“News for Sale” author: Best practices in digital subscriptions

By Anisa Holmes

Grzegorz Piechota, a Google Digital News Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, is an expert on digital subscriptions and paywalls in the media business. After working in the news industry for 20 years, the last of which has been spent on a yearlong research project on media subscriptions, he has come up with a catalog of best practices that every publisher can learn from.

For one, testing of more than 200 different variables showed that behavioural usage signals have the highest correlation to likelihood to pay for a subscription. “Your subscribers and non-subscribers have different needs,” Piechota explains. This finding highlights the importance of audience segmentation to allow for better strategic decisions, targeting and personalization, all of which allow for more reader loyalty and engagement. One example of how this insight can be translated into action comes from the Wall Street Journal, where their dynamic paywall offers different experiences for likely subscribers and for unlikely subscribers. This segmentation led to a 200% to 500% uplift in conversions.

Besides audience segmentation and personalization, automation is also key. One of Piechota’s experiments explored an area where automation has a huge potential value, but is being neglected; automated check-ins with the audience. After subscribing to over 20 news sites, Piechota did not access the sites for several weeks to see what would happen. Only the Financial Times noticed Piechota’s inactivity and followed up with a message prompt to foster renewed engagement. Piechota says in this case and many more, “the biggest challenge to automation is not the technology, it’s the human factor”.

Piechota also touches on a major concern for journalists and editors at newsrooms; ‘will we all be replaced by robots?’ The answer is yes and no. While media groups like MittMedia have used robot journalists to great success, Piechota thinks editors will take the brunt of the damage; whilst machines can make editorial decisions better than human editors can, they aren’t able to write nuanced, high-quality journalistic pieces (yet).