Un peu de contexte : du 26 avril au 31 mai 2017, Project R, une coopérative à but non lucratif, a mené une campagne de financement participatif pour lancer un magazine numérique en Suisse. Le succès a été retentissant : plus de 13 000 soutiens, réunis autour de l’équipe de développement de Project R, avec l’ambition de peser concrètement sur le paysage médiatique. Le magazine, baptisé « Republik », a été lancé le 14 janvier 2018 - sans compromis sur la qualité, financé par ses lecteurs, sans publicité, et sans fioritures inutiles. (source : Project R)

Réussir is an agricultural press group whose business model, like so many others, was traditionally based on print advertising. Of course, digital ambitions began to emerge in the early 2000s, but it took a pandemic to trigger a digitalization shock, spearheaded by Managing Director, Thibaut De Jaegher, and today orchestrated by Yoni Benaim, Chief Digital Officer. Together, they agreed to take part in this cross-interview project. The idea? To get the big bosses to share the business context and vision behind a major digital project, and for the operational manager to recount how it actually unfolded. 

Thibaut, Yoni, bonjour! Can you tell us a bit about the Réussir group? 

Thibaut: Our mission is to support agricultural and food industry professionals by providing them with quality, value-added information. Based in Paris, Brussels and Caen (where our head office is located), we’re traditionally print-based. But we’ve transformed over the past few years into a B2B digital press group, with specialized content and digital services. 

We’re a team of 110, and our main aim is to provide a service to our readers, to be useful to them in their jobs, particularly thanks to our digital publication.

Yoni: Yes, we had a big digitalization roadmap. We used to be very focused on print advertising, but over the last few years we’ve been trying to put digital subscriptions at the center by developing information services. 

My job as Digital & Data Manager is to make life as easy as possible for our users.

How did you get started in this digitalization? 

Thibaut: In concrete terms, we launched the Réussir.fr portal in 2020, just before the pandemic, bringing together our 10 B2B universes. I wanted to turn Covid into a digital shock, internally of course, but also in our relationship with our subscribers – we collected  almost 30,000 email addresses at the time, for example. And because we were suffering from paper shortages, we offered our subscribers the chance to receive their monthly magazine in digital format by email and via an ereader.

Collecting reader email addresses seems to be very important for your business model…

Yoni: Yes, since 2021 we’ve put all our content behind a registration wall, asking for an email address in exchange for access to articles. 

Thibaut: We learned a lot about this subject thanks to the start-up Commoprices, specialized in tracking raw materials, which we bought in 2018 and developed until 2022. Originally, Commoprices required users to log in to test the platform. As a result, all we had to do to convert audiences into subscribers was select qualified leads! So we decided to apply the same strategy to our media titles.

Yoni: What really changed our rhythm was the launch of a dynamic registration wall with Poool at the end of 2022. We used to create around 200 free accounts a month. But as soon as Poool Access was launched, we made incredible progress, peaking at 1,500 accounts created in March 2023, now settling at 700-800 validated accounts per month.

You only ask for an email address. How do you make sure these are real email addresses?

Yoni: To make life easier for the reader, and reduce friction, we only ask for their email address via a form within the wall itself. Completing this form triggers a welcome email which asks the user to click on a link to confirm their account. It’s this number (of ‘validated’ accounts) that I’m sharing with you in the figures above. 

In 2023, just under 11,000 validated accounts were created. Around a third of the email addresses deposited in our registration walls are validated. The rest are false addresses, or members who already have accounts and try to login via the registration wall.

How have you implemented this registration wall? Are there some formats that have worked better than others?

Thibaut: When we launched, we wanted to go very fast to get it out before an agricultural conference in February, which is a very strong audience vector for us.

Yoni: To launch with speed, we put up the same wall everywhere, for all ‘premium’ articles, except for a single A/B test where we ask the user for their interests to help us better understand our prospects:

We have 10 titles, each focusing on a particular sector (Cattle, Cereals, Beekeeping, etc.), so knowing which field our prospect is interested in is vital to offering the right subscription and targeting marketing messaging.

Have you also implemented a registration strategy for your free articles?

Yoni: Yes, on free articles, those open to all readers, we ask for registration after 2 or 3 articles. The wall, on the other hand, is non-blocking here with a button saying “I’ll continue reading”. 

I’ll add that we’ve integrated a “Members” audience segment for each article type (free and member-only) to unlock all articles, always for registered members.

Why is it important for you to log readers?

Yoni: One word: engagement… As soon as readers are logged in, their article consumption increases significantly. For example…

We see a drastic drop in bounce rate, from 70% for anonymous readers, to 15% when the person is known and logged!

