From community to reader revenue: lessons to learn from The Independent and Reach PLC

In its most simplest form, there are 2 steps to convert audiences into revenue:

  1. Engagement – unlocking the revenue potential of your audience
  2. Conversion – activating this potential to gradually increase revenue

The question then turns to exactly how this can be achieved.

For Mark Zohar, President and CEO at Viafoura, one of the most effective strategies involves building a community of increasingly more engaged and loyal users, whilst continuously moving them through a funnel of value exchanges and direct interactions to increase revenue.

Why should publishers build a community?

When audiences aren’t on your site, they’re spending a great deal of time on social media, growing accustomed to certain experiences and features that keep them coming back for more. In particular, these users feel part of a community. They can…

  • Interact with content
  • Comment
  • See other user’s opinions and contributions
  • Join events
  • Like and share content
  • Follow topics and authors that match their interests

These experiences have become user expectations, making traditional digital publisher sites seem passive with very little direct interaction.

As Mark puts it, we’re social beings who want to react and have human experiences – and it’s this that makes community so powerful.

“Publishers need to build a bridge between user expectations and experiences on publisher’s sites.” 

Another important reason why publishers should build a community is because content is a commodity – it’s easy to find any content at any time, especially for big news stories.

Community, on the other hand, is not a commodity. It’s an asset. Something that feeds into your brand value, that a user will come back for and that will make you different from other publishers producing similar content.

How engaging your community will drive value

All publishers with a reader revenue strategy aim to register or subscribe their audience. The problem, however, is when they try to go from 0 to 100 – from unengaged to a loyal subscriber.

Mark compares it to dating – you wouldn’t immediately ask someone to marry you (unless maybe if you’re on ‘Married at first sight’!), you’d ask them to dinner first.

Community helps to provide these intermediary steps, building engagement before trying to get value from your audience.

I.e. Community-led conversion.

For Reach PLC, this involves a 4-step model: Discover, Engage, Connect & Commit.

The key here, according to Mark, is to ungate the community but lock the content, reserving it for registered members or subscribers only. Readers will see the comments and feedback, building enough intrigue and interest to make them want to unlock the article.

Their ‘In Your Area’ postcode services & community, for instance, have led to 3 million registered users and a 35% increase in page-views per visitor since 2019.

On Reach’s “Devon Live” brand, commenting is reserved for registered users only, with messaging framing the action as a conversation that a reader can either be excluded or included in (“join”).

I’d add here that it’s also essential to highlight that registration is free. Although it benefits both you and the reader, it won’t cost them a penny and can be a brilliant way to monetize the large portion of your audience who may never pay to subscribe.

The Independent is another publisher who has made the most of community to register users, increasing engagement and collecting first-party data. To achieve this, they’ve put the focus on their audience, understanding and engaging with them in various forms across the site:

  • Q&A sessions with online experts covering a range of topics
  • Connecting journalists with their readers
  • Personalization features, such as the ability to follow topics, comment on articles and automated personalization based on data

Many of these community experiences are reserved for registered members who have proven to be 11x more engaged than anonymous users. 

And the funnel doesn’t stop there. Even after creating an account, registered users may still be blocked when trying to access premium features, such as bookmarking content, which are reserved for paying subscribers.

These conversion steps gradually move users through a funnel, collecting first-party data, increasing engagement and, importantly, revenue.

Subscribers have proven to be 62x more engaged than anonymous visitors

Best practices for building & gaining value from community

1) Reward your best contributors for their loyalty and participation

“Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one, whilst increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits from 25-95%”.

Retention should therefore be a priority, and rewarding highly engaged community members can play a valuable role in ensuring these users keep coming back.

  • Exclusive access for highly engaged users
  • Social proof – provide them with a subscriber badge or ‘super engaged user’ tag by their name (think of Twitter’s blue tick system)
  • Referral bonus/reward for inviting a new user to join the community
  • Feature their comments somewhere publicly, giving them a sense of fame
  • Reply to these users, establishing a more direct relationship with your publication

2) Highlight the best of your community

The benefits of this are two fold:

Firstly, you forefront the best comments to entice non-members to unlock content and comment so as to not miss out on this conversation. Any comments that add insight but also open up the discussion are particularly valuable here.

Secondly, you give the writers of these featured comments a sense of fame and inclusion as they’re placed directly below the article, encouraging them to comment more frequently.

3) Think bigger than just comments

As Mark put it, you can’t just slap on a comment section and hope for the best. You have to develop a whole community experience from the moment a user lands on your site and do so through a variety of formats.

Some of the most successful community-building techniques involve direct interaction between the newsroom and your audience. This could be as simple as journalists leaving an open ended question to users once a week, but it’s a small investment that your newsroom has to make to develop a strong, loyal community that brings business value.

4) Once you’ve collected data, put it to use

Identifying interests, propensities, etc is great, but this needs to circle back to improve the experience offered to users. Even personalizing a user’s home screen or content recommendations can have a big impact on engagement and revenue.

