Tag: viafoura

Enhancing Your Paywall: Why You Need a Conversion Strategy

In order to run a profitable media company, publishers know that audience engagement must be monetized. But relying on social media for advertising just isn’t cutting it anymore.

With social media’s unpredictable algorithm changes blocking your content from being seen and its loss of audience trust, it’s time to generate money from your community on your own platforms. And that’s where paywalls come in.

The Value of a Paywall

Nowadays, paywalls are becoming an important ingredient in a news publisher’s recipe for success. Not only do they attach value to your content, but they are also able to manage your subscribers and collect payments on your behalf.

“When clients invest in industry publication subscriptions, it serves as a tangible reminder that the publications… offer quantifiable value,” reads a Forbes article. “It’s content that matters to people — to the point that people are willing to pay for it. This serves as a reminder to your client that your services are worth the price.”

While some may argue that paywalls threaten to repel readers who aren’t willing to pay for your content, it’s a risk that many publishers find worth taking. In fact, readers who are willing to subscribe offer your business significantly more value than those who aren’t.

This past year, HuffPost chose to stop focusing on uninterested readers and, instead, assessed and grew its loyal reader base since 60% of their page views came from just 6% of visitors.

If you have great content and dedicated readers, the decision to take on a paywall may be an obvious one.

However, the power of your paywall can be greatly enhanced by supporting it with a winning conversion strategy.

Amplify the Effects of your Paywall

Readers will pay for quality content that they can relate to. Publications like The New York Times and The Times have shown us this.

But a truly powerful subscription management system relies on support from a community growth and engagement system.

According to the Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute, only nine percent of a publisher’s readers view over five articles per month. Their white paper states that “news organizations with larger-than-average “regular readership” – engaging that critical nine percent of audiences – tended to prioritize audience engagement efforts.”

And what better way to grow that number of regular readers than by engaging more of your audience? Applying community engagement technology to your platform will boost a user’s return frequency, session depth and total attention time, helping to drive more subscriptions.

Which is why it’s important to take the time to find a partner who not only boosts user engagement, but who will also work with your paywall provider to optimize your platform for subscriptions. 

Learn how to create real conversations and drive audience engagement to your organization’s publications with this Webinar: How CBC Creates Real Conversations Below the Fold

The Ultimate Conversion Strategy

A truly great conversion strategy marries your paywall and engagement tools together.

In this sense, a community engagement partner can track onsite audience behavior, grow your regular readers and alert your paywall when each user is interested enough to subscribe. Engage your audience. Understand them. And then use that knowledge to build a loyal, paying community.

“Using a mix of editorial and algorithm-based selections, [The Toronto Star] hard locks five to seven articles per day, typically more in-depth pieces driving strong traffic and engagement, to push more visitors toward the paywall and, eventually, the subscription process,” states a recent report by the Local Media Association.

Your engagement and paywall service providers should be able to help you develop and deploy a targeted conversion strategy, specific to the behavior of your readers. More specifically, as users become engaged with your content, your community engagement tools should be able to feed your subscription-ready users right to your paywall. Which means more subscription revenue for you.

Your Churn-Reducing Solution

Another great reason to own a conversion strategy between your engagement and subscription management systems is that you can boost onsite subscriptions and reduce churn, all at the same time. As your engagement tools build your community and track its behavior, your software provider can signal your paywall when a community member becomes disengaged with your brand, and is likely to churn.

Businesses can then send these users special incentives or content to keep them from unsubscribing.

Say goodbye to inefficiency and hello to an abundance of subscription revenue.

Interested in learning more about boosting revenue through subscription management and user engagement? Attend our workshop at ONA19 for a chance to win $500.

Seven Tips That will Help Your Moderation Team Survive a National Election

One of the biggest challenges for publishers during a national election is, without a doubt, keeping conversations around their content civil and preventing misinformation from tarnishing their platforms.

Whether your company plans to run live updates or craft a few blog posts during a significant political event — such as an election in Canada, the U.S. or anywhere else in the world — your moderation team will have their hands full with an extraordinary volume of opinionated comments.

