Consumer revenue

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Grow your audience and paid online subscription base by bridging significant gaps in reaching key segments, including Black readers.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Consider reaching a national audience that cares about a topic your newsroom covers well. The national audience may not subscribe because the rest of your reporting isn’t as relevant to them. How could you get them to read, interact with, and most importantly, financially support your coverage?

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Develop a program that bundles locally produced goods from local businesses with subscription offers. For example, you can work with a local coffee roaster, purchasing 1-pound bags of coffee, at half-price, to combine with an online-only subscription or weekend print delivery and full online access.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Use your newsroom talent and expertise to put on live events that show off your depth as an organization and offer new ways for audiences to engage with your work.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Reduce your subscriber churn by focusing on three key areas: grace period, credit card management and targeted customer communication.

The Narwhal found that fundraising can be as simple as a direct ask tucked into a email newsletter post-script. Accordingly, they trashed the usual non-profit campaign calendar in favor of timely, specific invitations for their readers to back their action.

Retaining members requires trust. It feels basic, but The Correspondent’s missteps in communicating with members appears to have accelerated the sustainability crisis that led to the site’s closure in 2020. The post-mortem has lessons for communicating with members and avoiding the broken promises that spike churn.

Santa Cruz Local CEO Kara Meyberg Guzman united her team behind the practice of community engagement by building a business and editorial case for listening, patient relationship building, and a membership model. Their listening has already paid off in membership gains, audience loyalty, and editorial victories.

When a 100-year-old paper in North Carolina dug into their audience data, they learned about segmentation that helped them boost digital subscriptions.

In 2020, sometimes it feels like we’re all throwing things against the wall. Seven mini-cases from LION publishers offer tactics and full-scale strategies they’ve used to diversify and grow their revenue. Together, the ideas are a good starting point for those regrouping on revenue.

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.

News organizations are finding ways to pivot their consumer revenue strategies in response to COVID-19, from taking events online to making timely appeals and building connections among audiences and experts. These adaptations of audience engagement and memberful modes of working are ready for application to our new normal.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Ask the journalists in your newsroom to tell readers about the value of their work and be ambassadors for digital subscriptions on social media.

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 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.

Newsrooms need relevant metrics that connect their work with the business’s bottom line, which often requires pulling data from various nooks and crannies in the organization. Sharing data regularly, with routines to guide that sharing, makes it clear how editorial decisions can contribute to the financial performance of the overall team. This primer on what to measure and how to socialize those metrics with the newsroom demonstrates tactics for bridging functional roles within a news organization.

Paid acquisition can juice revenue for publishers, the question remains as to predicting ROI on various paid channels. Phillip Smith pulls together a primer on the theory behind these strategies and tactics for a predictable, membership-driving revenue playbook in the first of a series of pieces for The Membership Puzzle Project.

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.

With the revenue strategies of news organizations evolving, so are the structures and demands on the people creating new ways of sustaining news. This report from The American Journalism Project in partnership with Impact Architects and The News Revenue Hub details how a handful are accomplishing their revenue work and rounds up resources for operations and hiring.

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.

Updates from the News Revenue Hub show that member and donor-driven news organizations are missing money when they set low fundraising goals or restrict their communication with audiences about the necessity and purposes of their fundraising.

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.

Retaining subscribers and members after they join is a complex business. This list of tactics is a quick and concise primer on where to start keeping people on your books, regardless of the sophistication of your marketing operation or engagement technology stack.

Calculating lifetime value of a subscriber is complex, though this spreadsheet makes it significantly simpler to perform that tricky math.

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.

This article explores steps the newsroom took to establish the mini-publisher teams and the experiments they’ve run.

These detailed case studies from Digital Content Next and the Lenfest Institute explore the finer points of successful metering and revenue-driving calls to action for Tribune Media, Slate, and The Guardian.

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.

This study by the Medill Center at Northwestern University re-centers the importance of local content in encouraging daily news consumption, which the massive data project shows is the most likely predictor of subscription and retention. As simple as it seems, this change represents a dramatic reorientation of the KPI’s for news organizations pivoting from ad-based to reader-supported models.

Reporters can apply a mini-publisher perspective to drive subscription growth, as demonstrated by The Seattle Times as they roll their audience-focused experiments across the newsroom.

The Correspondent reveals how more than a year of relationship building and foundational work led to their successful $2.5 million crowdfunding campaign.

Based on his work transforming news organizations, Tim Griggs distills the essential elements of successful membership-driven news organizations. He adds a simple outline for the all-important gaps-assessment meeting for those just getting started. This outline is a good starting point for understanding the table stakes for membership-driven news organizations.

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.

Engaged, community-motivated journalism satisfies a public-service mission and generates powerful levers for earning audience support.

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.

End-of-year fundraising campaigns with foundation matches are both an art and a science, as an examination of ProPublica’s strategy reveals. Email, direct asks, and a campaign mindset helped the organization bring in more than one-third of its small dollar revenue during its December campaign.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Dallas Morning News, which has eight major college football programs in its coverage area and just two full-time writers dedicated to them, concentrated on its smallest but most local school and turned it into a digital subscription success story.

An in-depth, quantitative study of messages, mediums, images, and subscription types demonstrates low ROI for Facebook ad spend and glimmers of promise in email subscription appeals.

This roundup of resources offers practical, step-by-step guidance and case studies for how to beef up your digital subscription business.

Kunle Campbell shared key points to encourage potential subscribers to finish the checkout process, or at the bare minimum, fork over their email address. This technical and tactical guide comes complete with screenshots outlining UX best-practices from his Facebook Local News Subscription Accelerator session.

This example shows how membership perks can make engagement an opportunity for community and conversion.

This quick case study unpacks how The Star Tribune used middle of the funnel tactics to achieve 30 percent growth in digital subscriptions with Facebook distribution.

This case study outlines how a nonprofit news organization serving Vermont grew its audience, diversified its revenue base, and secured a game-changing financial investment with an entrepreneurial approach.

Helpful guidelines to consider as you compare your subscription offerings to competitors.

Here’s how you can use content marketing to target prospective subscribers off site — in this case, via Facebook.

Among the tips here: Cut page load times, create more/better email newsletter products, close site-access loopholes, and encourage registration based on page depth.

Think through whether membership is right for your enterprise with four clear questions.

How the relationship between recency, frequency and volume helps predict what subscribers will stick with you.

Lessons in membership programs, including the difference between “thick” and “thin” approaches.

The Guardian has transformed from teetering on financial oblivion to generating more revenue from readers than advertising.

A slew of tips on retention, including customer service specialization, value-added products, and re-engagement marketing.

Driving paying readers means optimizing content to create subscribers, something Scandinavian publishers are doing at a world-class rate.