According to the latest Reuters Digital News Report, 36% of people worldwide choose to avoid news. In France, the Jean Jaurès Foundation found that in 2023, 53% of people suffer from information fatigue. From a business perspective, this represents a significant number of readers who may never subscribe to any news title or are at risk of unsubscribing soon. For the French newspaper Le Monde, this matter is taken seriously. This is why their team launched "Découvrir" ("Discover" in English), a new tab in their mobile app that showcases mainly positive and feel-good stories. We met Quentin Leredde, Product & Audience Director, who led this project.

Each feature team gathers a Product Manager, a Product Owner, a Developer, and a Product Designer. The role of « Product Manager » is new to us, we created it in 2022. Their mission is to lead product strategies that will bring value to users.

« Découvrir » is a mobile app feature that was developed by our mobile app team, but in fact, it was an idea born during a hackathon we organized last year…

Tell us more about this hackathon!

So in October 2022, our CTO/CIO, Sacha Morard, and Lou Grasser, Chief Marketing & Product Officer, brought 60 members of our digital teams together into one room for two intensive days. They were tasked with brainstorming new and innovative project ideas for Le Monde. We had just established this new product organization and wanted to get everyone working together. This was obviously a team-building event, but we organized it as a competition, with cash rewards for the winners!

Twelve groups, each with five members, were formed. We had PM, POs, product designers, marketers, data analysts, and developers on board – but no journalists. Each of them had to create a prototype of their idea, which had to be functional by the end of the hackathon.

To rank the projects, we used four criteria:
• Reach and impact: how many users will benefit from this project?
• Quality of execution
• ROI: business value for Le Monde
• Speed of implementation

The jury was made up of Le Monde management, including Jérôme Fénoglio, Le Monde’s Director, and Louis Dreyfus, Le Monde Group’s CEO.

Out of the 12 projects presented, two made it to our 2023 roadmap, and both have since been released, with “Découvrir” claiming the first prize.

Ah great ! Do tell us more…

The team who came up with this idea had the latest Reuters Digital News Report in mind. It reveals that 36% of people worldwide now chose to avoid the news, a significant increase from the 29% recorded in 2017! They also gathered insights from many of our unsubscribed readers, who emphasized the negative impact of news – how it was often depressing and anxiety-inducing. These readers expressed a strong desire for more positive stories. In France, the Jean Jaurès Foundation reported that, in 2023, 53% of people suffer from information fatigue…

From a business standpoint, this represents a substantial number of readers who might never subscribe to Le Monde or may churn soon. That is a serious business challenge for us, and all news media outlets worldwide.

So, Florence Pouvatchy, Nicolas Viry, Jérémie Chambrion, Agnès Bregeon and Georgia Gaye had this brilliant idea. They wanted to give our readers some ‘breathing space’ within the mobile app, quite the opposite of the busy, fast-moving home page. The plan was to curate uplifting content to provide readers with some relief from anxiety-inducing news. At the same time, they wanted to shine a light on those hidden gems of content, the kind that often gets buried in the constant news flow.

The project, which code name was « Escape with Le Monde », had three dimensions:

• an immersive experience to reinforce the escapist effect,
• introducing a mood selector with reader purposes (get inspired, enjoy, understand, act…),
• and integrating personalization based on the reader’s interests.

But the last two items are not included in the current version yet.

What business goals are you pursuing with this project?

With « Découvrir », we have two primary objectives:

• Combat the disengagement of our products
• Improve subscriber retention

Why did this project win the first prize in the hackathon?

This project stood out because it aligns perfectly with Le Monde’s mission. Fighting news avoidance and information fatigue is a priority for Le Monde. Of course, this has an impact on our bottom line, but it also leads readers to seek alternative, sometimes less reliable sources of information. So it’s becoming a democratic problem, and for Le Monde, it’s a major source of concern.

Another advantage of the project was that it didn’t require additional editorial production. All the articles featured in the « Découvrir » tab already existed; they were just not very visible.