A recent study conducted by the Center for Media Engagement found that moderators who focused on preventing uncivil comments were affected “on a very personal level, leading to emotional exhaustion and less positive work experience.” This means that an effective moderation team needs to protect more than just the domains they’re assigned to monitor — they also need to protect themselves.

And yet, comments are still essential to your brand’s success.

To help your moderation team maintain civility and accuracy on your platform while keeping their cool, it’s important to empower them as much as possible well in advance of an election.

We spoke with Leigh Adams, the product manager of Viafoura’s moderation services, to help arm your moderation team with the best practices and tips to make it through the election period. Adams also holds over 10 years of experience moderating and developing guidelines for news commenting forums. Read on to discover her must-know election survival tips.

1. Predict probable misinformation

Before moderators can begin battling misinformation, they first need to have a clear, consistent understanding of the kinds of misinformation that are likely to come up. Moderators can then brainstorm different types of rumors and topics that should not be spread on the domains they’re protecting.

For example, according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, you can expect to see misinformation that generates “fear, intolerance and misinformation about immigration across Canada” during the upcoming 2019 election period. 

“Create a shared document that everyone can print featuring keywords or names to watch for within those categories of misinformation you’ve identified,” Adams says.

This will make it easier for moderators to scan through comments and quickly identify problematic statements.

Viafoura’s moderation team also uses a unique search tool that allows moderators to search comments by specific keywords.

“The quicker you can find and shut down those conversations, the better,” she states.

2. Identify your biases

When was the last time you spoke to a human that was truly neutral towards the political landscape? Everyone has their biases, which can influence their day-to-day actions. Not even moderators are immune.

A study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania found that “users who consistently express minority viewpoints are more likely to be moderated than users who consistently express majority viewpoints.”

To ensure your moderation team isn’t enforcing any political bias unintentionally, each moderator must understand what their own biases look like in order to avoid censoring opposing viewpoints.

3. Don’t be afraid to ban users

In the digital world, the general belief is that the more eyeballs a piece of content can get, the better. The end goal for media executives is typically to gain and engage more site visitors in order to maximize subscriptions; however, visitor quantity isn’t always better than quality.

“Don’t be afraid to ban users,” says Adams. She goes on to explain that “a lot of newspapers are afraid to ban users because they want the audience, but when you allow trolls and other toxic users to take over, you’re actually scaring away more valuable visitors.”

Fewer quality commenters offer more value to brands than many commenters that destroy the safety and trust between an organization and its loyal followers.

4. Leverage user account history as a moderation resource

User account history is an extremely useful resource for moderators. Access to information like past comments posted by users and account registration date can help moderators prevent spam and make decisions on what to do with questionable comments.

Adams explains that “if a user posts a couple hundred comments within a few days, chances are, they aren’t posting valuable comments.”

5. Create a thorough emergency procedure

Make sure your moderation team has thoroughly outlined a procedure for comment-related emergencies.

“Let’s say someone threatens to be an active shooter at your headquarters. How do you deal with that type of threat?” Adams asks.

There are a few crucial questions you can ask your team to help them prepare for these types of threats: 

  • Is there a clear chain of command in an emergency? 
  • When do you alert the police versus the organization you’re protecting?

Adams recommends distinguishing between different types of non-urgent, semi-urgent, general and specific threats, and outlining how moderators should react to each of them. 

6. Keep team communication open

Whether your moderation team prefers Slack, Google Hangouts or any other communication tool, it’s best to have a shared chatroom where they can ask each other questions or flag any important information instantly.

“To ensure sanity and consistency, create a shared space where your team can feel supported enough to ask for help,” Adams suggests. “When someone needs to make a judgment call on a comment, having open communication with the rest of the team is very empowering.”

7. Take Breaks

If you need a break as a moderator, you need to ask for one. Don’t feel like you need to power through the rush of comments until the end of your shift. Maintain visibility over everyone’s workload as well so team members can assist one another when needed. That way, your moderation team will be well-equipped to prevent the volume of comments from getting out of control.

