20 years of paywalls, 249,000 digital-only subscribers - Aftonbladet has lessons for us all
Hi
I don't know about you but time is flying by, summer feels like a lifetime ago and shops are already putting out the Christmas stock (is it just me or do they do this a week earlier each year?!)
In this month's newsletter:
Forget conferences, we organized a festival!
We still haven't quite recovered from the first festival in Paris and we're on to the next one, in London on October 12th.
Our first event was a blast... 222 digital publishing professionals. 20 speakers sharing the strategies & operations needed to succeed. Networking from the first coffee in the morning to wine & cheese in the eventing.
> Check out the video of our event on our YouTube channel.
Monitoring the international media landscape: best practices for publishers to increase ARPU
“What can we learn from international publishing titles when it comes to reader revenue models?” Takeaways from the Audiencers Festival
As we shared at The Festival, the key is for publishers to continuously step outside of their silo, looking outside of their tunneled vision for ideas from others both inside and outside of the publishing industry to not only succeed in achieving their goals but do so without wasting time and resources.
Whilst many publishers consider the question of which subscription model is best - freemium, metered or hard - maybe the question should be more about which model leads to the highest Lifetime Value, or LTV.
"You need to analyze your most loyal subscribers and ask yourself what "type" of engagement corresponds to high retention rates.
That way you start with the most loyal subscribers instead of starting with acquisition.
If you can find a link between engagement and loyalty, you'll have a better understanding of how to increase engagement before subscription in order to achieve high conversion and loyalty rates.
For example, the Lenfest Institute found that the likelihood of readers becoming paying subscribers increases most when they read more than 5 articles per month or provide their email address, among other engagement actions.”
One of the most powerful strategies to develop pre-subscription engagement and increase the value of readers who convert is registration.
Help us with research into how to achieve the best conversion rates
If you've followed along with our B2B media, The Audiencers, you may have read this article by Markus Schoberl analyzing publisher conversion rates to discover what explains subscription conversion success.
However, as you can imagine, there's a lot more factors at play than simply the paywall model - such as publisher maturity in digital subscription, the reader attitude towards paid content, the 'trends' in each country...
To help dig deeper into this, we're working in collaboration with Markus and Press Gazette to collect more data from a wider variety of publishers from around the world. And this is where you come in!
Please would you be able to email me with your publication name, number of digital subscribers, page views and paywall model.
Recommended by LinkedIn
You'll then be part of this important, valuable research, and be able to directly compare your conversion strategy to similar publishers on the market. And I'll make sure that you're amongst the first to receive the final analysis!
Thank you!
20 years of paywalls, 249,000 digital-only subscribers... Aftonbladet has lessons for us all
"Doubling revenue from digital subscriptions in the past four years, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet provides a blueprint for success and shares all of its pivots since launching in 2003" - the brilliant Greg Piechota interviewed Ted Kudinoff, head of Aftonbladet Plus, learning of 3 key learnings from their 2 decades of success:
Thanks to data, Aftonbladet's editors have learnt which articles attract new and existing subscribers, making sure these are a 'need to have' amongst premium readers.
Today, 30% of articles on Aftonbladet’s homepage are paid (making for significant premium content visibility), with everything from investigative and expert journalism, product tests and guides, insider sports, and health advice.
succeed.”
In the beginning, a dedicated desk of 15-20 journalists prepared all the Plus stories. Their focus helped to learn what worked best and delivered early results, but this approach was a barrier to scale further.
Today, every news desk has Plus goals. A dedicated conversion desk optimises the selection of Plus stories on the homepage.
The head of Aftonbladet Plus believes future digital bundles will come in many flavours as many readers value flexibility, contrasting with traditional cable TV’s all-you-can-eat content model.
He stresses that exclusive news content remains the primary driver of subscriptions over everything else.
"35% of L’Équipe’s total audience is logged. And on the app, it’s 50%.”
It was Emmanuel Alix, Digital Director of the famous daily sports newspaper, who stunned our afternoon audience at The Audiencers' Festival with this fact that would turn any CRM director pale. More than a third of audiences (83 million visitors in August 2023) are known and logged, i.e. L’Équipe has important data points – a first name, surname, email address, etc – can track cross-device behavior and doesn’t need cookies to find out what content readers consume.
Content to read this month
Have a great month!
All the best,
Madeleine
Poool is The Membership & Subscription Suite - the all-in-one platform for publishers to convert, manage & retain their members & subscribers. Not only this, but we also have expertise to accompany our tools, in the form of a consultancy offer for clients and our B2B media, The Audiencers, with insights, inspiration & best practices from publishers around the world to help you do your job better!