“Establishing the value of a subscription to readers was our core challenge,” Pradeep Gairola said.

The vice president and business head of digital at The Hindu, a quality broadsheet in India, spoke at my recent INMA Webinar on digital subscriptions in Asia.

Across the region, INMA survey found news executives believe low willingness to pay for online news and competition from free alternatives are the biggest obstacles for growth.

The Hindu’s research confirmed the gap between the cost of subscriber-exclusive articles, Webinars, or e-books and their perceived value in the eyes of subscribers. 

The solution was to test putting a market price tag on e-books and offering them for purchase on Kindle to non-subscribers. The non-fiction books advised on healthy diet, explained AI, guided sports careers, portrayed India’s legendary founder of Tata Group, and analysed the appeal of maoism in India.

“Our goal was not to sell many e-books on Kindle but to influence how readers perceive the value of a subscription in which these e-books are included,” Gairola explained.

The promotion of highly priced books as subscriber benefits drove more than 5,000 downloads for each e-book, elevating them to bestseller status in India. 

The books attracted new subscribers, helping to recover one-third of their cost. And subscribers who downloaded books retained at 10% higher rate, boosting lifetime value.

The success motivated The Hindu to publish a new e-book every week instead of monthly. They are considering expanding price anchoring to Webinars and even individual articles.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

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