A brief overview of what this Town Hall will cover and of the 8-month-long GNI Subscriptions Lab Europe, a growth program by Google News Initiative, FT Strategies and the International News Media Association.
In the past three years, INMA members’ news brands doubled their online subscription base. Interestingly, the European brands grew three times faster than those in Americas, Asia and Pacific.
In this panel discussion, we will distill the biggest learnings from the transformation of The Financial Times and other European news publishers to subscription-first businesses: their strengths, weaknesses but also opportunities and threats. We will also discuss the proven ways to unlock growth in the COVID era — after the early spike in demand for news and subscriptions in the pandemic, the growth in 2022 requires strategic clarity, effort, and investments. What do the winning strategies look like?It is also an opportunity to hear from Google about ways it supports reader revenue models, with programs, such as GNI Subscriptions Lab, and other initiatives globally.
Meet the European publishers that followed the Financial Times’ North Star framework to plan a roadmap for their online reader revenue growth in the next 3-5 years.
In this session, we will showcase examples of such strategic plans, and provide a practical guide to finding the North Star for your company.
We want to discuss benefits and risks of different metrics popular among publishers, such as the ones measuring profitability of subscribers (e.g., Lifetime Value) or measures of subscriber engagement (e.g., RFV).
A practical session based on real-life case studies of experiments by the national, regional and local publishers in attracting readers, converting and retaining subscribers.
What hypotheses did they initially have? Did they validate them with data? What did they learn? We hope these stories from the trenches will inspire your own ideas for tests, but also unveil the agile process behind experimentation.We reserve time for practical questions and answers.
Experimentation capability and methodology is found key to unlock growth in digital news subscriptions through prioritisation, iteration, and learning. Many publishers though struggle to set up and scale their experimentation programme.
In this session, experts from FT Strategies will talk about the best practices, and offer practical advice how to improve this capability.
We will synthesise today's programming with a final session highlighting the key takeaways..