Adams elaborates on how this can be accomplished: “We use a moderation tool that was created in-house, which lets other moderators on the team see one another’s workload. It can also alert others when you’re away from the keyboard so that someone else can take over.”

A moderator’s role can be mentally draining, so if you need a break for the sake of your mental health, you owe it to yourself to take one. After all, you need to protect yourself before you can effectively protect others.

Want a Higher Reader Retention Rate? Look to Your Commenting Section

How do you get readers to stay on your site longer, read more articles and engage with your digital community?

Earlier this year, we did a deep dive into three months of anonymous, aggregate data from our media partners. The goal was to learn — and share — insights around how reader activity in comment sections has an impact on visitor retention and engagement.

In our data dive, we looked at over two billion pageviews on publisher pages in the first quarter of this year. We learned that readers who were logged into Viafoura spent over two million hours on customer domains and 565,595 hours in comment sections.  

We then compared logged-in users to those who were not in order to identify how their behavior differed. The findings:

We also looked at how audiences engage with others when logged in. In analyzing nearly 2.5 million actions on more than 430,000 comments, we discovered that people are a little nicer than you might initially think: 

Our findings illustrate that comment sections allow for civil, real-time conversations, creating a highly engaged community of authors, readers and influencers. These individuals can then turn into paying subscribers if your website is properly moderated. In other words, real-time commenting enhances audience engagement, which can build reader loyalty in your brand’s online community. 

Through our suite of products, our partners can access first-party data for real-time commenting behavior, content consumption habits and more. This allows our customers to measure the impact engagement has on brand loyalty, and drive meaningful business value.

Request a demo to learn how Viafoura can help your organization build an engaged community.

The Connection Between Human Habit and Brand Loyalty

Naturally, humans are creatures of habit. We visit the same restaurants, stick to the same daily commute and speak to the same people on a regular basis. According to a recent report developed by Hootsuite, people spend an average of two and a half hours on social media each day, browsing the same feeds and reacting to the same media brands.  

So what exactly does this have to do with your company’s website? To put the answer simply: shaping those repetitive user behaviors on your site can help your brand build a loyal online community.  

NiemLab published an article detailing how to turn subscribers into loyal followers based on their habits. In the article, NiemLab outlines how The Wall Street Journal tracked the actions of new members during the first 100 days after subscribing, and then used the data to create an engagement strategy that would improve retention rates.  

“We know that publishers are focused on habit formation,” explains Dan Seaman, Viafoura’s product director for engagement tools. “All the definitions of loyalty are starting to converge around habit signals. A company’s website engagement strategy should be adjusted based on those behaviors.” 

Loyalty is fueled by habit. This means that in order to convert website visitors and subscribers to loyal brand followers, each company must create a unique strategy to improve user engagement habits.  

The Wall Street Journal also found that the top trends in retention were driven by habits: repeated visits to a website section, reading regularly-published content and interacting with more passive media like video. 

To help kick off your own company’s retention strategy, our engagement specialists suggest following a few best practices:  

Gather as much raw data as possible

Before you can begin suggesting new ways to engage and re-engage website visitors, you need to have a thorough understanding of their regular behaviors.  

To do so, be sure you have a way to gather raw data — in a secure, lawful way — resulting from every onsite action, including subscriptions, app or information downloads and other forms of website engagement. You can then analyze your data to gain valuable information on the habits of your company’s online community.  

Maximize the opportunity for interaction

“It’s not just newsletters and content itself that drives loyalty,” states Seaman. “It turns out that there’s a broad range of actions people take and habits they form that contribute to retention.” 

In other words, it’s important to serve up plenty of tools and features right on your website to engage your online community over and over again.  

As Viafoura’s product manager, Mehrad Karamlou, explains, one of the key takeaways from The Wall Street Journal’s study is that “the first 100 days after a person’s first interaction with your company is your opportunity to re-engage them.”  

Give your website visitors the opportunity to interact with your company in multiple ways during that impressionable period. After all, boosting engagement is a great way to boost retention.  

Include a social layer on your site

Adding a safe and well-managed social layer to your website, where users can share information with one another, is a great way to encourage ongoing interactions from visitors.  

Tools that enable meaningful conversations include real-time chat, live blogging & commenting, site-wide moderation, community management and push notifications. They help to ensure that people interacting on your owned and operated digital properties are forming meaningful connections with your brand.

At the end of the day, every brand is completely different and will need to create a unique strategy to build loyal visitors.

Your Guide to Building and Engaging an Online Community

Your company has decided to implement a suite of engagement tools for its website. Exciting, right?

To help you navigate the realm of digital engagement and ease you into working with commenting sections, we’ve put together a helpful guide of trusted tips and industry best practices.

*Keep in mind, it is important to understand what sets a community apart from an ordinary audience within an online space.

Before we jump in, let’s talk about engaging an online community. Anyone working with digital channels probably hears the word “engagement” a lot. So, what exactly is it? Some define it as a goal. Think number of followers, likes and shares you receive from tweeting out one article versus another.

But engagement is more than a metric. According to Viafoura’s product director, Daniel Seaman, it is the “expression of appreciation by your audience for the content and experiences that you are providing them.”

Gone are the days of traditional one-way interactions with audiences. These days, it is absolutely vital for brands to create positive, two-way relationships with website visitors. Ignoring your community is a great way to lose trust, content consumption and revenue.

As brand representatives, here’s how to ensure the work you are creating is not only speaking to your online community, but also encouraging website visitors to interact with your company.

The value of engagement

After gathering data from over 85 million non-registered and 2.5 million registered Viafoura users (see the chart below), we were able to conclude that registered users are more invested in the content they consume.

These individuals want to be a part of the community by interacting with others, sharing content, and opting in for real-time updates. It is also clear that the more opportunities there are to engage with a media outlet, the higher number of users there will be who are interested in registering.

In other words, an engaged and optimized digital community will lead to more website registrations and, therefore, more revenue for your company.

Per user per week Sitewide Pageviews Attention Time per visist (mins)
Registered Users* 52 98
Non-Registered Users** 4 5
Average Lift 14x 23x

Data collected Jan 2019 – May 2019
*sampled 14 unique media brands
**sampled 85M unique non-registered and 2.5M registered users

Commenting makes a difference

For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the commenting feature is critical to its vision: giving Canadians a place to discuss their opinions. Jack Nagler, the director of journalistic public accountability and engagement at CBC, explains how commenting has helped them become a better newsroom because their readers improve the stories being told. CBC also found in a survey that 70 percent of respondents said that comments were important to them and spent at least 15 percent of their time onsite just reading comments. 

In addition, Carrie Lysenko, the head of digital at Pelmorex Media — which owns The Weather Network — says that when they tested turning off comments, there was a significant drop in pageviews and attention time. Online commenting in a safe and moderated space is, after all, a great way to drive engagement with your brand.

Getting involved

We’ve all seen it. A comment section that quickly turns into a volatile, troll-infested mess of rude comments that go against the community guidelines and has nothing to do with the article resting above it. Anyone would be happy to sit at the sidelines and read in horror instead of engaging with a troll.

But guess what? Getting involved with your brand has actually been proven to help keep the comment section relevant and civil. In a study conducted by The Engaging News Project, when the reporter interacted in the comment section of their article, the chances of an uncivil comment dropped by 15 percent.

As engagement specialists, we know how trolling can be a major deterrent for getting involved in the comment section, or enable one at all. But luckily, Viafoura can automatically moderate inappropriate and offensive comments, keeping your digital community clean and safe. Get in touch with us here for more information.

 

The Age of the Cookie is Crumbling Giving Publishers a Huge Opportunity

Last Updated: February 13, 2020

There once was a time when the cookie was all-powerful, drastically changing the advertising and media industries. But the cookie’s time is passing, and publishers are in search of other tools to monetize their readers.

Even Chrome is now officially joining in on the cookie crackdown.