Session durations rise from 1.20 minutes (unlogged) to 7.61 minutes for logged-in users!

In terms of page views, 1.4 PVs/session for anonymous users, and 5.6 PV/session for our members… 

It’s easy to see the value of registration!

How has this logged-in audience share evolved at Réussir?

Yoni: At the end of 2022, 4% of page views were from logged-in members. By the end of 2023, we had reached 10%. But we’re not finished yet…

Can you explain how this strategy of building up free members supports paying subscriber acquisition?

Yoni: In concrete terms, when you create an account, you’re automatically signed up to the newsletter linked to that title.

Thibaut: And to get to know our prospects better, we recently bought a direct marketing firm, which had a great deal of information on our target audience, 380,000 French farmers!

Yoni: We then enrich each new member’s profile, comparing it with this company’s database and qualifying those we know fairly quickly (especially those who have changed activity, which is quite common in the farming world!)

We then move on to the conversion funnel, presenting direct marketing actions to promote subscription offers (with discounts such as Black Friday, New Year’s Eve, etc.) and phoning.

Today, we don’t (yet) have a paywall – sales are made after account creation.

How is your paid subscriber growth?

Thibaut: Over the past three years, we’ve been growing and growing. There are fewer and fewer farmers in France, but we’re capturing more and more subscribers! We have two levers for this: the quality of our content, aiming to be useful to farmers, and the increasingly detailed customer knowledge base which enables us to push personalized upsell offers to our loyal, long-standing subscribers. 

Yoni: Before we embarked on this digitalization project, 100% of our subscribers were to our print product, or almost. There was a premium newsletter, and subscribers could access the title’s associated website, but the product was print. Today, our portfolio includes 12% digital subscribers. It’s not a lot but we’re closer to where we want to be and our digital offering is developing. 

Does collecting all this data about your prospects also feed your advertising strategy?

Yoni: Yes, indeed! Being able to offer targeted display advertising obviously enables us to offer advertisers more qualitative, more effective contexts, which we can sell at a higher price.

Advertisers want finer, more niche targeting. In our market, affinity is very, very important, and it’s part of Réussir’s DNA. We’re not a generalist in the agricultural sector, but we offer very fine-tuned targeting, with operations that can go as far as giving advertisers hot leads that we’ve identified via our content.

The registration wall also enables us to identify consumer habits. For example, a farmer who subscribes to our « Bovins viande » title often ends up on “”Céréaliers pages. Without this knowledge, we wouldn’t have seen this valuable opportunity to increase average revenue, and act on it. 

Collecting data is important, but it takes a lot of people to sort and understand it… How do you process the data and make it actionable?

Yoni: We’re in a finite B2B market in the sense that there are 380,000 farmers in France and that’s it. That’s a lot, but not that many either. So the masses remain manageable, and are handled by our 10-strong subscription department. 

In terms of tools, we’ve built up a fairly comprehensive BI dashboard which shows the subjects a prospect or subscriber has consulted over a given period, and our key indicator is the number of page views consumed on each subject:

This chart enables us to easily identify individual customer behavior, and seize opportunities to sell or upsell subscriptions. And even avoid churn by tracking any decline in consumption. That’s the whole point of collecting data: to use it effectively to sell additional subscriptions!

When you launched a hard registration strategy, didn’t you fear that you’d lose traffic? 

Yoni: Of course, we feared a drop in audience, but in the end nothing happened, not in terms of SEO, nor on the webperf side. 

Of course, the debate of blocking articles or not came up internally. So we had to reaffirm to our team where the story was going, the reasoning behind this move and the value of doing it. Ultimately, the goal is to enhance the value of our content and therefore forefront the expertise of our teams!

OneLog is the joint login service for the Swiss Digital Alliance – the federation of the largest Swiss media companies and publishing houses. The single login enables publishers to offer readers a personalized, cross-platform media experience whilst guaranteeing the highest security standards. I spoke to Patrick Rademacher, COO of the Global Media Unit at Ringier AG & Chairman of the Board of OneLog, and Silvano Oeschger, CEO at OneLog, to hear more about this single sign-on solution and how it’s benefiting both Swiss media and their readers.

Back in 2019, whilst at the annual Swiss Media Forum, CEOs of the 5 big media companies decided to come together to solve a challenge faced by publishers across the country (and indeed the world). Namely that the end to 3rd party cookies means that non-logged users are becoming more difficult to address. But knowing who their readers are is vital for product development, personalization and both advertising and reader revenue….

And there’s a pressure to solve this problem before the end of 2024, the already-pushed-back date for Google to discontinue 3rd party cookies.  

