Spiegel launched six new thematic offerings in September of 2024. Spiegel Extras provides our readers with a new digital service six days a week, featuring practical tips and inspiration for important topics in daily life.

In a short video, we explain the product promise of the Extras:

About the Extras

• Each Spiegel Extra appears on the same day of the week, with a dedicated spot on the front page of Spiegel.de for 24 hours and a high-quality, magazine-like design.
• We start on Monday with Work, on Tuesday follows Money, Wednesday focuses on Health & Fitness, Thursday follows with LoveLetter, Friday’s Extra is contributed by our colleagues from 11Freunde (our soccer sister site), and Saturday offers Weekender with gripping storytelling and smart entertainment.
• Each Extra typically consists of a main text that welcomes the audience and guides them through the issue, along with informative and entertaining elements such as graphics, surveys, or short text formats. Additionally, each issue links to one to three stories linked from the main text.
• All Extras are Spiegel +: content that is exclusively available to subscribers, and almost all articles first appear exclusively in the Extras.
• We publish a (free) newsletter for each Extra, containing excerpts from the issues to alert users to new content each week.  In the medium term, we plan to make the entire issues available as Plus newsletters.

We aim to be “companions to our readers,” fulfilling this promise from Spiegel Editor-in-Chief Dirk Kurbjuweit. In terms of product strategy, we expanded the core of the Spiegel brand toward a “Core+.” 

In short, we wanted to offer our readers not only hard news, analyses, investigations, and opinions but also life advice, tips, and entertaining reading, thereby reaching new target groups. The Extras are a building block in this core expansion, consisting of a mix of digital magazines and newsletters.

Covering what we know

The topics covered in the Extras are not new to us. We regularly report on work life, write about love and relationships, explain health issues, and focus on money matters.

With the Spiegel Extras, we have expanded our offerings — thanks to new colleagues — and created more space for these topics, placing them prominently on the home page, sending them out in dedicated newsletters, and making them more visible on social media.

We did this to meet a significant user need, to accompany our readers holistically, and, of course, because we anticipate further subscription growth in the medium term.

Many colleagues from our team worked on developing the Spiegel Extras over the past few months. The design agency Make accompanied us along the way.

After the first four months, we can share the following insights:

• The presentation and placement in an almost fixed position on the home page work very well: Users appreciate the variety compared to the often “hard” topics, while the rest of the home page is not weakened.
• Reader usage of Extra articles and the number of Plus conversions they generate are more than satisfactory. Extra articles rank disproportionately among the top 100 for the most conversions.
• Among the Extras, most subscriptions were generated thanks to the Extra Money.
• The newsletters (so far only free newsletters with teaser functionality) are growing rather slowly. We will soon launch complete Plus versions.

In the weeks and months to come, we will therefore be collecting feedback and data, learning, and then developing Spiegel Extras consistently and openly. This also includes the creation of high-quality, product-focused marketing and the iterative development of elements and features.

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