I have spent last week visiting two different newsrooms, conducting workshops on digital storytelling and helping with the newsroom transformations where we get away from “editions” to concentrate on “stories”.
A centerpiece of conversations in these newsrooms has been about paywalls and subscriptions, an area in which newspaper organizations have come a long way in the past year, with much more to do.
However, if attracting readers who will pull out their credit cards and pay for content has been a challenge, perhaps a bigger one is that of making sure they stay as subscribers.
This challenge, which will become more difficult to conquer in the last quarter of 2018 and all of 2019, has been the center of a WAN IFRA study, which yields some interesting, but not surprising ,results.
Basically, in this study we learn that there are three main areas which offer some guarantee that subscribers will renew their subscriptions and stay with our title:
- News that offer local value. I would add here that “investigative journalism” about local issues is always a winner here, and we have seen how loyalty can be developed when this type of indepth reporting kicks in.
- “Need to know” material, what I call the “essentials”. How useful is this newspaper in my life? How does it help me survive life’s intricacies?
- “Nice to know” material, the not essential, but vital to make us happier, healthier, more informed and perhaps better conversationalists both at work and socially.
An interesting fact
What makes the challenge of retaining subscribers doubly hard may be reflected in this statement from the German daily, Welt, which has implemented an internal “loyalty score,” which makes it easier for all parts of the organization from editorial to marketing to tech to understand where the organization is losing people. According to Welt, half of their customers leave in the first three months, after which the rate of unsubscribing rate drops dramatically.
For more: