What started as an impressive increase in digital subscriptions in 2020-21 at Nordwest Mediengruppe transitioned into a challenge by 2022-23, as was the case for many news media companies around the world.

Mediengruppe is a regional news media companies in northwestern Germany, an area with a population of 1.4 million people. The company has three titles that combine to one digital brand; 75,000 print subscribers 22,000 e-paper subscribers (who also have access to the Web site), and 17,000-Web only subscribers.

During the recent INMA Media Subscriptions Town Hall, executives from Mediengruppe shared how by 2022, the company couldn’t keep up with its pandemic success in digital subscriptions. During the first two years of the pandemic, churn wasn’t a problem — even with a strict paywall. 

“But we couldn’t keep the momentum in 2022 and 2023,” explained Andreas Ahlden, head of marketing and paid content at the company. “We didn’t reach the number of active subscriptions we wanted to reach. We have a limited market as a regional brand, and we had been growing in reach for the first time in many years. Then growth got harder. People started using trials, short-term subscriptions, we saw lots of turnover, and our churn rate increased a lot.”

Reader analytics

The answer: a small analytics unit that included a new data scientist and a handful of data-savvy editors. The unit took a look at user behaviour and content, changing pricing based on their findings. In March 2023, increasing current monthly subscripions increased from €7.90 to €9.90 with a yearlong subscription at €7.90 per month offer for new subscribers.

In the meantime, the editorial side of the company was building a small unit for audience analytics. Starting at the beginning of 2023, the team evaluated articles and topics, categorising content into five groups: premium articles, conversion articles, subscription articles, reach articles, and ghost articles.

The latter, which the team focused on, is an article that gets zero conversions, less than 100 subscriber clicks, and less than 300 non-subscriber clicks. 

“These numbers gave us a better sense of where we have potential, where to respond, where we want to put effort into,” said Max Holscher, a member of the company’s chief editors board.

They built three audience teams: regional economics, crime/justice, and people/social topics.

Since the teams began their work in June, the number of ghost articles have decreased. The audience teams, as well as other teams, are able to track the ghost articles through a dashboard. The teams are also responsible for new products to create more engagement like newsletters, Instagram content, podcasts, and magazines. 

“In October, the crime/audience team produced no ghost articles and a high read of subscriber reads — articles that create engagement with our products,” Holscher said. 

Some of this ghost content came from things reporters had covered for decades. In some areas, the number of articles decreased by 1,000 some months, most of them ghost articles, Holscher said.

Engagement score

The company implemented an engagement score in July to measure the activity of subscribers, Ahlden said. One aspect of that was separating subscribers into five cohorts based on engagement: fans, habitual reader, occasional reader, seldom reader, and no show. 

The next challenge was making that content usable.

The company’s newly hired data scientist made all the data flow into an audience database and into the company’s CRM system, Ahlden explained. 

“Being able to look into this data gave us the impression we had to put some people on it,” he said. “That’s where the magic happens. We’re now able to look into the data. There’s a strong correlation between retention and usage and our newsletter usage. That was interesting because in the past, we actually considered our newsletter to mainly be a potential conversion tool” when its actually working better to drive engagement.

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