When subscribers don’t read content, they’re far more likely to cancel their subscriptions. Hunting “zombies” to reduce churn should be part of any healthy subscription revenue strategy.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Refocus your community coverage to build trust and cultivate new, diverse audiences — growing subscriptions along the way.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Prioritize digital subscribers over page views, and provide subscriber-only stories on topics that are vital and unique to your community.
Use your archives and partnerships with cultural institutions to retell your community’s most fascinating stories through audio — engaging new audiences and opening doors to new sponsorship opportunities.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Facing a hit to advertising, The Day in New London, Conn., partnered with the Local Media Foundation to launch a crowdfunding campaign to support its COVID-19 coverage.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As the COVID-19 pandemic hit advertising, The Keene Sentinel of New Hampshire used its email database to generate additional revenue through a “grocery giveaway” sweepstakes and several other initiatives that served the public.
This one-stop guide to membership offers on ramps for organizations beginning to develop these modes of relating with audiences while digging deep into the strategies and tactics that organizations need to cultivate vibrant membership and keep members for the long haul. Staffing, product thinking, trust, revenue, it’s all in here.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Newsday is driving digital subscriptions and engagement with targeted newsletters.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As a local news organization, you can solicit drawings from children and publish a special section thanking essential employees who have kept your community going throughout the pandemic. It’s a great way to provide some positive news — and generate ad revenue along the way.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Indianapolis Star created a playbook that helps journalists build a business plan for multimedia projects, including how to engage target audiences, acquire subscribers and increase advertising and sponsorships.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the KPCC-LAist newsroom has invited questions from its audience. Nearly 4,000 people have written in. More than half of them have opted into newsletters, and nearly all have received a personal answer.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Inspired by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Detroit Free Press published its first community impact report to show its readers — and funders — how its journalism drives social change and makes Detroit a better place to live.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Identify and serve an audience segment that has left your print edition, but is still invested in your community and active in city life. Help them find value in a digital subscription.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: You have great reporting and writing skills. Use them to get grants and other funding for your newsroom.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Use this guide to convince those in charge that you need to turn your homepage into a donation destination during your fundraising campaign.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: WFAE kicked off a community podcast competition that sparked hundreds of new podcast ideas, revealed issues important to the community and empowered residents of all ethnicities and backgrounds to share their stories.
As revenue models change, so too are the ways funders assess the fit between a news organization and its audiences’ needs, including factoring in reader revenue as an indication of health and impact.
Subscriber retention efforts can start as soon as a subscription begins, as outlined in this guide to onboarding tactics from API’s Reader Revenue Toolkit. Examples from a range of news organizations are ready for testing and adaptation, from video to thank you notes and email newsletters.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Dallas Morning News is bringing in big audience numbers through browser push notifications.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Greeley Tribune in Colorado used a “mini-publisher” team to grow revenue around dining cards that offer customers “buy-one, get-one” deals at local restaurants and breweries.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The News Reporter of Columbus County, N.C., built a digital-first workflow, established a metered paywall and consolidated its subscription plans. The result was an increase in its circulation and subscription revenue.
This research from the Lenfest Institute and The Shorenstein Center illustrates best practices in digital subscription, focusing on the finer points of applying funnel discipline and implementing tools like paywalls and pay meters. The result is a playbook full of tactics to adapt, regardless of a news organization’s size or familiarity with reader revenue.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Engaging with and fundraising to a digital-first audience doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel or put your content behind a paywall. But you may need to get input from people across different departments and create small cross-departmental teams with different expertise to complete effective fundraising campaigns.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The University of North Carolina and Duke University’s student newsrooms teamed up to create the Rivalry Challenge around the Duke-UNC men’s basketball game earlier this year. There were two big parts to the challenge — a fundraising competition and a joint editorial project in print and online between the two teams of student journalists.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Miami Herald in August 2018 created Sports Pass, a sports-only digital subscription plan, allowing sports diehards both in and out of market to subscribe at a lower rate than a full digital subscription.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Sacramento Bee used a SMART-goal setting process to find audiences willing to pay for its work.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Durango Herald partnered with several organizations to use a solutions journalism approach to covering youth suicide, a sensitive subject that the publication had received criticism for in past coverage. The approach won over the publication’s critics and improved the community conversation around the difficult topic. The paper funded its coverage through a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., created cross-disciplinary teams across the company — spanning the newsroom and the sales/marketing side — to launch new products in specific content areas like food, politics and real estate. The initiative resulted in nearly $900,000 in new product revenue and, in the past two years, an increase in digital subscriptions by 250 percent.
When, and how, should members be consulted about decisions, and how does that fit with membership as a revenue strategy? The balance of expectations, transparency, communication, and shared ownership can be a delicate one that requires careful tending. Emily Goligoski of The Membership Puzzle Project rounds up advice about building and reinforcing member relationships from an international complement of news organizations who are building the membership playbook.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Detroit Free Press found a better way to serve one of its key audience segments — people hungry for coverage of the auto industry — than running a standard serialized project.
Gwen Vargo from API rounds up examples of well-converting offer pages to demonstrate how their design influences trust and encourages conversion. Design choices at this important stage in the funnel can make or break subscription rates.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Bay Area News Group and McClatchy’s Sacramento Bee, two Northern California news organizations, are sharing stories, photos and video. A conversation among top editors about how to best collaborate resulted in a content-sharing and co-reporting experiment.
Examples from major news orgs and regional outlets fill this primer on the different dimensions on designing user flows that convert, gather reader data, and generate revenue.
No single approach, even email marketing, can be the sole source of subscriber growth and consumer revenue. News organizations should connect with prospective subscribers, both on and offline with a diversified strategy. Gwen Vargo unpacks a portfolio of techniques through mini-case studies.
Peter Gray, The Wall Street Journal’s VP of Optimization, reminds publishers and mini-publishers about the simplest things that boost reader revenue. This quick read includes an outline of the WSJ’s iterative, testing process.
Email is key to reaching individual readers and measuring the success of subscription marketing. This primer from API’s Reader Revenue Toolkit covers technical and programmatic approaches to email capture.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Durango Herald created a twice-monthly speaker series to connect with new audiences, existing readers and subscribers. The events focus on a wide variety of topics, and offer a new way to engage with diverse communities.
This multi-section report unpacks reader motivations to subscribe.
A breakdown of how the subscriber funnel works with the goal of retaining your audiences.
Financial support from philanthropic sources offers all sorts of new opportunities for funding journalism sustainably. It also raises some ethical questions that can potentially challenge reader trust.
How to determine you are engaging the right people with the right content.
You know you need to reach your targeted audiences where they are. But how do you decide where to distribute your content, how to test other platforms, and how to determine their effectiveness? Start here.
The Guardian has transformed from teetering on financial oblivion to generating more revenue from readers than advertising.
A collection of best practices for talking to readers with practical, downloadable examples.
Consumer revenue can take many forms, including subscriptions, membership and donations. And while these three types of consumer revenue serve unique audience needs and interests, the discipline required to execute each is very similar.
Native advertising can be a tremendously effective revenue driver and service to audiences. If executed poorly, however, it can quickly erode reader trust.
“We’re doing four times more in-depth investigative and explanatory reporting now than we did when our newsroom was three times larger than it is today. And I barely heard a peep from readers about most of the stuff we stopped doing.”
Reaching audiences is no longer just another function of marketing and circulation teams. The role of attracting readers/viewers/listeners belongs to everyone, including (and especially!) the newsroom.