DC Thomson is a family-owned publisher headquartered in Dundee, founded in 1905 and best known outside Scotland for the Beano. Its two regional dailies are the titles in this story: The Courier in Dundee and the Press and Journal in Aberdeen.
Graham McDougall is Head of Trading and Retention, responsible for pricing, packaging and offers across both titles and the wider portfolio. The company’s digital subscription launched in lockdown, grew by roughly 10,000 a year and last reported around 50,000 subscribers. One product inside that number is a digital-only Sports Pack, now £4.99 a month, built for readers who only wanted sport.
> Scottish publisher DC Thomson (The Courier in Dundee, the Press and Journal in Aberdeen) had one of its biggest content areas by engagement producing almost no subscriptions. Match reports and team news are commodity content any reader can find free within minutes > The fix was a digital-only Sports Pack cut from content already in the full pack. Nothing new was commissioned and editorial was not asked to change anything. It sells in-article at £1 for the first month then £4.99, and around 95% of sales happen there rather than on the subscribe page > Trial conversion and retention both beat the full pack. 15-20% of buyers upgrade, half of them within a month, and the rest stay on the cheaper pack. A reverse test settled the cannibalisation worry: offered both packs on the same sport articles, readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster > Exclusives did the converting. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the Press and Journal sent a reporter to his home country and nobody else had the story. The sports desks dropped Saturday match reports and Friday team news for what readers could not get elsewhere > No deep discounts anywhere. Every trial is one paid month, the price has risen from £3 to £4.99, and readers who try to cancel are offered an annual contract paid monthly rather than a percentage off. Graham McDougall, Head of Trading and Retention: "If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it's going to be a lot harder"
Sport had the audience but none of the subscriptions
Sport was one of the biggest content areas on The Courier and the Press and Journal, and readers spent a lot of time on it. Almost none of them subscribed to read it. McDougall boils this down to the fact that match reports and team news are commodity content: the clubs publish them, fan sites repeat them, and any reader can find them free within minutes.
“It was really good for engagement of subscribers, but wasn’t something that would convert users,” McDougall says.
Competition and reader feedback pushed DC Thomson to act. Football-only websites were appearing in Scotland, focused on the big Glasgow and Edinburgh clubs, with Aberdeen an obvious next stop. And viewers of Highland League Weekly, a highlights show for the north’s semi-professional league, kept saying that content was all they wanted. “We assumed that everybody would want their local news as well.”
Existing content, sold on its own
The Sports Pack is the sports section of the full digital pack. Nothing new was commissioned. “We just took what we had and tried to package it up in a way that our Potential subscribers were going to like.” Each title’s pack follows its audience: The Courier’s is football (Dundee, Dundee United, St Johnstone, Dunfermline); the Press and Journal’s adds the Highland League and shinty, a traditional Highland team sport similar to field hockey.
Sport readers buy through an in-article payment screen and rarely see the subscribe page. Around 95% of Sports Pack sales happen in-article, so the pack is often left off the subscribe page entirely; its three slots go to whatever needs volume that month.
Exclusive reporting made it grow
Once the pack showed sport readers would pay, growth came from exclusives. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the P&J sent a reporter to his home country to find out who he was. Nobody else had the story. “All of a sudden we started to see huge success,” McDougall says. “It started to teach the journalists what kind of content would really resonate, and what people would be willing to pay for.”
The sports desks stopped writing Saturday match reports and Friday team news, and started reporting what readers could not get elsewhere: youth players coming through, a different lens on the club. “It heroes the journalists. If they create great content, it will convert and retain subscribers.”
It retains better than the full pack, and most buyers never upgrade
Trial conversion and retention are both significantly better on the Sports Pack than on DC Thomson’s other products. Drop-off comes after months one and two, then flattens. McDougall credits the focus: a Dundee United fan goes to one page, finds everything, and follows a team with a passion that general news does not attract.
Around 15-20% of Sports Pack subscribers upgrade to the full pack, with half of them doing so in the first month. The other 80% stay. Internally, that raised the cannibalisation question. A recent reverse test answered it: DC Thomson offered both packs on the same sport articles, and readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster than those who chose the Sports Pack. “Sure, they might have gone onto the web pack, but maybe they would not have enjoyed paying for all the content they weren’t wanting to read.”
A smaller product at a rising price
The Sports Pack launched at £3 for three months, about half the price of the full pack, purely to find out whether sport readers would pay anything. They did, so the question became what a credible price looked like. Over the last year, DC Thomson has switched from chasing volume to growing revenue. Every trial is now one paid month, and the Sports Pack costs £4.99 after a £1 first month. When the main pack’s trial was cut, the cheap pack’s trial was cut with it.
Win-backs exist in the cancel flow, but there is no 90%-off deal for anyone who phones and asks; on a £4.99 pack it would be pennies. Instead, subscribers who try to cancel are offered an annual subscription paid monthly: a lower monthly price in return for a twelve-month commitment. McDougall says it makes far more money than a large percentage discount.
“If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it’s going to be a lot harder. We’ve got to get people to see that the product is worth something.”
DC Thomson is now looking at the same idea by geography: packs for Aberdeen or the Moray coast, built on data about what people read. “We’ve got to be really careful that we don’t offer another pack at £4.99 when people could be paying £9.99 for the content and getting more.”
What this means for you
Find the section that gets the most engagement and the fewest subscriptions, then try selling it on its own. DC Thomson didn’t need new content, nor an app and editorial mandate. The product succeeded with existing articles, a simple payment screen and a lower price. How far that travels depends on what you publish.
- Regional and local publishers: Football is the obvious choice where a club has a real fan base, but build the pack around what your readers actually follow: the P&J’s includes shinty, a sport rarely covered elsewhere. Sell it in-article, keep the trial identical to the main pack, and run the reverse test before anyone asks about cannibalisation.
- Nationals: a sport-only pack competes with dedicated sports subscriptions. The transferable part is the method: pick an under-monetised segment (a section, a region, a day pass), test it against the full product on the same pages and judge it on retention as well as conversion.
- Magazine and specialist publishers: your product is already a niche, so slicing it thinner is risky. Take the pricing rules instead: one trial length across products, a term commitment in the cancel flow rather than a percentage off, and retention tracked for every offer cohort.
- Single titles and small teams: if no section is big enough for its own pack, the cheapest thing to copy is an annual contract paid monthly.
McDougall’s warning is to ask first what problem the pack solves and which readers it is for. DC Thomson had readers asking for it and reporting nobody else had, and the pack needs both.
