Tracking the right metrics, alignment across the organization and ensuring your end user is always put first are essential factors in successful reader revenue products. And for many, including Financial Times, establishing a North Star has been the secret to achieving this.
A North Star goal for media companies represents a guiding, overarching objective that helps align efforts and strategies towards long-term success.
- It drives decision-making
- Serves as a unifying metric for the company’s performance
- Communicates the organization’s impact and progress to the rest of the company
- Enables teams to focus on impact and sustainable, product-led growth.
FT Strategies established a checklist to help organisations create effective North Star goals, detailing that North Stars should be:
- Single, specific and measurable, so that it acts as a vehicle for ambition. This sets it apart from a traditional business plan.
- Bold enough that it challenges you and your organisation. It is based on ambition, not just a calculated projection, with a cost for not meeting it. It should cause slight discomfort.
- Achievable enough to ensure that you don’t set yourself up for failure.
- Memorable enough to keep everyone focused (e.g. the number should be rounded).
- Aspirational and purposeful, so it can inspire the whole organisation on your journey.
- Time-bound (typically 3-5 years). This creates urgency whilst also recognizing that times change.
Above all, the North Star shouldn’t be a vanity metric – a measure that lacks context, has no clear intent and doesn’t guide action or learning. I.e. metrics that make us feel good but don’t help us do better work or make better decisions.
Village Media’s North Star: 25% of the total addressable market should be brand lovers
As a media dedicated to “making community news sustainable”, encouraging readers to return, engage and stay is essential to Village Media’s mission. They therefore defined their North Star around the goal of increasing the percentage of brand lovers – anyone who visits their site more than 15 days/month.
This is easy to understand, specific, measurable, and can guide action across the company.
Nation Media Group’s North Star: to become Africa’s premier news destination, with a 500 million daily interactions across all digital platforms by 2027
Speaking to WAN-IFRA, Pamela Sittoni, Group Managing Editor, says their North Star will see the company “transforming into the most trusted, empowering and innovative content platform in Africa; we want to reach 500 million daily interactions or engagements across all our digital platforms.”
Research and analysis into this target suggests this could be achieved thanks to two major transformation moves: newsroom integration into a single team with one editorial direction and central decision making, and a “quality over quantity” content strategy.
This North Star helps inspire the whole company, not just business teams, towards becoming truly digital and continuously thinking about how to ensure the customer is the central focus.
The Irish Independent’s North Star: secure the future of independent Irish journalism, reaching X digital subscriptions by 2025 and generating X revenue
Although slightly outdated, this example from The Irish Independent (shared at an INMA conference) provides a nice visual of the North Star framework in action.
To reach its North Star goal, teams created metrics and then broke them down into smaller, achievable tasks.
Financial Times’ North Star: from engagement to LTV to Global Paying Audience
Since 2016, Financial Times has defined a single metric that matters, a North Star, that they consider essential to digital transformation – the process of evolving an organisation to a point where it can use technology, data and strategy to fulfill its mission, as Tara Lajumoke, Managing Director of FT Strategies until August 2023, shared in an interview.
When defining this first North Star, the team considered the biggest factor that determined whether an FT subscriber would continue to use their subscription. The answer was determined as their level of engagement with content and amount of value they’re getting out of it.
Thus, FT’s first North Star: RFV (recency, frequency and volume)
The metric looks over a 90-day period and calculates a score based on the number of days since a user’s last visit (recency), total number of visits in that period (frequency), and the number of “counted content pages” viewed.
A user is considered engaged when their RFV score is more than 18.2, and becoming engaged leads to a 10 percent reduction in cancellation rates.
This became a very concrete, strategic piece of information that people across the organization could understand, use to prioritize their work and rally behind.
For example, with this North Star in mind, the team set out to build a feature called myFT, a simple but effective personalization mechanism based on a subscribers preferred topics. They discovered that the mere act of becoming a myFT user increased engagement by 86%.
Evolving towards a more comprehensive North Star
From a focus on engagement from 2014-2019, FT has since developed their strategy to develop a North Star metric of lifetime value (LTV) in 2020.
Although, it’s worth noting that LTV didn’t replace RFV, but built on it, especially as the latter is an important predictor of the former.
LTV does however support better decision making when assigning resources or prioritizing tasks for acquisition vs retention, or B2B vs B2C for instance.
> Get started with measuring LTV
GPA: Global Paying Audience
From 2023, the North Star was developed to Global Paying Audience, designed to help grow audience revenue beyond its core journalism offerings and across its broader portfolio of products and services, aiming for 3 million by 2028.
The GPA metric encompasses not only the core digital product but also live event customers, FT Specialist and print newspaper circulation, seeking revenue from across a range of sources.
> 100k downloads later, what I learnt from launching FT Edit
Metrics that matter
The Global Paying Audience North Star is part of a wider framework called “metrics that matter”, outlining a range of metrics that sit underneath GPA and used more regularly by different teams across the organization.
In short, Metrics That Matter (MTM) gives all departments at FT a shared framework & common language so everybody in the company can see how their day-to-day work impacts GPA.
- Reduces focus & pressure on the North Star
- Mirrors a simplified customer lifecycle
- Put more focus on retention
- Encourages evaluation of costs
- Links volume and value in all pursuits
- Uses existing metrics where possible
The new metrics “solar system” framework:
This has been established for 7 departments, hosted on FT Intranet for full visibility, with links to the Data Cataglogue (a space to support consistency and ownership of definitions across the business). KPI checklists help measure performance and take action using data.
For example, the consumer revenue group (B2C): (GPA = Global Paying Audience, FT’s current North Star as of 2023)
And Editorial team:
Looking to get started on Metrics That Matter? FT Strategies has created a dedicated playbook!
