No matter how where news publishers are in their quests to optimise reader revenue, there are some simple things they can do that will help them understand their audiences better. 

“Don’t be so blinded by subscriptions that you lose sight of other opportunities to increase audience,” Patrick Appel, vice president of data strategy for Piano, told attendees of INMA’s recent Media Subscriptions Summit.

Piano and other third-party vendors shared important information during the summit to help attendees navigate their subscriptions journey.

Piano

Piano created its subscription propensity tool in 2017 to target users for paywalls. Since then the company has found ways to fine-tune that model to balance subscription and advertising revenues while also increasing audience engagement more broadly.

“Sometimes you get the subscription increase but lose the overall audience,” Appel said. 

To optimise subscriptions, publishers still need to show their paywall to a large audience that contains a critical mass of likely subscribers, as well as potential registered users. And they can’t lose sight of retention. To that end, Piano has developed more sophisticated tools to segment audiences beyond subscription propensity — they now have registration propensity, return propensity, and cancellation propensity metrics. 

“Not everyone has access to our model, but you can still apply this way of thinking,” said Michael Silberman, Piano’s executive vice president of media strategy.

The key, he said, is to figure out how much exposure to the product publishers need to give to get different users to pay. For example, direct visitors who click several stories have very different propensities than those who come in once via Facebook and then bounce. 

Understanding your own content is also extremely valuable, Silberman said. Usually a small proportion of stories generate an outsize proportion of subscriptions. Once publishers identify these stories, they can showcase them to the right audience.

Google

Google offers a simple audience segmentation tool with similar goals, explained Anntao Diaz, head of Google News Initiative Data Tools.

Its News Consumer Insight tool sorts users into casual readers who may visit just once a month, loyal readers who come at least three times, and brand lovers who come three times. 

For most sites, Diaz said, the vast majority of users are casual readers, but since brand lovers are far more likely to convert, simply being able to identify them is incredibly valuable. 

“If you are new to this, that is exactly the place to start,” Diaz said. 

Zuora

The Zuora Subscribed Institute is releasing its Subscriptions Economy Index (SEI) in April, and attendees of the summit got a sneak preview.

“What’s going on in the subscriptions economy right now? The theme across all of them is consumers might be getting frustrated — too many subscriptions, pricing is tricky, experience isn’t great, hard to cancel,” David Warren, principal director of Zuora Subscribed Institute, told summit attendees. “But is subscription fatigue really a thing? Sort of, but there’s something else going on.”

Warren suggested news media companies follow 100 customers to see who churns, who upsells, downsells, etc. Compare the revenue made from the customers who did not churn: Did it increase? Decrease? He said 70% to 80% of revenue in a mature subscriptions business comes from existing customers.

When people do want to leave? Warren suggests news publishers have options that will keep them.

“Supporting multiple models is good for business,” he said. “If you have three to five different charge models running, you’ll see much higher revenue growth. If you don’t have a place to take the customer other than to the exit door, then we do see churn. If you see options, we see that less so.”

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