We hear a lot of discussion about the best way to move people down the funnel. If we know the risk of churn significantly decreases when a consumer reads 10 stories, how do we get them from averaging five stories to 10? 

I imagine many of you have had some form of this conversation many times. 

But this is very much a business problem — not a customer problem. What if your users consuming three to five articles per day are happy with that? What is the customer need you are fulfilling?

As one of the INMA Advisory Council put it: Do we have a product/market fit problem? 

To understand that, we need to know why people are using our product and consuming our content. What are the motivations? The Reuters Institute at Oxford did some research on this. 

Note that it’s not always content driven. Some sign up to support journalism, some to identify with the brand. In fact, only two of the top five reasons have to do with our core product: the content and the experience.

And these are the people who paid for news. Many others did not — even if they are extremely interested in news (67% in U.S., 86% in Germany, and 87% in the U.K., according to the same Reuters Institute study). 

During our advisory council meeting, we also discussed that many loyal subscribers pay to have access. It’s not about how much they consume, but there is value to having access when it’s needed. Many users consume less than they think they do but their perceived value is higher. 

Most news organisations are trying to serve all these needs with single products. With massive content libraries and sometimes feature-heavy products to service loyal audiences, can we also truly serve the more casual user? 

Personalisation of the home page is one way to do this. We have an entire INMA Knows category devoted to personalisation, and my colleague Sonali Verma, lead of the INMA Generative AI Initiative, will have more on this in her master class in April. 

But it also makes me wonder whether it’s worth workshopping what an ideal product would look like for each user segment if we were building from scratch. And then see if it’s feasible to put these into a single Web site or app. Could a product be versioned for different users?

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