5) Moderation is crucial

Investing in a solution, whether AI or human, is the only way to ensure that your community is moderated enough to keep control whilst also allowing for free reign.

Mark recommends creating community guidelines and finding a solution that allows you to ban someone entirely, ghost ban someone (the user doesn’t know they’re banned – they can still comment, but no one else will see it) or even give some community members moderation status, gaining value from these users and increasing their loyalty as they feel more involved in the community.

Thank you to Mark Zohar, President and CEO at Viafoura, for speaking to me about this topic!

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

Daily Herald brings vibrant, interactive communities to its digital property with Viafoura

Many publishers experience challenges with enticing their digital readers to elevate their relationship from casual reader to actively engaged subscriber. The Daily Herald is a publisher zealously conquering this challenge.

The Daily Herald, suburban Chicago’s largest daily newspaper, provides up-to-date breaking local and national news. While they did offer commenting to their readers via Facebook, those comments appeared on Facebook.com and not DailyHerald.com – depriving the Daily Herald of building a dialogue between their staff and their readers. By moving commenting to their property, the Daily Herald now offers a healthy and vibrant environment that facilitates community interaction.

Mark Stallings, Manager of Digital Operations at the Daily Herald, discloses “we conducted several exhaustive rounds of analysis during our search to find a replacement for our current commenting platform. We had a list of must-haves for any new commenting platform, and Viafoura was among a small group of vendors that met or exceeded our criteria. First and foremost, we wanted a vendor that placed commenting and social engagement at the core of their business. They needed to be well established, with a proven track record of delivering best-in-class solutions with the following features: reader personalization, strong moderation, simple user management, comprehensible reporting and analysis, and easy integration. After narrowing the list, we talked to other publishing company staff and industry groups to help us make the final decision.’

With Viafoura’s Conversations, Live Blogs, Community Chat, Auto-Moderation, and Full-Service Moderation, the Daily Herald will be increasing subscriber revenue,  visitor’s time on site, the number of articles they read, and the number of times they return to engage with the content in a set interval.

Ensuring that the Daily Herald is successful and has an exceptional customer experience is Dalia Vainer, Viafoura’s Director of Customer Success. Dalia has the following comment regarding Viafoura’s newest partnership: “we’re excited that the Daily Herald has chosen Viafoura as its partner in community engagement! We’re looking forward to working together to create and grow a safe, moderated space that will provide peace of mind to internal teams and readers”.

Five Common Mistakes Media Companies Make That Lead to Subscriber Churn

Subscribers are helping to fund the media industry right now. And in order to maximize reader revenue, companies are working to perfect their subscription strategies.

Juan Señor, president at a media consulting company, explains that “many publishers can expect to get up to 50% of their revenues from reader revenue, and [that number’s] growing.”

However, this boom in reader revenue doesn’t come without a major challenge: subscriber churn. As media companies begin to see interest in coronavirus content tapering off, they’re fighting tooth and nail to keep readers loyal and paying. 

But reducing subscriber churn doesn’t have to be a complicated task… especially if you know what’s causing it. To help prevent you from losing precious, paying community members, here are a few common mistakes your media company should avoid making at all costs.

1. Allowing Toxic Comments to Exist

While hosting user commenting tools is a powerful way to engage visitors, letting people post offensive content comes with consequences. Some of these consequences can include trolls and community-wide disengagement. 

In fact, nearly 50% of members will remove themselves from a platform when they see incivility from user comments. Many advertisers and advertising platforms also don’t want to be associated with any type of offensive content. 

By protecting the quality of conversations through an effective moderation solution, you’ll protect your brand’s reputation and ability to monetize its community.

2. Not Leveraging First-Party Data

Any insight you can get into the behavior and interests of your visitors is extremely useful. It can be used to improve their experience with your brand and strengthen the relevance of your content. 

“Companies that are able to produce insights from content, audiences and commerce transactions will be the most successful going forward,” Kristen O’Hara, the chief business officer at Hearst Magazines, tells Digiday

Plus, now that third-party cookies are being phased out by internet browsers, businesses must focus on gathering and analyzing first-party data. Failure to do so could prevent you from knowing how to keep your community members interested in your content and willing to pay for a subscription. 

3. Leaving Subscribers Unengaged

Many media companies believe that the process of engaging visitors must continue until they convert into a member or subscriber. But onsite audience engagement shouldn’t stop after this conversion point.

Without engaging your subscribers, they can become disengaged and churn.

“Once people come across your content the key is to make it easy, accessible and engaging in the hope they will come back,” says Chris Waiting, CEO of The Conversation.This rings true for visitors at every step in their digital journey — whether it’s their first visit to your website or they’ve already subscribed.