Starting February 17th of 2020, Chrome will require web developers to set tighter restrictions on cookies. More specifically, cookies must be defaulted to first-party access — the kind that collects a small amount of user information and stores it directly on the website that the user visits. Companies that use third-party cookies — the ones that follow you around, reporting to an often-anonymous home base that re-targets you with ads — will need to tweak their website code to restrict them to secure websites.

“Only cookies set as SameSite=None; Secure will be available in third-party contexts, provided they are being accessed from secure connections,” states Google on the Chromium Blog.

If developers fail to add the necessary code, or don’t have a secure website, their cookies will be deleted without hesitation by Google. In some cases, websites may even break if the proper cookie code isn’t added in.

Although this update won’t completely eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome yet, the company is limiting their use to secure websites and eventually plans to phase them out altogether by 2022.

While this change could bring about yet another period of dread and uncertainty for media companies, we think it actually marks an opportunity for publishers to reclaim authority as the shepherds of engaged audiences. All it takes is quality journalistic content and a connection with readers. Just like the good ol’ days.

How it Crumbled

Consider the events that led to the crumbling of the almighty cookie: Its fall from popularity started when Safari — often the most-used browser on North American mobile devices — began limiting third-party cookies. Firefox and Google followed suit, blocking more and more tracking with every product update.

End users benefit from this shift because being tracked across the internet feels creepy, so any step away from that is a good one. But while many online publishers currently rely on ads served using tracking data, the Great Cookie Shift will be a boon for them too.

Cookies have devalued the context of where a given ad appeared. Because cookies have been able to find someone anywhere it doesn’t always make sense for an advertiser to pay a premium to serve it on a site producing quality journalism. That has, in turn, disincentivized publishers from producing high-quality content in exchange for sheer volume.

But if third-party cookies are de-powered as a result of browser changes and ads can no longer easily heat-seek their way to a reader in any ol’ corner of the internet, advertisers will have to shift their approach to find the quality audience they seek.

Why Quality Matters More Than Ever

The selling of quality context is going to matter more and more and advertisers, agencies, trading desks and everyone in between will be thinking more about that. Instead of chasing the New York Times’ audience to cheaper third-party sites with retargeting, it will mean advertisers must simply advertise on the actual New York Times.

However, capitalizing on this opportunity will rely on engagement with audiences. 

As Martin Pietrzak, Viafoura’s VP of Marketing put it, “If you can no longer target anonymous, single-visit users, quality connections with audience members will need to be the focus. Converting anonymous users to registered users will be key, and the faster a publisher can do that, the better off they’ll be.”

”The big win is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions.

Dan SeamanDirector of Product

The big win, in this case, is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data (pages visited, dwell time, ads clicked etc.) in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions. That behavioural information — matched with declarative demographic info — is valuable first-party data that publishers can offer to brands who advertise directly on site, or to exchanges who want inventory.

First-party data has always been incredibly valuable, and publishers could become the gold standard for that once again, Pietrzak added. 

Before the digital revolution, news organizations marshalled large audiences for advertisers, offering little data beyond the size of readership and overall demographics to help with content adjacency. At a time when cookies are giving way to privacy concerns, those same organizations are positioned to lead the pack again, this time rich with user behaviour information given willingly by an engaged audience.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

Please note that this article was last updated on February 10, 2020. 

How The Irish Times Uses Audience Data to Build Engaged Communities with Quality Content

Sometimes the solution to a complicated problem means thinking outside the box.

Or outside the country.

Just ask Patrick Logue, the digital editor of the Irish Times. Logue joined the 160-year-old paper in 1996 when its website was just two years old, a shadow of the print edition.

In the more than two decades since his arrival, the editor has seen the paper move away from the traditional newsstand sales-dependent model and transform into a profitable multi-platform media organization that in recent years has actually seen its audience grow.

“It’s been a mammoth task,” says Logue of the transitions he’s witnessed. “The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”

As other Irish papers have watched their circulation numbers shrink, Logue and his team are drawing in new readers in droves – and not from where or how you might think.

