While, generally speaking, the demand for online news is driven by the news cycle, people are also discovering news through a variety of channels — social media, Web sites, and apps.

In the United States, 23% of pageviews come from direct traffic, INMA Readers First Initiative Lead Greg Piechota during the recent Subscriber Acquisition Master Class. About 18% come from social and 27% are from search. In other countries, Google Discover is accounting for more than 50% of traffic.

During the recent master class, presented by the Readers First Initiative, media leaders shared how their companies are leveraging an audience-first mindset to reach readers with the content and offers that appeal to them. 

There are many paths to your news brand, but what happens when you’ve reached your audience?

“You need to start investing in branding, telling people, explaining to people what actually you do,” Piechota said. “Why should they consider subscribing to your brand.”

Le Devoir’s post-Meta strategy

On August 1, 2023, Meta removed all Canadian news content from its platform in response to the Online News Act. News brands like Le Devoir experienced immediate, negative fallout, including lower traffic and revenue.

Marianne Gélinas, the company’s director of marketing and business intelligence, shared insights into some of the seven pillars of a tactical strategy Le Devoir implemented to inform and engage its audience, including sending e-mails to all available users and adjusting their pricing structure.

Prior to the news ban, Le Devoir had only one price for digital access (CAD$17.75). The new pricing strategy involved introductory offers and rebates. In addition to the pricing strategy, there was a paywall update, powered by Piano, that highlighted different offers and benefits, Gélinas said: “The objective was to help people subscribe and remove the most barriers possible in order to do so.”

Le Devoir used Piano to push out pop-ups, targeting three possible actions from the users in order of involvement — newsletter subscription, app download, and subscription.

1. All of Le Devoir’s newsletters are free for readers, thus the barrier of entry is lowest here.
2. The mobile or tablet app download requires a download and a possible change in behaviour to consume news.
3. The highest level of engagement would be a subscription because it involves signing up for a financial commitment on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Digital subscriptions increased thanks to the removal of price barriers, more engaged readership, and improvements in the paywall. Gélinas said the total budget for this strategy was only CAD$3,700: “Such important results with such a low investment.”

Condé Nast’s content-centric approach

Driving profitable growth across its diverse portfolio of brands is a priority for U.S. publisher Condé Nast. Madison Tucker, associate director of paid digital marketing, shared some of the strategies the company is using to employ various channels to reach potential subscribers whilst enhancing their overall experience.

One of the standout initiatives within Condé Nast’s marketing strategy is its new content-centric direct response (CCDR) approach, which emphasises content over special offers.

“What we’re trying to do is really use our product — which is content — to leverage that as the hook of why someone should subscribe instead of introducing the tote bag, the offer, even value proposition messaging or the print cover,” Tucker said. “Any of those details come on our order form later. But in the initial ad, all the user is seeing is a piece of content that looks very native in their feed.”

For example, a user might encounter a captivating article from Vogue or The New Yorker, prompting them to click through. Upon clicking, users are directed to article landing pages rather than subscription forms.

“There isn’t really anything about it that is screaming, ‘This is an ad, click on me,’” Tucker said. “It’s just a piece of content that a user scrolling through their feed on Instagram or Facebook or our other social channels could come across and be interested in.”

The success of this content-centric approach is evident in its ability to drive subscriptions and increase traffic to article pages.

“We’ve seen order page conversion rates a lot stronger in bringing users in this way,” Tucker said. “There’s a lot higher of a digital take rate that we’ve noticed as far as not advertising totes or print magazines. And then also the pageviews that we see as far as traffic goes to these article pages are extremely higher.”

Content-led growth at News Corp Australia

Brendan Collogan knows a thing or two about what news consumers want and, more importantly, what they’re willing to pay for. During his time at News Corp Australia, he led a programme aimed at increasing the number of subscribers by focusing on content-led growth.

Brands should be looking at the articles they’re producing and evaluating the average value of that article. Are companies putting too many resources behind producing a lot of articles that have low value? If so, Collogan recommends a total retooling of the investment.

“There’s a lot of stories being produced, they’re not converting many subscribers, and there’s not many existing subscribers reading them,” Collogan said.

Collogan says these stories can either be stopped or automated if possible. And the investment in these can be moved to other forms of content like high value articles.

“This is where most of the investment should flow from out of the high volume, low value into the low volume, high value quadrant,” Collogan said. “And then you’ve got stories that you are already producing a lot of that are high value and you should seek to continue to increase the mix of that.”

Focusing investment in the areas that will grow the value of journalism is the way News Corp Australia hit its one million subscriber milestone. This method helped them increase the average value of each story by 170%.

“The 170% represent higher conversion and higher engagement on average for each article produced,” Collogan said. “The value of those things is correlated with revenue.”

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