A couple of years ago, we launched the « Fil Good » newsletter (play of words with “Feel good”), which sends our subscribers a selection of feel-good stories. This weekly newsletter has been a huge success. We’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to showcase the positive content we produce, which often gets overshadowed by negative news as I explained earlier.

Did you take inspiration from other media for this new section?

When working on new projects, we always like to benchmark against what other media outlets are doing, especially overseas.

We’ve been looking at The Guardian’s mobile app feature, « Discover », which presents long-format stories in a dedicated tab for subscribers.

We also explored the Washington Post’s « Well Being » vertical.

Technically speaking, how does « Découvrir » work? How are articles selected to appear in this section?

First, in terms of themes, it’s important to note that “Discover” not only features « feel good » articles, but also content that accompanies readers in their daily lives, with topics on culture, love, health, cooking, lifestyle, and more. We keep the news content to a minimum, or break down news to help readers better understand current events. We take great care in ensuring that « Découvrir » is not just a repetition of the home page…

Functionally, we’ve selected about forty eligible tags for « Découvrir », and it’s a fully automated feed. There is no human editor involved. In total, we present between 10 and 15 articles a day.

How did this project go internally? When did you start working on it and which teams were involved?

We kicked things off last spring. As I mentioned earlier, the idea came up during a digital product hackathon, but it was a highly editorial project, so we had to include the newsroom from the very beginning. Francoise Tovo, Le Monde’s deputy editor-in-chief, worked closely with us, and her expert eye has been incredibly valuable. The journalists were immediately seduced by the idea, but we wanted to validate our intuitions with User Research.

We learnt a lot from our focus groups :

• Readers easily grasped the section’s philosophy, which was good news!
• They liked the diverse content mix, so we held off on developing content filters.
• The storie’s intro paragraph that appeared to be useless, so we hid it

As of now, « Découvrir » only exists on your mobile app. Do you plan on launching it on your website Lemonde.fr as well?

For now, it’s only on our mobile app, where we have our most engaged users. We may consider launching it on our website in the future, but our tech roadmap is currently full of projects!

What has been the most challenging aspect of this project?

Finding the right name! We wanted something that sounded like « evasion » or « escape », but neither of these options worked… so we settled for the simple « Découvrir » (« Discover » in English).

It’s been a week since you launched « Découvrir », what’s the initial feedback?

Initially, we had planned to launch on October 11th, but due to the Israël-Hamas conflict, we decided to postpone it for a week. We realized that this horrific event wasn’t going to subside anytime soon, and we couldn’t delay the launch indefinitely. However, the initial reception we got from our readers emphasized the need for this kind of editorial content, particularly during such difficult times.

We launched a quick survey among our readers: 82% told us they were satisfied or very satisfied with « Découvrir ». What pleased us the most was that people clearly understood our objectives: less news, more information, nice visuals, and no anxiety.

Which Key Performance Indicators will you be monitoring in the coming months?

Engagement is our core focus. We’ll be looking at:

• Frequency of visits over a week and a month among both our subscribers and free readers.
• Retention of subscribers during the critical first few weeks. We’ll track subscriber retention after 3 months, 6 months, and a year.

We’ll also look at our qualitative surveys, where news fatigue is often mentioned – do those signals calm down over time?

What are the next phases of development you have planned on this project?

There are no further developments planned for the remainder of this year. In 2024, we’ll be introducing personalization to align with reader’s interests, and deploying news filters.

We’re really happy with the product as it stands right now. The digital team has perfectly grasped the challenges faced by major general-interest daily newspapers, like Le Monde, particularly in terms of information avoidance and subscriber retention. This editorial project has the full support of our editorial team and, in its early stages, has been met with satisfaction from our readers.

FT Edit and the Financial Times

FT Edit is a new app by the Financial Times that offers 8 in-depth articles a day. The app aims to replace the endless scrolling on social media and news sites with more thought-provoking reading time. It’s the first new app the company has launched in a decade.