Paywall Innovator

Back 2015, print sales at the Times were plummeting and online advertising was hardly making up for it. The Times’ circulation had dropped 45 percent in the previous five years, and things were looking dire. It felt like a race to the bottom, as other publications pumped out click-bait stories in pursuit of page views.

The Times made a bold decision. Instead of focusing on page views in the hopes of generating advertising revenue, they would create premium content that users would be willing to pay for. Up until then, all the major Irish dailies had been providing their online content for free.

That year, the Times became the first Irish daily to introduce a digital “leaky” paywall meaning readers could view 10 articles for free each week, but to read more, they had to subscribe for either 12 or 16 euros ($13.40 or $17.86) a month. “We decided that we were not going to chase traffic in an aggressive manner,” says Logue.

The other benefit of this approach? Developing content paying readers want.

Logue says the paper then began using the new data generated by online readership to discover what was important to readers — be it abortion laws, Irish History, or these days, Brexit.

“We become the experts on these big issues,” he says. “We break things down in simple ways using explainers, infographics, and evergreen digital content that informs the reader.”

This dedicated focus on quality has led to several Times stories dominating global news cycles. A story reporting the Times’ exit poll of the 2018 abortion referendum was viewed more than a million times, with the BBC breaking into regular programming to report the poll’s results. An editorial about Donald Trump’s ties to fascism by revered columnist Fintan O’Toole broke the paper’s record with 1.3 million page views.

”“The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Data-driven Community Building

Audience data has continued to reveal unexpected opportunities to develop active, loyal communities with existing readers. For example, one of Logue’s responsibilities is to search for new, untapped readers, and he was surprised to find them beyond Ireland’s borders.

“We recognized that there is a large Irish diaspora around the world,” he says of the one in six people born in Ireland who now lives overseas. “They’re hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

To satiate this audience, Logue created the paper’s Abroad Network. Readers anywhere in the world can sign up and will receive a weekly email containing a collection of Times stories as well as e-ballots to participate in polls about important political events.

”“We recognized there is a large Irish diaspora...they're hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Abroad Network readers are also encouraged to contribute as photographers, writers or interviewees to the online project Generation Emigration, a digital section featuring the images and personal narratives of Irish readers living abroad, including a personal report from New Zealand after the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, reports from the front lines of climate change in Australia, and numerous essays on Brexit from Irish citizens living in the United Kingdom.

“We found these readers were looking for a sense of community and were also willing to contributing content,” he says. “Generation Emigration brought in a new audience, and in a very real sense created that community.”

Logue explains that the overall goal is to drive traffic, engagement and ultimately subscriptions while at the same time bringing in ad revenue. It has proved effective — some 35 percent of the Times’ page views now come from outside Ireland, and the Abroad Network has 35,000 members.

This two-fold approach of quality content and community building within its readership has been an important part of the strategy that has kept the Times in the black in recent years.

An audit of the paper in February of 2019 showed digital edition daily circulation of 21,275 — a 26 percent increase over the previous year. The paper also grew its total daily circulation by two percent to 79,406, with sales of digital subscriptions rising more quickly than the decline of print. As such, digital revenue has grown by 8.7 percent in 2018 even as print sales dropped by 8 percent. The paper posted a €2 million euro (US$2,200,000) profit last year — which is no small feat in today’s newspaper market.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