So, these media companies decided to launch a project group with the goal of developing a login service to regain a direct relationship between media companies and their users, enabling publishers to improve their 1st party data basis and understanding of their audience.

Testing was run across various publications from October 2019 with title-specific, voluntary logins to discover readers’ propensity to create an account. After seeing the success of these tests and reader’s increased acceptance to log in, the decision was finalized to align on a technological solution. The chosen tech was one developed by Ringier, its in-house technology Ringier Connect which was tailor-made for the specific needs of media brands, and live from August 2021 when other publishers, such as 20 Minuten and Tamedia were onboarded into the solution. 

And, just like that, OneLog was born! 

Today, OneLog has onboarded 47 media brands, including titles from the Ringier and TX Group, and more recently, a joint job marketplace from the Ringier and TX universe, allowing their user base to grow to more than 2.3 million verified accounts.

After an initial phase, when Ringier and TX held 50% of the shares, OneLog is now owned by the four biggest private media companies in Switzerland, Ringier, TX Group, NZZ, and CHMedia. As a result, selected titles of NZZ and CHMedia will migrate to the single sign on solution by the end of the year. In the midterm, all of the shareholders’ titles will switch to OneLog. The fifth founding partner of the Swiss Digital Alliance, the public broadcaster SRG SSR, already uses OneLog as a 3rd party login for its streaming platform PlaySuisse. But this isn’t intended to be the end of the growth. OneLog is open to include all small and medium-sized media companies in Switzerland. 

What are the main benefits of OneLog for media brands? 

The end to third-party cookies is a pain point for all publishing companies, but the perceived urgency varies across brands. So, when the OneLog team works to bring a publisher onto the solution, focus is placed on this lack of data which means products can’t be built with the reader’s needs in mind. 

• A state-of-the-art login solution with the latest features (e.g. FaceID, TouchID), from Switzerland for Switzerland, and one that is easy to integrate as it complies with the standard, with open APIs to connect to other technologies
• Cost sharing – OneLog is not a profit center expansion of the respective 1st party database. However, there is no cross-company data exchange (we’ll come onto that later)
• On this same topic, smaller publishers can benefit from the larger companies in the technological game to keep up with the speed of change
• 100% GDPR compliance 
• All the benefits that come with logging a user. The participating media companies can increase advertising revenue, personalize user experiences, collect first-party data and learn about their audience to improve every aspect of their business. And, of course, registration increases reader propensity to subscribe by up to 40%.

OneLog’s thinking is also that the more media companies who use this solution, the better it is for everyone. Users will only have a single registration before they can log in everywhere. 

“OneLog is a vital component of our registration strategy at Blick Group. For those users who have existing login credentials from any other big media brand in Switzerland, the ability to utilize the same credentials to access our platform removes a significant barrier to entry. This streamlined registration process aids us in broadening our user base. OneLog’s stringent commitment to upholding data privacy and safeguarding user information amplifies the trust our users place in our login infrastructure, a factor critical for fostering strong audience relationships in the digital age.”

Adrian Gottwald, Head of Reader Revenue at Blick Group

What about the benefits for readers? Why should they create an account? 

• Simplicity. With a single registration, users gain access to numerous online offerings from different media companies
• OneLog relies on the highest security standards and, with the option of two-step verification, their account is even more secure (OneLog recently got awarded with the digital trust label for instance). We all know and use Google SSO, but we actually don’t really know what they do with our data. So, the goal is to be a more trusted, secure login system. 
• Personal details can be managed by the user centrally and conveniently in one place (« user cockpit »)
• A state-of-the-art login solution with the latest features (e.g. FaceID, TouchID), from Switzerland for Switzerland

What is the user experience on OneLog? 

I tested this out for myself on a variety of media brands using the OneLog service, and the experience is extremely smooth and simple. 

As the team highlighted, the user’s main touch point is with the publisher rather than OneLog. The goal here is to build trust with individual brands and help readers understand how their data is being dealt with. After all, the publisher’s content is the reason why users come in the first place, and the reason why this should always be the main focus. OneLog is simply the facilitator to get these users registered. 

Whilst the registration page is fairly similar across partners, to keep some kind of consistency, the branding differs based on the publisher’s house style. For example, below is the landing page for registration on L’Illustré and Blick.

After creating an account, I’m emailed to confirm. 

I was then curious as to whether I would be automatically logged into another OneLog publication if I visited their website after having already created an account. 