Contrary to popular belief, I think there’s virtue in launching something new on a decades-old foundation. The team felt like a startup, while our 135-year-old organisation is far more comfortable launching new products now than a year ago. Here is what I’ve learnt:

1. Identify your baseline

We had a good starting point – the FT already had a strong internal belief that:

1. FT content has much larger audience appeal than our subscriber base (look at our 7m LinkedIn followers), and
2. It’s hard to attract new customers at scale with our price of +£35 a month.

But launching new products requires a new mindset. Drawing on my previous experience launching new features at Google Arts & Culture and running my own startup, I knew a lot needed to change.

Being an intrapreneur always requires cautious patience which can, at times, clash with an entrepreneurial spirit. I mapped in my head the areas that were critical to change immediately; areas I could change later; and things I needed to accept and appreciate.

2. Pick your battles

When launching a new venture, you need to be ready to make decisions every minute. Inevitably, there will be arguments — a positive sign you have surrounded yourself with thoughtful, critically-thinking individuals. However, as you have limited time and energy, being wise on which battles to pick is essential for success (and your sanity).

My rule was that I aimed to influence situations that were vital for validating product-market fit.

For example, the FT’s initial understanding of a low-cost product was £19 a month. While it’s nearly half the price of the current subscription, it’s still more expensive than any other news subscription on the market. Our main job with the FT Edit was to understand if users would engage with the product and be willing to pay for it, at scale. If we set a price that was too high, we wouldn’t know if it was the proposition that didn’t resonate with readers, or the price was too high for that proposition. It was a “make or break” decision and we decided to push the organisation to agree on a cheaper price (currently £0.99 for the 6-month trial).

As you have limited remit (and energy) as a Product Manager, there were areas that I challenged but decided to park for later. These were mainly areas which, prior to launch, we had no data on, therefore it was pointless to engage in long discussions. For instance, we took the decision not to include new articles on the app during the weekend; instead we would feature “best articles of the week”. One year after launch, we are seeing weekend engagement rapidly decreasing for new users and the team is now revising this approach.

Finally, there were the situations I had to work with. In our case, it was whether we could launch a fake-door paywall instead of spending time developing a working paying solution. One of the worries was it would impact our brand. I sensed that the organisation was not ready for this type of crude experimentation. A year later, this is no longer the case!

3. Get your team comfortable with ambiguity

There will be many moments in the new product development journey where you need a team that is comfortable saying, “I don’t know, let’s try and see” or “Yes, why not”. It’s an attitude that is significantly different from the requirements of a regular job, no matter the department. In a normal setting, you are praised in your job if you know all the answers and you are detail-oriented.

Doing new product development requires the opposite virtues: distilling signals from noise, and knowing what’s important to focus on right now, and what you should worry about later.

For example, the FT Edit experience is no different for users who have been paying for 2 months or for 8 months. We decided that life-time value is something we will optimise for only if we validate there are enough users ready to pay for the product after using it for a month. This is not to say that long-term retention is not important, but we made the conscious decision that our resources were limited, and there were more important things to solve right now.

I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who, although they had no experience in launching new products, were curious and excited and wanted to challenge the status quo. This mentality made our team move much faster.

4. Take the team on a journey with you

If you are someone who has launched multiple new products, you probably have the whole playbook in your head, but don’t assume people from your team will know what’s coming next. It’s the job of the Product Manager to ensure everyone in the team understands the decisions you take and feels confident that we are building the right thing. I aimed to be systematic and transparent on the product decisions I’m making and what would follow based on different results and scenarios. I aimed always to articulate to the team what our product strategy was and why we had prioritised one feature over others.

We did a few things that helped tactically: we have a weekly team meeting with everyone working on the project. All qualitative or quantitative research is shared in that meeting, we discuss the results and we make decisions together.