INMA 2019 Story: Why journalism should sell a service — not a product

If you want an insightful, well-researched perspective on the evolution of news media, Grzegorz Piechota is a good place to start.
A researcher at the University of Oxford and Harvard Business School, Piechota studies how technology forces change on established industries. He is the researcher-in-residence at INMA, served on the boards of major journalistic enterprises, and has spoken as a thought leader at WMEMC and WAN IFRA events the world over.
At the INMA World Congress of News Media in May, our own VP of Marketing, Martin Pietrzak, met with Piechota, who made the case that audience engagement and data-driven editorial can rebuild journalism’s place in society by presenting the reporter’s craft as a service to invest in —  rather than a product to sell.
Martin Pietrzak: You called your presentation at the INMA congress “Reader-first Newsrooms: From content factories to service providers.” How do you see the evolution of the news media business?
Grzegorz Piechota: When media switched from advertising-based revenue to consumer-based revenue, that transformation involved changing other parts of the business model as well, not only the revenue source. When you change who pays, you need to adjust your value proposition to the needs of that different payer. And then, of course, you also need to adjust your operating model to be able to deliver that value proposition.
[Publishers] were using one single product to get as many readers as possible so they could aggregate their attention and send it to advertisers — the primary customer. We were chasing reach. Now, we no longer want to sell our products to as many people as possible because we know it is impossible. Content has become a commodity. Instead, we need to sell to the people who are the most profitable. Suddenly, we need to segment our consumers based on, for example, their profitability, and adjust our products to the consumers that you want to reach.
Pietrzak: You said content is a free commodity, which stuck with me because I’m not sure every journalist would agree.
Piechota: Content is a commodity because it is available everywhere. The tools are free. Anyone who wants to spread any kind of message can do it. In capitalism, the market determines the value of content, which on Facebook, Google and other platforms is virtually free.
But the way we deliver news products today makes it possible to think about journalism not as a product, but as a service. Two articles about a certain news event can have the same value from the perspective of company economics, but one was provided by professionals that actually verified its information. So I’m not paying for the piece of information; I can find a free alternative, right? But I cannot find a free alternative from somebody professionally trained in verifying this information. If I actually want to make a better decision based on facts, I want somebody to actually verify the facts.

"The way we deliver news products today makes it possible to think about journalism not as a product, but as a service."

Grzegorz PiechotaResearcher-in-residence at INMA
Pietrzak: You mentioned managing this shift from selling a single product to selling a subscribable service requires deep audience development skills. What do publishers need to think about when developing these relationships?
Piechota: When you make decisions about your content output, you must also data mine which target groups would be interested in this content, because your business model is based on finding the most profitable customers and putting a price tag on your service for them. You have to ask if [your content] is the best fit for the segment that are actually willing to pay for it … Suddenly, the decisions about content become decisions about audiences.
Pietrzak: Is this not simply pandering… producing what people want versus what they need? You’ve raised a few of those questions showing tension between loyalty to citizens versus loyalty to “customers.”
Piechota: It’s about needs. If I want to develop part of an audience, do they need content for themselves, or do they believe in that content? The Guardian is famous for charging its users while making content available for free. How the hell does that work? They look for customers who actually want to sponsor content for other people. Its readers might think climate change is the most important problem in the world, but that most of the public doesn’t see it that way. So they want to help The Guardian develop this content to spread the message. On the other hand, I may subscribe to the Financial Times’ content to understand the market and be smarter than my competitors. These would be very different needs. But what is common is we believe that factual, verified information moves communities to make better choices.
Pietrzak: So we’re not talking about chasing big Google search trends, which we’ve seen newsrooms do a lot of in recent years.
Piechota: When you think about your audiences, the core of the service that you want to provide should be wanting audiences to stay with you. The idea that newsrooms needed to grow and maximize their reach made them focus on people who didn’t actually visit their sites. “Oh, no. On Google, people are looking for information about this singer, so we need to have a story about them.” But we’ve since realized that people who want to pay for news are people who actually already use the product. And if you want to make them pay, you need to make them use the product more. We want to focus on driving the frequency of visits, maybe the depth of visits. We want to maximize the time that they spend on a page.

"We want to focus on driving the frequency of visits, maybe the depth of visits. We want to maximize the time that they spend on a page."

