As news companies compete for attention with other forms of digital media, building habit is crucial.

Readers who form a routine around consuming news are less likely to churn, so building habit can increase retention rates, Jodie Hopperton, lead of INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative, said during the recent Building Direct Audience Master Class.

“The more bought-into a brand and the more habit you have, the more likely you are to tell other people, which creates a flywheel effect,” Hopperton said.

In that sense, engaged readers become brand advocates who introduce others to the publication.

Citing a presentation she had seen from The Guardian, Hopperton noted it is important for companies to think about how they can integrate into users’ routines. That means aligning offerings with key moments in a reader’s day.

“You’ve got to think about your audience and what they’re doing,” she said. “You get up, you have breakfast, coffee, check your e-mails ... think about where your product and features sit around that.”

Features that drive habit include newsletters, push alerts, horoscopes, games, cooking recipes, stock market updates, and sports coverage. The New York Times and The Guardian have successfully leveraged cooking and sports content to increase habitual engagement, while Yahoo Finance has built a dedicated audience around stock tracking tools, Hopperton said.

“We can really see how these things come together into that daily habit,” Hopperton said. And news media companies that understand their users’ behavioural patterns can strategically deliver content to strengthen that habit.

The principles of habits

How can we support better habits?

Samuel Salzer, behavioural designer and author, said it’s about changing behaviour: “My belief is basically that if we want to achieve product metrics, we can’t achieve them without understanding what changes behaviour. So behaviour change is where everything starts.”

What is a habit?

The first book on the subject was published in 1890, and many have been published since. A habit is formed by repeated action until it becomes something done without even thinking. Researcher Wendy Wood writes: “A habit is a sort of mental shortcut to repeat what we did in the past that worked for us and got us some reward.”

Habits are complicated, but Salzer offers four principles to help better encourage habit formation.

1. Habits need stable context.
2. Friction kills habit.
3. Emotional stickiness.
4. Sprinkle surprise and delight.

Most product teams focus on wrong things, like variable rewards, gamification, nudges. Salzer said the most important thing, though, is understanding internal triggers: “There’s no behaviour that will ever start if there’s not an internal or external trigger that activates that behaviour.”

Winning the subscription game at The New York Times

Although The New York Times has long been respected for its journalism, it has expanded its offerings in recent years to include a broader range of digital products.

Jonathan Knight, head of NYT Games, told INMA members that games have become a powerful tool for attracting new subscribers and strengthening the loyalty of existing ones.

In the second quarter of 2023, The New York Times hit 10.2 million digital-only subscribers, and Knight said bundle and multi-product subscriptions are making up an increasing portion of that total.

“The bundle is really an expression of our essential subscription strategy,” he said. “It’s a collection of digital lifestyle products that help people understand and engage with the world.”

While traditional news subscriptions remain at the core of the company’s offering, they now represent just 21% of the digital subscriber base, down from 34% a year earlier. In contrast, the share of bundle subscribers has been steadily growing — and games play a critical role in that bundle.

The investment in games has resulted in a “funnel that works in both directions,” Knight said, explaining it is introducing its traditional news audience to games and helping create a daily habit. And many users discover NYT Games first and then are introduced to other digital products like news, cooking, and sports content:

“We recently collaborated with The Athletic to build a sports version of Connections called Connections Sports Edition, and users are beginning to discover The Athletic through that,” he said. “So yeah, the bundle strategy is working.”

Der Spiegel’s News Quiz

Der Spiegel in Germany knows its audience well.

Users come to them for breaking news, investigative stories and all the hard hitting news. When something happens in Germany, people are trained to go to Der Spiegel for quality journalism on what has happened.

While Der Spiegel loves this part of its reputation, it provides some more difficult days when the news cycle is slow. They set off on a journey to change the perception that they’re only good for big, hard news stories.

The company decided to create more reasons for their readers to come back every day. It started with the launch of a product in 2022 called News Quiz.

“The rationale behind it was to bring people more often to our site and create another reason besides checking current affairs and news,” Christoph Zimmer, senior vice president and chief product officer, said.

News Quiz tests users on important topics in current affairs and politics. It tests their knowledge by asking them to answer seven questions. Der Spiegel launches a new quiz every day at midnight. They’ve used this to drive registrations since users have to log in to see previous quizzes or look at stats.

Der Spiegel sees up to 900,000 unique users playing News Quiz every month and found that very often the link to play is the most-clicked link of their entire newsletter.

With the success of News Quiz, Der Spiegel launched even more games and has more on the way. They’re working on different difficulty levels and how to go beyond ad-financed, free games.

“It’s interesting to see that these games are more heavily played when readers visit our site for the first time in the morning and are a bit more heavily played on the weekend on Sunday than during the week,” Zimmer said.

Bonnier News encourages habits with subscription bundle

Bonnier News launched one of its newer subscription packages, +Allt, in early 2023. +Allt consists of more than 150 Swedish brands.

Mans Palmsqvist, commercial team manager B2B marketing operations, and Nicolas Larsson, head of commercial, shared how the package is helping encourage news consumption habits.

The goal of this package is twofold in terms of user activity—increase engagement and consumption of many titles. Based on user testing and research, Palmqvist’s team concluded that more consumption of titles with higher frequency resulted in a low churn.

Another strategy that has helped Bonnier News keep a low churn is family account sharing. When individuals within the same household are active on the account, there is noticeable retention.

Palmqvist expects more growth in this area this year.

Larsson, who oversees engagement and churn, further elaborated on the process of onboarding or “creating the habit,” which revolves around three focus areas:

1. Reaching the consumer in the proper channel. How the information is shared or distributed to the reader is just as important as the content itself. Reaching where they are and where they like to engage is critical to ensuring more engagement.

2. Understanding the product value. “We want you to be very interactive with the product that you have bought the main title, but we also want to show you the value of all the range of products that you now have access to,” Larsson said.

3. Creating a personalised experience. Utilising data from past behaviour helps inform customisation and more unique user experience.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .