The future of reaching the next generation of subscribers through bundled offers is about breadth not depth, according to Todd Olsted, vice president/bundle subscription strategy at Dow Jones.

Olsted shared the details and strategy of Dow Jones’ WSJ+ product during last week’s INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Amsterdam. The initiative, featuring Dow Jones’ brands The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, and Investors’ Business Daily, soft launched in 2024.

“We’re not immune to legacy disruption,” Olsted said. “Subscription fatigue is a real thing we’re facing. And the economy is part of it. In the U.S., nearly one in four subscribers say that they are willing to cancel one of their subscriptions to save costs.”

Brands like Disney+ and Amazon Prime are mirroring the “evolution of content consumption,” as Olsted called it: “People want experiences curated, personalised, worth their time and money. Industries, not just the media, are responding through breadth.”

Dow Jones is taking a different approach.

“We see a slightly different path,” he said. “We believe the future of bundling is about depth. Our readers don’t want just a little bit of everything. They want to be able to deep dive into the subjects that get them ahead. WSJ+ is our way of packaging all that power under one subscription. It’s not just a bunch of add-ons. It’s an ecosystem of expertise built for ambitious people looking to get ahead.”

The bundled offer is not just a discount, Olsted said, creating a premium instead of a transactional experience. 

The soft launch focused on WSJ super users, offering a dashboard that gives subscribers a personalised newsfeed and aggravates articles from all four brands. Subscribers can also customise a stocks watch list. 

Olsted shared three steps taken internally to help with challenges of keeping the initiative value-led instead of pricing-led:

1. Leveraged data/insights in terms of how customers were leveraging and engaging the products.

2. Introduced new features based on insights from customers.

3. Optimised sales tactics to go from broad to specific and targeted, focusing on “customers most primed to purchase a bundle.”

WSJ+ has fully launched now, and Dow Jones hopes to double revenue from bundled subscriptions over the next year, Olsted said.

“We’re actually gaining new customers,” he said. “The bundling offers themselves — even when you migrate up to the bundle — we’re gaining incremental subscriptions from that because of the four individual subscriptions. Because ARPU was double, we’ve naturally gained revenue from that.”

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