Grzegorz PiechotaResearcher-in-residence at INMA
Pietrzak: This has had a huge impact on how we measure success in this business, hasn’t it?
Piechota: We’re shifting from measuring past profitability to future profitability. In the past, profitability was about measuring individual products. But now you need to look at the profitability of individual customers because some customers will be buying more products. And then, because you shift from a single sale to [ongoing] subscriptions, it means that you can plan for future revenue. You can actually, based on your data, predict the future profits from the customer relationships that you start.
Pietrzak: This is where average annual revenue per user (ARPU) comes in.
Piechota: Yes. This absolutely gives you new opportunities. Because when you know the value of your customer over the next three years, you can rethink costs of acquisition. You can think about spending more because you know that this customer will most likely not just give you $10. The right person might be worth $300. And that means that you can outspend your competitors on acquisition and use this revenue to actually improve your product.
Piechota’s newsroom is a changed newsroom — one that’s shifted from content production to audience development by providing a service to communities. Building trust through engagement, he says, will be key to future success.
Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

How The Philadelphia Inquirer is Building an Audience-First Newsroom

The Philadelphia Inquirer gave Kim Fox a big job: help transform it into an audience-first news organization.

Sure, lots of newspapers advertise themselves as community focused, but for the Inquirer it has to be more than a marketing tactic — it’s a public-benefit corporation owned by a nonprofit dedicated to “preserving local journalism.” Community engagement is its official mandate.

Serving a city of nearly 1.6 million but lacking the resources of an international news organization, the Inquirer has had to be tactical in its approach. Its success, so far, has come from focusing on a few community news fundamentals and putting a new kind of editor in the newsroom.

Fox, the Managing Editor of Audience and Innovation, saw big challenges in connecting with readers when she arrived in 2016 from Bloomberg.

Just one example: reporters were being doxxed by trolls in a comment section so toxic, the mayor had publicly called it out. That problem was solved with investment in Viafoura’s moderation and engagement tools. It was one step of many in a longer-term challenge: the paper’s 240 journalists needed to make community engagement part of their day-to-day.

The fact that “editor” is in Fox’s job title shows how the Inquirer decided to approach this: as something championed by journalists rather than imposed on them from the business side or the organization. “There was some debate whether this kind of job should live with the product team or in the Inquirer’s newsroom,” says Fox. “The newsroom was the right place to make sure journalists bought in.”

Armed With Information

To help reporters adopt the tools of audience engagement and keep this change rooted in editorial, Fox created three editor positions overseeing SEO, newsletters and analytics. She describes them as coaches and advocates for their respective engagement tools, but says they are primarily there to help make stories better, discoverable and more relevant to the community.

“I like to say we’re data informed, not data led,” Fox says. Their approach is more than just seeing what stories are most-read and doing more of the same. They try to contextualize audience data, including from their moderation and engagement tool, to find opportunities for new products and services.

The Inquirer’s new Curious Philly sub-brand is showing early promise on this front. It lets residents ask questions about the city through an automated online audience platform. Asking about a city’s curiosities is a familiar concept to anyone in local news, but Fox sees it as the first step in making the Inquirer the “listening post of Philadelphia.”

“I like to say we’re data informed — not data led.”

Kim FoxManaging Editor of Audience and Innovation, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“We’ve been really successful with Curious Philly, getting more than 2,000 questions in the last six months,” she says. And while there are plenty of questions about local quirks (“What happened to the Hunting Park carousel?”), it’s starting to encompass broader, complicated issues (“I feel like the rest of the country’s economy is recovering and Philadelphia’s isn’t”).

“Think of that as 2,000 story assignments directly from the community,” Fox says. They tend to outperform other news items in terms of pageviews in part because they remain relevant longer than a typical news hit.

“We’re able to bring them back for recirculation on our site and promotion on social over a longer period of time, and some have been able to get a steady drip of evergreen search referral.”

The Ongoing Conversation

The success of Curious Philly drove more community outreach through a handful of workshops wherein Fox’s team connected with diverse groups of non-subscribers. Those sessions spawned We The People, another online sub-brand that profiles interesting, everyday individuals around the city. It also performs well from a traffic perspective and earned its reporter, Stephanie Farr, a Keystone Press Award in April.

The focus on community engagement is paying off. Online subscriptions have grown past benchmarks during Fox’s tenure, and she says the Inquirer has “some of the top retention rates for the industry at the metro level,” though she’s keeping exact figures close to her chest.

“At the end of the day, I want to tell readers, ‘We’ve got your back,’” Fox says. “Whether that’s with city hall, or figuring out where to buy your next house. That’s our service.”

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

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