Audio and video continue to transform journalism, and at News Corp Australia, that is changing the perception of their value. 

During the recent INMA Asia/Pacific News Media Summit, Rod Savage, general manager/editorial innovation, and Ainslee Horstman, general manager/commercial networks, shared how this different value proposition is reinventing the company’s approach to journalism and creating new opportunities for generating revenue.

Convincing subscribers to pay for these new formats begins with inspiring journalists to embrace it as a new tool for storytelling. That means making them “as comfortable and competent with video and audio as they are with text and images,” Savage explained. And the payoff for doing that correctly will be immense: “I firmly believe that if we take care of the quality of our storytelling and the confidence of our storytellers, the numbers take care of themselves. We’re proving if the content is right, the audience is global.”

The benefits of that will be multi-dimensional, he said, and will include engaging a bigger audience but also making that audience more valuable by developing an ongoing subscriber relationship with them: “And we can not only retain but attract incredible journalistic talent to our profession.”

To accomplish that, News Corp Australia has put “the power and rigour of our journalism at the heart of our video and audio strategy,” Savage said. This means exposing every journalist to their personal audience engagement data by creating a digital enlightenment programme.

As it has leaned into video, it experimented with putting video behind a paywall — an unusual move, but one that paid off. Using the newsroom data tool Verity, it was simple to see cause and effect, discovering how big a role video was playing in driving subscriptions.

“In a year of experimentation, we can see that we’ve acquired more than 1,000 subscribers who came to us specifically because of the video asset they clicked on. That is an insanely powerful and actionable insight: People will pay and subscribe for video alone,” Savage said.

Video insights

With some 12 months of data looking at video as a tool to acquire and retain subscribers, the company has gained some interesting insights into its effectiveness:

• A premium video embedded in an article keeps people on that article 22% longer.
• A video locked behind a paywall gets played about four times longer than a free video.
• Specific content verticals can drive retention and acquisition through video — something being examined further.

“This is an enormous insight,” Savage said. “Video needs to hold a different value proposition for subscriber brands, and by locking video, we believe we’ve unlocked that value.”

More recently, the company began experimenting with vertical video, whose popularity has been driven by social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Earlier this month, News Corp Australia launched its own vertical video player, which Savage said “behaves like a social player but monetises 100 times better.” To further monetise it, the company is making some of the videos shoppable.

“We’re not sitting back waiting for our tech platform friends to figure out how to better commercialise the vertical format; we are bringing an audience on our platform to watch vertical and monetising it ourselves,” he said. “It’s an exciting and, we think, game-changing product.”

Listening for audio opportunities

While podcasts have exploded in popularity, they haven’t become big revenue generators. Audio audiences are accustomed to listening to podcasts for free, so big numbers don’t necessarily translate to dollars.

But Ainslee Horstman, general manager of commercial networks, explained how News Corp Australia is leveraging the medium for money.

“Our audio business delivered a 200% increase year on year in earnings,” she said. “At News Corp Australia, we look at podcasts as one of the most potent storytelling devices in the newsroom toolkit, and there are a number of key commercial use cases for them.”

Podcasts connect and engage with audiences far beyond the readership of the company’s print and digital publications. That makes podcasting a powerful tool for marketing and audience development, helping build relationships with an entirely new audience.

“We weaponise podcasts to support our engagement and acquisition goals for our consumer business,” Horstman said. “Podcasts are highly effective at reaffirming the value of a subscription to a subscriber. They enrich their experience with our journalism and help us to drive our retention.”

By increasing brand exposure and frequency across different channels, podcasts provide an “unparalleled level of intimacy and relationship with our journalists and our journalism far beyond what we see across many of our other channels.”

With that in mind, News Corp Australia can use podcasts to find an audience it doesn’t yet have a relationship with.

“So in this way, podcasts effectively warm the lead for us, allowing us to actively market to this cohort, driving a really rich experience of our journalism across the Apples and the Spotifys, whilst we … encourage them back to our owned assets via a really carefully curated ecosystem of premium editorial experiences,” Horstman said.  

Last year, to see if podcasts could help diversify its earnings, News Corp Australia launched its first subscription-only podcasts. Aggregating all of its true crime podcasts into one channel that it named CrimeX, it intentionally removed any references to Australia and positioned itself as a global offering.

Its premium-tier CrimeX+ offers subscribers the option of a monthly or a discounted annual subscription for early exclusive or ad-free content. Subscription results have exceeded initial expectations: “We’re about eight and a half times where we thought we’d be at this point in our journey,” Horstman said. “We are one of the biggest and fastest-growing subscription channels in Australia, and Apple has told us we are amongst the top 20 subscription channels on Apple podcast subscription globally.”

This is encouraging news — not just for News Corp Australia but for all publishers eyeing the opportunities in podcast revenue.

“The opportunity is also global,” she said. “But it’s not all roses. It’s certainly very thrilling, exciting, and encouraging, and we’re incredibly excited about where we’re at in the journey. But we’re very much in the midst of understanding the drivers of retention, particularly for the monthly customer. So we certainly have some work to do.” 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .