An increasingly focused approach to high school sports coverage during the past three years has proved to be a huge win for digital subscription sales at Advance Local.

In January, with the 2022-2023 school year only half over, our high school strategy had already delivered about 8,500 new monthly and annual subscriptions (priced at US$10 and US$100, respectively) across nine U.S. markets. Since January, we’ve added 7,500 more. And when it all nets out, the 2022-2023 high school sports season will have been worth at least 16,000 new subscriptions.

How we did it

Advance Local — whose markets span North America from Portland, Oregon, to Cleveland, Ohio, to Newark, New Jersey — has been a local news publisher for more than 100 years, and community athletics have always been part of our DNA. When we began developing a digital subscription strategy in 2019, we expected high school sports to be a cornerstone of the initiative.

But we hadn’t counted on the coronavirus.

Just as we began selling subscriptions in spring 2020, schools across America shut down. When sports returned in 2021, we sold about 6,000 subscriptions during the fall semester. More importantly, we developed strong views about what we needed to do to make 2022 bigger, namely:

• Develop a scalable, data-driven content strategy.
• Use our customer-data platform to identify the audience that customer research indicated would be our likeliest subscribers: parents with kids in high school sports.
• Aggressively promote daily high school sports newsletters in all markets to drive regular engagement.
• Evaluate whether free print-quality photo downloads for subscribers only would drive uptake.
• Experiment with the power of live-streamed sports to generate new starts.

We set a goal of 7,100 new starts — a year-over-year increase of about 14%.

Focus on content

To achieve these objectives, Story Lab — Advance Local’s internal incubator for newsroom innovation — invested US$125,000 from August through December 2022 to create hundreds of freelance stories across markets. Importantly, the investment was not merely for more reporters to cover more games. Rather, we asked newsrooms to focus on creating five specific types of content that had performed exceptionally well with prospects in the prior year:

• Season previews of important sports, rivalries and players.
• Player rankings by sport, position and region throughout the season.
• Reader polls about favourite players.
• Championship tournament coverage.
• The naming of postseason all-star teams.

As already noted, we scored about 8,500 new starts in the first half of the school year. That was a 43% increase over 2021 and 26% above expectations for 2022.

We refined our targeting and set even more ambitious goals for the 2023-2024 school year.

Beyond sports

Moreover, in addition to high school sports, we’ve begun to explore a new coverage area: High School Life, aimed at a wider parent audience whose children aren’t necessarily athletes.

We’re investing tens of thousands of dollars in the year ahead in covering marching band and cheerleading competitions, high school proms, graduation ceremonies, and musical theater events, as well as expanding our reporting about schools and children’s mental health.

We’re confident there’s a wider value proposition in satisfying engaged parents who want to celebrate important milestones in their children’s lives in their communities, on and off the playing fields. We’re excited to explore this niche further in the year ahead.

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