teams and collaboration are essential to achieve the said outcomes. 

This means that the success of digital subscriptions largely hangs on how you structure your team. FT Strategies recommends a Subscriptions Council team, a Mission Control and finally an Experiment Team. While the Subscriptions Council defines the North star goals, the Mission Control team is prioritizing hypotheses, building the experiment teams and reporting on progress to the wider business. The Experiment team is the one implementing the experiments, proposing new opportunity areas and passing on data insights to the Mission Control. 

Of course, this isn’t as easy in smaller teams where human resources are limited, but what matters is how your time is structured and who takes the lead on each of the 3 areas above. 

Accountability is key and so is defining your metrics for success.

2. The three pillars of economic sustainability and moving our focus to what doesn’t change

An FT Strategies study on more than 450 news media outlets worldwide revealed that financial sustainability for publishers can be broken down into three main pillars:  

• A differentiated product, i.e the ability to provide value, both in terms of innovation and stable elements amid transformations
• A sound business model 
• Fundamentals, for instance skills to test and learn, or a favorable market context.

We hear people talk about transformation all the time. For good reason. However, Managing Director of News and Books Partnerships EMEA at Google, Sulina Connal, recommended we focus on what doesn’t change, taking the example of Google search. 

In terms of information, Google Search is still looking for the same core signals: relevance in terms of language, location and expertise. This matches audience expectations: when looking for information, people continue to search for trusted sources and valuable information. And it’s this that should be at the core of your strategy.

3. Developing a culture of experimentation: the example of the Irish Times

Launching their digital subscription model back in 2015, The Irish Times has made use of a metered strategy to gather over 130K subscribers. According to Subscriptions and Reader Insights Director, Cliona Mooney, this is partly thanks to their culture of experimentation.

One of their experiments aimed at targeting a location-based audience; specifically, Irish readers in London.

Why this target audience? It represents a significant business opportunity as over 370K Irish nationals currently live in London

How were these tests put in practice? Eight “Irish in London” articles were published along with eight control articles over a 4-week period.

The result? 

• Promoting London articles to London readers is more than twice as efficient as promoting non-London articles.
• Spike in overall London readership during the experiment.

The aim was to present these London readers with relevant content and engage them enough to ultimately convert them into subscribers. Although it’s too early to clearly evaluate conversion results, the 4-week trial has seen their London readership grow, something that will hopefully pay off in the future in terms of reader revenue.

NB: The spike in readership on the week of the 12th of September (prior to the London experiment) corresponds to the death of the Queen.

These tests also resulted in internal changes: the culture at the Irish Times has evolved to encourage continuous testing, helping teams to learn faster.

4. Diversifying audiences: the need for inhouse changes

Cordula Schmitz, Deputy Editor-In-Chief of the German regional outlet, The Hamburger Abendblatt, shared that they’re currently working to reach younger audiences, around the 35-55 mark.

Her advice on where to start? Change the publisher’s internal structure. By rethinking how departments are organized and run, they reshape the product being produced and can attract a new audience. 

For instance, some publishers at the event mentioned redefining the relationship between journalists and marketers with the goal of integrating more data into editorial planning. Measuring engagement (including scroll depth for instance) came up as a key metric to understand the perceived value of content, thus influencing editors on future content production.

For FT, however, it’s not just about internal restructuring, but also product adaptations. For instance, to attract younger audiences, they’re working on a premium offer with a lower price point to entice students who wouldn’t normally be able to afford a subscription. 

Find the full event replay here.