On Bilanz’s website, for example, I arrived on the homepage and wasn’t automatically logged in. However, upon clicking on the ‘Account’ icon in the header, I was presented with a OneLog page that asked me if I’d like to link my existing account. At this stage, I have the chance to provide further information (for personalization reasons, as the first step only required my email and password) as well as accept the terms and conditions of this specific brand.  

How is OneLog already benefiting publishers? 

Marc Isler, CRO at Tamedia, shared how they’ve been using OneLog since 2020 rather than self-building a login solution. They also strongly believe that an independent Swiss solution for login will bring value to users across Swiss media platforms. 

This decision has also proved valuable for their reader revenue model: 

Logging in users and getting them to try the [premium] product for free for two weeks has helped us a lot to grow our known user base, who we can then target, primarily through email, both with a specific registration onboarding journey and then with subscription offers. 

We have really focussed on a full registration strategy for anonymous users first, then converting them into subscribers after the 14 day trial phase. In summer last year, we realized that, in the post-covid period, we needed to test more flexible approaches – so we mixed in special longer term subscription offers also for anonymous users and have gained really strong results in directly converting them. 

Those results gave us confidence to move away from the two-step strategy and we have implemented the direct subscription offers based on Piano’s propensity model (LTS) in March, offering a 1-month free trial to lower and no score groups. So far the results look great. What we have changed now is to use the login mechanism for all new newsletter subscribers and we have further testing planned for low LTS cohorts to first push them specifically to the editorial newsletter sign ups, as we see very strong results in general of subscription conversions coming from our editorial newsletters.

We generally manage to convert 3-8% of our registered users to subscribers – and we’re getting better and better at it. OneLog as an industry standard has certainly helped us, as user acceptance for logging in has increased with it, but also the habit of logging in with OneLog (easy and secure).

What about data sharing between publishers and OneLog? 

There is no data lake. Every company is in charge of its own first party data. 

Of course, this is a limitation of OneLog as it’s every advertiser’s dream to have access to this kind of data lake. But it’s also the beauty of the solution’s game. Privacy for readers is a priority, and OneLog only collects the data necessary for a secure and user-friendly login service. 

There are two kinds of data collected: 

• The basic data collected by OneLog that is required for registration are e-mail address, password, if applicable surname, first name, title
• OneLog also stores additional data on behalf of individual partners. But this data is only accessible to the respective partner, allowing each publisher to build up their own first-party strategy.

One of the next steps for OneLog is also to evaluate password-less options which could potentially provide more security for the platform, but they’re seeing how the adoption goes in the market. 

Ultimately, this is the proof of concept that industry alliances can work and prove beneficial for both publishers and readers. 

“This is a very important message. There are so many fields where we do not compete with each other, where the real competition is somewhere else, where we can share costs, for example, or work together for the sake of the whole industry… it’s this that we’re trying to achieve here.”

Patrick Rademacher, COO of the Global Media Unit at Ringier AG & Chairman of the Board of OneLog 

Thank you very much to Patrick and Silvano for taking the time to talk to me! I think the OneLog model is a brilliant example to set for the rest of the world to follow.

I recently had the pleasure, and honor, of speaking at Google’s local news event on a panel alongside Daisy Donald and Jeremy Clifford of FT Strategies, and Steve Barron, of Highlands News and Media. One of the biggest challenges brought up was the question of advertising vs subscription for digital monetization. My argument: let’s stop talking about advertising vs subscription, it’s advertising AND subscription that will support sustainability for local news publishers.

In 2020 and 2021 we experienced a subscription boom as COVID forced readers online and arguably gave audiences a new-found appreciation of quality journalism.

2022 was the year of retaining these subscribers. 

As for 2023, the focus is on diversification as we’ve realized how any revenue stream can be put at risk at any moment with the cost-of-living crisis, increasing competition amongst subscription brands, tightening privacy regulations and the end of 3rd party cookies.

Of course, both advertising and subscriptions are considered as important revenue streams for digital publishers. But they’re often considered as dichotomous – you either have an ad-based revenue or subscription-based model. 

But what if you can employ both? 

And how? 

One word: registration 

The act of converting anonymous users into known, logged, free members. 

If you’ve been following The Audiencers closely, you might have noticed that I’m a big fan of registration. Of course, we’re all aware by now of the value of registration for a subscription model as a way of increasing propensity to subscribe. But what’s often forgotten is the reason why this is the case… engagement.

Logged users are highly more engaged than anonymous readers – they come back more frequently, consume more content, stay for longer and interact with your site thanks to the features they now have access to as a member, such as being able to read more articles, save content for later and share their opinion through commenting. 