5. Everything revolves around the value proposition

Our team spent months surveying users, doing diary studies and user interviews, before we designed even one screen. Articulating clearly what problems your product solves and where it adds value into people’s lives is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Still, if this information is mentioned once in a meeting and then collects digital dust in a shared folder, it all goes to waste. I quickly understood that this was not a one-off activity. Particularly in the early days, we mentioned the value proposition at every single discussion we had around the product.

One way we ensured alignment was involving all departments from inception — marketing, brand, PR, editorial, product, technology. They were surely annoyed with me and Maia Bridi (our stellar researcher at the time) asking the whole team to attend user interviews or sit through key insight sessions. We filtered any decision through the lens of our value proposition. This resulted in marketing coining the slogan “Time well read” for our launch in March 2022, as well as editor-in-chief Roula Khalaf describing the app as a way to “Read less, understand more”. It’s exciting to see how little by little everyone is playing to the same tone for a new product you have created together.

> Discover value proposition benchmarks from successful publishers

6. Are we there yet?! Defining success before launch

Another thing that empowered the team to stay focused and move quickly was having a clear definition of success from the very beginning of the product development journey. Reaching product market fit is an elusive term if you don’t know what you want to achieve. In our case, we know we would be successful if FT Edit reached the industry benchmark for Download-to-Paid rate on mobile news apps, and if we did this at scale.

Having a high Download-to-Paid rate with few users would mean we were a niche product; having a lot of users with low willingness to pay would mean we were not offering anything new or valuable.

On the latter, consider how you will reach product channel fit: how to optimise your product to work with the top communication channels your audience is using. It would be a mistake to focus exclusively on growth before you have validated your product is valuable to users, but it’s important to consider embedding one or two growth loops into your product early on. In our case, we over-relied on paid marketing activities at launch which should not be the only growth driver to any new product as marketing budgets are never endless.

7. The perfect MVP doesn’t exist

It’s a paradox: you cannot create a perfect product, if you haven’t launched a scrappy minimum viable product (MVP) first. The process of new product development is a iterative, sometimes chaotic journey that requires you to launch unfinished products to learn how to make them better. By contrast, the FT has a reputation as one of the most trustworthy organisations in the world for the opposite reason: perfection is the aim with everything we publish. This could easily have created tension between the product and editorial teams.

Luckily, the editors on the app, Malcolm Moore and Hannah Rock, were open-minded, and they trusted me with adopting a new approach to work.

While we kept our perfectionism in the editorial realm, we learnt how to be more experimental with testing our assumptions and launching experiments, from new push notifications to product improvements.

8. Validate your biggest assumptions as early as possible

Before the minimum viable products, there were the minimum viable tests. I often share this article by Gagan Biyani, which discusses a leaner approach to testing new product concepts.

It asks you to list all the things that need to be true for your product to succeed.

FT Edit is an app offering long-reads, we therefore needed to validate if people would be willing to do that long reading on their phones. We did this in a diary study before we had a working product and no user has brought it up as a problem.

You don’t need a team of engineers and extensive A/B testing to validate whether your product has a chance of success.

Once you have that initial validation and knowledge, it becomes much easier to pitch internally for more resources.

Hope this was useful!

Choose your edition

Do you have readers in different continents? Or maybe articles in other languages? Let your readers choose which edition they’d like on their app.

Le Monde, the French newspaper, has an English edition. Upon arriving on the app, we’re asked to choose between the two versions.

Whilst on CNN, in the U.S., we’re offered the option of a newsfeed focused on the U.S. or international stories.

Customized alerts

Push notifications and alerts are one of the best ways to keep readers coming back for more. Thanks to the app, your content is always available in their pocket, you just have to give them a reason to open the app.

However, you can frustrate readers if you notify them too much, and with alerts that don’t interest them.

The solution? Ensure alerts are personalized to the reader’s interests.

The New York Times integrates small modules into articles, offering readers the chance to activate alerts related to that specific topic. Here, « World » alerts. Activating these only requires a single click.

Welt displays a pop-up upon arriving on the app, asking us to activate alerts or pass, with a supporting image showing what « activating alerts » will look like.