4. Focusing on Building a Community on Social Media Instead of on Your Website

There are thousands of active users on social media. Some media companies are, therefore, tempted to use it as their primary way to connect with consumers. 

Unfortunately, companies don’t have much control over user data, who sees their content or the quality of conversations on social media, and are subject to comments from trolls and bots.

The New York Times’ COO, Meredith Kopit Levien, stresses the importance of building “a direct path for sending… readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules.”

Social media, and any other type of content aggregation platform, removes that element of control over readers for businesses. It also prevents you from reaching, understanding and engaging the subscribers that you’ve already earned.

5. Not Positioning Your Brand to Be Trustworthy

Robbie Kellman Baxter, a strategy consultant, explains that consumers pay for subscriptions because “they trust your [organization] to solve their problem, or achieve their goal, forever.” 

No matter what kind of content your media company creates, it’s essential that your company is a trustworthy resource for consumers. 

But brands can jeopardize this trust through several actions: like allowing toxicity to exist in social spaces, running your trustworthy content near misinformation on third-party platforms or even not being transparent enough with your audience. 

You can’t expect consumers to continue paying for your services if they don’t believe in your brand. To position your brand as a trustworthy resource, be sure you’re meeting your community’s needs, serving up reliable content, and are taking steps to keep them safe. 

It can be easy for any media company to make a simple mistake that has detrimental effects. Thankfully, you now have everything you need to avoid these common pitfalls and continue on the path toward success and sustainability.

You’ve Got A Paid Subscriber, Now What?

Well done on earning another subscriber for your media company! But contrary to popular belief, it isn’t time to pop open that bottle of Champagne quite yet. In fact, whether you’ve gained one, ten or hundreds of new subscribers for your organization, the journey to long-term success is far from over. 

“People are, on average, likely to pay for one news subscription and up to three entertainment subscriptions,” says Lucinda Southern, a reporter at Digiday. This means that “the pool for acquiring new readers quickly dwindles.”

Even so, you don’t need to miss out on that profitable, sustainable business you’ve probably always dreamed of. The solution to that shrinking pool of consumers lies with your existing subscribers. If you’re aiming to be a competitive player in the media industry, the subscription experience your company offers must be second to none. 

Make your subscribers want to remain active, paying members of your digital community by engaging them continuously. After all, a sustainable business model doesn’t just acquire subscribers — it retains them as well.

Here’s how to keep your subscribers from, well, unsubscribing. 

 

Build a Community for Subscribers

While your content offering may have convinced a visitor to subscribe to your brand, it likely won’t be enough to keep them interested for long. Especially with countless other media organizations fighting for your subscribers’ attention. 

But rather than fretting over your loyal subscribers losing interest, take action. 

One of the best ways to keep subscribers loyal to your platform in the long run is to delight them with continuous social interaction. This can be accomplished by maximizing the opportunity for them to build meaningful bonds: to both your brand and to other loyal users within your audience. Think live commenting or chat tools.

“An organization able to build relationships with members — as opposed to plain customers — has…  a powerful competitive edge,” says Robbie Baxter, author of The Membership Economy

Humans are creatures of habit who instinctively crave social interaction. Use this to your advantage and form a sustainable business by offering ongoing social experiences to your audience. 

 

Monitor Subscriber Behavior to Enhance Their Experience

“To truly engage customers and clients, to broaden customer bases or nurture relationships that fuel engagement and growth, data is where it begins,” states a managing director at Deloitte Digital. 

In other words, the audience engagement data you have access to on your platform is key to strengthening subscriber loyalty. 

This is your chance to dig into the numbers, gather insights into your audience’s behavior, and in turn, use those insights to improve your user’s experience. 

Take sports media, for instance. More and more sports organizations are beginning to use their first-party data to offer up a premium experience to their subscribers. And oftentimes, a premium experience means personalization, where brands cater to the unique needs and appetites of the individual.

Consider personalizing your subscriber’s experience by sending them recommended content and experiences based on their data.

 

Prevent Churn Before It Ever Happens

Sustainable businesses in the media industry have already realized that preventing churn the loss of subscribers should be a priority. Even The Economist pours 70% of its marketing resources into retaining its subscribers. 

At the end of the day, “acquiring a new customer is up to 25% more expensive than retaining an existing one,” says the International News Media Association (INMA).

So how does one exactly stop churn from taking place and extend the lifetime value of each subscriber? 

The answer lies in your engagement tool and paywall strategy. When implemented properly, your engagement tool provider should be able to identify dips in user activity, and notify your paywall provider when churn is on the horizon. Then, your paywall provider can send special subscription discounts and content offers for the subscriber in question before churn ever happens. 

Alternatively, you can use your first-party data to send out personalized emails directly to your inactive subscribers with content that would appeal to their interests. 

When it comes to paywalls and engagement tools, you can’t just set them and forget them. It is absolutely essential to check on your audience, and enhance their experience time and time again. The fate of your business depends on it. 

 

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