Tool tip: build registration as a product, just like subscription, with a value proposition, key benefits and an onboarding journey that aims to increase engagement. For instance: encourage newsletter sign up, app download and introduce new members to their account space so they make the most of the value you offer. Find more registration best practices here.

> You’ll also enjoy: How Alternatives Economiques’ registration model increases LTV

Use registration to learn about how to engage your audience

Thanks to de-anonymization and gaining a single-customer view, registration also gives you valuable insights into your audience behavior and the strategies that are most effective for encouraging a value exchange and increasing engagement. 

A great example of a publisher maximizing on this strategy is Blick in Switzerland, who now has 647,000 logged members, and counting, acquired through a diverse acquisition strategy: 

Thanks to this model, they’ve been able to increase frequency, recency and volume of visits, as well as better understand what makes their users partake in a value exchange. 

For example, although commenting has been a valuable acquisition channel (14.5% of their members registered this way), the vast majority of these members are male, despite Blick’s overall audience being very balanced male-female. Raffles, however, which account for 33.1% member aqcuisition, appear to engage and attract both genders, so the publishers has been putting more energy and focus into this conversion strategy over others. 

Registration for revenue diversification

Importantly, both subscription and advertising monetization are an outcome of customer engagement, meaning registration supports revenue diversification.

Subscription: 

• Registered users are highly more likely to subscribe: 13 times more at L’Équipe and 45 times at The Independent
• They also have higher retention rates meaning a greater CLTV than your average subscriber

Advertising:

• Thanks to the first-party data and custom reader IDs, ad spots can be sold at a higher cost (targeted to a specific profile), and higher engagement means more eyes on more pages

But whilst registration provides a valuable solution to balancing these two revenue streams, there’s a lot more at play given that many of the features of ad-based models aren’t synonymous with a high-value premium offer and a reader-first model. For instance:

• Instead of content being purely for generating traffic and bringing eyeballs on-page, articles in a reader-first model should be curated to reinforce loyalty and engagement, aiming to increase recency, frequency and volume of visits
• Engagement and life-time value metrics should be prioritized over clicks and page views, something that the whole company needs to buy into. This article on the best engagement metrics for a reader revenue model will be useful here

Not all users are created equal

The other important point to consider when it comes to diversification is dynamicity – adapting your strategy to the individual reader. 

We’ve all heard about how large publishers such as The New York Times or Washington Post employ complex, machine-learnt dynamic paywalls, but dynamicity is far from something exclusively for these large media. 

The whole idea of being dynamic is that you maximize the value of each individual visitor, whether they subscribe or not. 

For instance, whilst your fan readers who visit your site on a daily basis are likely to respond positively to a paywall and convert into a subscriber, volatile users who only visit once a month will probably turn around, leave your site and find content elsewhere. Of course, if they do that, you won’t be able to monetize them in even a minimal way (e.g. from advertising). Instead, you can consider targeting these less engaged users with a soft conversion journey to increase engagement and LTV, such as by offering a free article before encouraging them to sign up to your newsletter or create a free account (where you can collect additional ad revenue and data points to inform your strategy).

You can then work on personalized experiences to more effectively convert them into a subscriber. 

For example, say you have a handful of newsletters, each with a specific theme. You may not have machine-learning technology, but you do know that subscribers to each of these newsletters are interested in a specific topic. So, what ELLE Magazine did was to create a UTM_source to place in the URL links in their newsletter so that subscribers to each newsletter would see a paywall adapted to this interest. 

For users signed up to the fashion newsletter, the paywall copy fore-fronted the subscription benefits that a fashion-lover would appreciate. Whilst those receiving the relationships newsletter would see different copy, adapted to this specific interest. 

> You’ll also enjoy: How the fashion magazine ELLE is using a dynamic paywall to optimize conversion rates

The personalization possibilities are endless… 

How can the wall adapt? 

• The design: colors, images, photos of journalists, format (banner, box or pop-up)
• The offers (annual vs monthly pricing, discounted offer, number of offers on the wall…)
• The wording (value proposition, personalization to the person or the content-type…) 

What could the wall adapt to?

The reader’s context or profile:

• The content type – is this wall on an article talking about general news or politics? E.g. the content is telling you key information about the reader’s interests, so use this to your advantage in writing an adapted value proposition 

Le Figaro adapts the paywall messaging based on the content type:

• The source of traffic – did this user come from a newsletter, social media, a partner…? E.g. users coming from a news aggregation site may not yet be aware of the value you offer. So, you could consider leading them through an adapted soft engagement journey, just like Journal du Dimanche did with upday
• The reader’s location, e.g. The Guardian’s personalized messaging says “you’re joining us from France”