CNN goes a step further with a pop-up that lists the various topic alerts that a reader could activate. « Breaking news » and « Top news and analysis » are automatically activated, but this can be undone in 2 clicks.

On the Financial Times app, they’ve integrated a module into the home page, allowing readers to activate notifications. This module is in a different color, dark grey with white text, to stand out from story blocks, with a value proposition that tells us why we should complete this action – to be the first to hear about the stories that matter – and bell icons to reflect the action of receiving notifications.

On-app onboarding

Just like SaaS product tours, you should introduce your reader to the app, it’s features and encourage them to activate anything that’s valuable for increasing engagement.

However, we’d recommend keeping the onboarding process short, interactive, and visually appealing, perhaps saving some personalization or onboarding steps for later in the user’s journey, such as when they try to access pages or activate features.

On The Washington Post app, we’re first offered the option to pass through the onboarding steps or not.

Step one allows us to choose our alerts, each with its own emoji, the perfect way to illustrate the different sections for mobile-readers who are used to these visuals. Alerts can be activated in a click and there are plenty of options to appeal to each reader’s interests.

Step two is a unique one, introducing us to their « audio article » feature and allowing us to adjust the speed and voice to our liking. Audio articles, often generated by AI, are a valuable way to increase engagement for a variety of reasons according to this article on FT’s Medium page:

• Embracing and building habits – « We found that the most popular reason why subscribers listen to audio articles is the ability to multitask. By enabling hands free content consumption and multi-tasking, audio articles allow users to consume content in situations where they don’t usually have the option to read »
• Responding to users’ time pressure – « The great thing about audio articles is that they don’t necessarily compete with other activities. By removing the need to look at a screen, users can listen to stories while they go on about their days. So without spending more time or compromising on existing routines, audio articles allow users to get more value from their subscriptions. » – this is perhaps even more prominent when it comes to consuming content on mobile
• Driving incremental content consumption – « Our data shows that allowing users to listen to articles does not cannibalise on reading. On the contrary, we found that it adds to their content consumption overall »
• Attracting young audiences – « Research findings suggest that audio (articles) can be a useful tool in building relationships and attracting young readers in particular. »
• Improving accessibility – « In the UK, there are over 2 million people who are living with sight loss, 340,000 of these are registered blind or partially sighted. Providing the ability to listen to articles will help visually impaired subscribers and allows us to reach and engage a larger audience overall. »

Some best practices for these onboarding steps:

• Reassure: « Update them anytime »
• Offer options: « choose later » link at the bottom of the page
• Communicate the onboarding journey: « Step 1 of 2 »
• Consider which engagement actions are the most valuable to your business by analyzing existing, loyal app users with high frequency and volume of visits. Do they have push notifications turned on? Do they listen to their content rather then read? This will help you define the most valuable onboarding steps to prioritize
• On each page: a short, succinct title with a form of explanation or value proposition, explaining exactly what this step involves and why a reader should complete the action
• Minimal actions (clicks, scrolls, form fields) needed to complete this step

Download or queue content

One of the 4 main reasons why people don’t pay for news (according to a study) is time. However, as readers pretty much always have their phone in their pocket, there’s a few ways in which you can ensure your content still gets consumed:

• Save content for later, building a queue or a reading list
• As mentioned above, audio content is a great way to allow readers to listen to your articles whilst completing another task
• Download content, whether that be audio or text. I’m not sure about elsewhere in the world, but this is vital for the UK where you can’t get signal whilst on the tube in London. By allowing app users to download your content, you’re filling time in their morning commute that they can’t fill with social media or messaging

Customizable homescreen and topics

We all know that personalization is essential for high engagement. But it doesn’t have to involve a machine-learnt technology. Instead, let your readers customize their feed, selecting the topics that interest them.

To ensure readers know that this option is available, The Washington Post has a pop-up that displays on our first visit to the home page, letting us know we can customize this page.

I would add here that maybe an entirely customized feed has its limitations and could confine readers in a box of similar content, preventing them from seeing all the value that you can provide.

