The B2B publication, Press Gazette, recently published a ranking of the best newsbrands at converting readers into paying subscribers, slightly modifying the benchmarking metric shared in my last article. Instead of comparing the number of website visits to the number of digital subscribers, Press Gazette measures the conversion success of paywalls by the number of unique website visitors, presenting the figure as a percentage value (subscribers in relation to website visitors) whilst the pv digest figure is ‘subscriptions per 1,000 website visits’. Their benchmarking article presents values for 23 English-language premium offerings and 7 selected prominent non-English media, with results ranging from 16.4% (The Athletic) to 0.2% (Nikkei).
What explains conversion success?
Press Gazette explains the range of factors that set apart newsbrands with higher conversion rates:
- The amount of time that a publisher has had a paywall in place, i.e. maturity in the digital subscription market
- The brand reach – for instance national titles seem to have added advantages over local brands thanks to a larger potential audience and more money for technology and subscription marketing than local papers
- The publisher’s overall business model, with those publications trying to generate digital advertising revenue alongside subscriptions, it’ll be harder to be at the top end of the reader revenue market compared to a publisher replying entirely on paid content
- Potentially, the paywall model too…
Does the paywall model impact conversion success?
