The Financial Times: Subscription is all about habits

Joanne Kuai

22, February 2019 | London

The Financial Times has created its own engagement metric based on audience data that serves as its North Star and correlates directly with retention, user value and commercial, says Gadi Lahav Weislovits, Head of Product at FT.com.

The magic formula contains “Recency” – how recently a reader visits the site, “Frequency” – how many times they visit, and “Volume” – how much they read over the period. The engagement score coded “RFV” has powered FT’s commercial side, which currently has 1.9 million daily readership, 970,000 subscribers and 770,000 of them are digital only.

How to come up with your own North Star and how should it be like, Lahav shares the company’s insight: 1. A single metric – so that you can have one single version of the truth; 2. Simple to understand – it has to be understandable across the business to consolidate effort and conversation cross teams; 3. Correlation – consistently proven correlation to your real goal to help you focus on the most important thing.

A North Star

Lahav stresses the importance of having a North Star for publishers’ success in forming habits that lead to subscriptions, and how it can guide and focus product and editorial development.

Lahav was speaking at the Product Development and Design Thinking Summit, which took place in London 21-22 February 2019. As part of the 9th Data & AI for Media Week, the event aims to inspire participants to imagine how to earn revenue with AI-driven products for their own media companies.

The Data & AI for Media Week was created in 2013 by World Newsmedia Network’s Martha Stone Williams. Since then, the conference has been held in London five times, Hong Kong once and twice in New York. The 10th Data & AI for Media Week is planned for San Francisco and Silicon Valley for 29 April to 3 May 2019. https://sanfrancisco.dataaimedia.org/

As part of the 10th Data & AI for Media Week, the 2019 Global BIGGIES Awards competition is also calling for entries. The BIGGIES Awards aims to reward media companies’ best practices in Data and Artificial Intelligence products, projects and strategies. The deadline to submit BIGGIES entries is 1st, April 2019.  https://sanfrancisco.dataaimedia.org/