Perhaps a middle ground would be a customizable feed with « Recommendation » modules suggesting similar content to help expand their reading.

Live feed

Readers today have been conditioned by the mobile and social revolutions to spend a significant amount of time scrolling on their phones. The structure of live feeds mimic this same concept, keeping readers on your app for longer by constantly providing them with new content.

What’s more, these formats allow publishers to share not only text and images but also social media posts, graphics, videos… anything that can be embedded as an iFrame. Why does this matter? By seamlessly integrating a variety of mediums into one format, you can take digital storytelling to new heights by providing readers with a variety of captivating text and visual content.

All in all, these formats have proven to bring readers back and keep them on-app for longer, two metrics that directly contribute to higher subscription and retention rates.

Welt makes the most of this engagement feature with a dedicated live feed tab.

In this interview, Juan shares how they developed this concept, why they chose WhatsApp as their only distribution channel (and how this is going), how they’re monetizing their content and what’s next for this media.

What is Pamplonews and how did you come up with this concept? 

Pamplonews is a fresh take on news delivery, centered on local insights that truly matter. 

Our mission is simple – serve our users with news that isn’t just informative but also personally useful. Together with my co-founder, Diego Macaya, we’re shaping local news to be what we’d want as locals ourselves. 

Our approach is straightforward—curating the most intriguing events, experiences, food recommendations, courses, practical tips, etc, all presented in a style that’s easygoing, engaging, surprising, and approachable. We keep it concise and punchy, even throwing in some emojis and bullet points to make reading and sharing a breeze. Links aren’t about clickbait; they’re shortcuts to real experiences and events we’re passionate about.

At Pamplonews, our goal is to bring together the widest possible audience. Unlike traditional media that often falls into political divides, we’re all about focusing solely on topics that unite. We believe in community, shared experiences, and stories that resonate with everyone, regardless of differences. Our aim is to create a space where diverse voices can come together and celebrate what connects us, making Pamplonews a place where people from all walks of life can find something that speaks to them.

The journey that led me here has been like Steve Jobs’ metaphorical dots connecting. Our guiding philosophy, « Assertive Journalism, » (sort of an acronym for Anticipation, SERvice and interacTIVE) took shape during my time at CNN working along with my colleague and friend Alvaro Valderrama. This framework is about anticipating needs, serving users, and fostering interaction. We want to offer content that’s ahead of the curve, tailor-made for our audience’s needs. Without utility, a product is empty. Engaging our audience isn’t just about feedback; it’s co-creating content with them.

My path was also shaped by insights from industry reports like the Reuters Digital News Report. It became clear that news consumption was changing, and people wanted content that improved their lives. Traditional media often lagged in adapting to this shift.

My failed application for the JSK Fellowship at Stanford marked another pivotal point. Focusing on « Eradicating News Deserts and Strengthening Local News » made me dive deep into local news and technology’s potential. The results revealed a gap in genuinely serving local audiences. I did not get the fellowship but learned a ton in the process.

Finally, inspiration came from two unique sources. Documented, a New York-based newsroom, who used WhatsApp for content sharing within immigrant communities. Conversations with their Director of Audience & Community, Nicolas Rios, broadened my perspective and inspired me a lot. The Geekout WhatsApp experiment by Matt Navarra also caught my attention—showcasing a community-driven approach to content sharing and a smart monetization approach. Chatting with Matt offered valuable insights into innovative content delivery.

Drawing on my background in Human-Computer Interaction, I’ve always been passionate about crafting products that are intuitive and enjoyable to use. This perspective has played a key role in shaping Pamplonews. I believe that technology should seamlessly connect people to valuable content, making it accessible and meaningful. With this approach, I’ve infused my training into the design of Pamplonews, ensuring that the interaction is simple and engaging. It’s all about creating a user-friendly experience that resonates with our community in Pamplona.

How are you different from other local news outlets in the area? 

Pamplonews is all about Pamplona and its community, offering localized information and topics in a unique style. Unlike traditional local media, which often cover a broad range of subjects and areas, we focus on a distinct agenda. While other outlets may churn out the same mix of stories, including local, national, politics, crime, entertainment, sports, weather, and business, we steer clear of that terrain. Our approach revolves around serving up news that’s useful, events, and lifestyle content—stuff that enhances our users’ experience of the city and lets them squeeze out all the enjoyment.

Our style sets us apart. It’s more casual, direct, and simple—akin to how friends message each other. We sidestep traditional news articles format, opting for bullet points and concise content units that provide the right amount of info, a touch of wit, and useful links to original sources.

What really sets us in a league of our own is our exclusive use of WhatsApp as a delivery channel. Unlike our competitors who have full-blown websites and direct their messaging products towards driving website traffic, we’re all about the mobile messaging experience. I like to paraphrase McLuhan saying that in Pamplonews, “The message is the Medium”.

Being small allows us to cultivate a personal rapport with our readers. We engage with them, gather insights through surveys and direct messages, and Whatsapp is the ideal platform for fostering this interactive connection.

Embracing our youthful, experimental nature, we don’t shy away from daily experiments, unafraid of challenging the status quo. We’re agile, preferring quick-and-dirty approaches to gather insights. 

Mistakes? We see them as information to get better.

Adaptability is another ace up our sleeve. We can swiftly pivot our content and focus based on shifting audience preferences. Unlike traditional media with more rigid structures, our nimbleness is a distinct advantage.

When it comes to monetization, we’re thinking outside the box. From local offers to events and collaborations, we’re exploring a range of revenue streams. Unlike traditional local media that often leans on conventional advertising and subscriptions, we’re forging innovative pathways.

Last but not least, community engagement is our secret sauce.

We’re all about involving the local community, experts, and leaders through collaborations and user-generated content. This sets us apart from traditional media’s narrower approach.

Why WhatsApp? How has this format proved valuable for reader acquisition and engagement? 

For numerous years, the concept of developing WhatsApp-based products had been percolating in my mind. The pervasive reach of this messaging platform across Latin America and Spain were a constant source of inspiration. However, the journey was often deterred by the technical limitations inherent to the platform, hindering the seamless creation of news products. Unlike platforms such as Telegram, which boasts an array of publisher-friendly features, WhatsApp demanded administrators to invest significant manual effort in community management. Yet, Telegram lacked the scale and penetration wielded by WhatsApp.

Immersing myself in a trove of news consumption reports spanning recent years, unveiled a persistent trend: WhatsApp consistently stood out as a growing platform for news consumption. This revelation led me to embark on this venture and introduce our product.

Pamplonews leverages WhatsApp’s Communities. This product offers valuable features, including a notably augmented maximum membership limit and the crucial ability to hide user numbers, thereby safeguarding our users’ privacy. Furthermore, the seamlessness of sharing the community link and joining the community itself has remarkably streamlined the user acquisition process. This has removed any technological barriers and frictions for users, regardless of age; joining the community is an intuitive process, universally understood.

Add to this the fact that virtually every smartphone owner in Pamplona (and Spain) is equipped with WhatsApp—an app that commands ubiquitous presence in our target market. The connection we share with our users is characterized by its directness; a mere WhatsApp message serves as the sole divide between us and each individual. 

The proximity this affords is unparalleled—always just a message away.

You only launched on June 6th – What has been the response so far? How many readers do you have? 

The response has been amazing. Despite entering a market already dominated by established newspapers and digital outlets, we’ve managed to carve out a space for ourselves. In just two months, we’ve gathered 3,750 subscribers, with the number of new subscribers tripling from July to August.

This is even more impressive considering that July and August are typically slow months for news consumption in Spain, especially in Pamplona due to summer vacations and the attention-grabbing Running of the Bulls Festival in July. Despite these challenges, our growth has exceeded our expectations.

What are your KPIs? How do you know if a story / message has been popular amongst readers?

In our current phase, characterized by the recent launch of our product and the utilization of WhatsApp as our primary distribution channel, the available data remains somewhat limited. Our focus primarily revolves around two key metrics: the number of subscribers, an index we diligently track on a daily basis, and the count of Unsubscribes, a parameter we also monitor. 

I am delighted to say that our rate of unsubscribers currently stands at an admirably minimal level. On a daily basis, the unsubscribe count remains modest, just a handful, and notably, most of these instances can be attributed to reasons that extend beyond the product’s quality or user satisfaction.

This churn frequently stems from human error or apprehension derived from distrust to joining unknown WhatsApp groups. In these instances, we proactively reach out to each individual who unsubscribes in order to understand the specific reasons.

These interactions, although labor intensive, have proven enlightening for us, and reassuring for our users, who in most cases rejoin the community. There’s an inherent allure in being heard and feeling valued within a product environment that prizes engagement and meaningful interactions over sheer numerical metrics. It is this shared sentiment that resonates deeply within our user community.

How do you monetize your content? 

We’re excited about the various opportunities ahead to monetize our content and keep providing value to our local community. While we’re not monetizing right now, we’re charting an exciting path to generate revenue and make Pamplonews sustainable in the long run.

Our vision involves a mix of innovative approaches. We’re looking into partnering with local advertisers, giving them a meaningful way to connect with our audience. Also, we’re planning to offer exclusive deals and discounts from local businesses, benefiting both our subscribers and collaborating establishments.

Monetization will also take shape through unique and engaging events that resonate with our community’s interests and values. We’re looking forward to organizing local events that provide not just knowledge, learning, and entertainment, but also encourage connection and participation from our subscribers.

Another exciting avenue is setting up an e-commerce platform offering local products and services, creating a shopping experience and supporting local entrepreneurs. We’re also planning to team up with local institutions and organizations for collaborations that align with their goals and values, further enriching our readers’ experience.

Our aim is to build a monetization model that reflects our commitment to the Pamplona community and offers genuine value to all our users. Each step we take will be carefully considered to ensure we keep delivering valuable content and creating sustainable opportunities for the community we deeply care about.

What do you have in mind for the future of Pamplonews?

Our immediate focus is on growing our subscriber base and exploring ways to generate revenue. This is crucial as we want to make sure that our product not only attracts an audience but also sustains itself financially. Our next step involves creating a premium offering that could potentially lead to a subscription model. We have plenty of ideas for valuable premium content, but our priority right now is demonstrating our ability to monetize our current audience.

Looking ahead, we have some exciting plans in the pipeline. We’re considering the use of AI to develop new voice-based products and also venturing into producing video content. Additionally, we’re exploring opportunities in e-commerce. 

However, it’s important to recognize that these plans will take time to fully materialize. Our approach is grounded in practicality and a measured pace of implementation.

If everything develops as planned, the next step would be expanding this concept to other major cities in Spain to replicate the model.

One last point I wanted to mention is that, inspired by the « Software as a Service » model, Pamplonews will embrace a concept I call  « News as Service” (NAS). Just as software is no longer a product you buy and own but a continuous service that evolves and adapts, I see news and information as an ongoing service to our community. Our aim is to go beyond the traditional news consumption model by offering a dynamic platform that provides value in real-time. Pamplonews will act as a service hub, delivering timely, relevant, and engaging content that actively serves the interests and needs of our readers. It’s a shift from passive news consumption to an interactive and personalized experience, where information becomes a utility that empowers our users right here in Pamplona.

> Subscribe for free to Pamplonews’ WhatsApp group here.

En résumé :
- Tout part du paradoxe apparent du mobile : beaucoup plus de visites sur les sites de contenu depuis un appareil mobile que depuis un ordinateur, et pourtant, très peu de conversions depuis mobiles.
- Alors, adapter votre stratégie d'engagement et de conversion au contexte de consommation du contenu permet d'augmenter la valeur des utilisateurs mobiles.