As news publishers prepare for a new year — one that has the uncertainty of a recession and other challenges hanging overhead — it’s important for them to think differently about their subscription programmes.

During Thursday’s Media Subscriptions Town Hall, INMA members were given food for thought as they look toward their 2023 strategies. In all, 1,163 participants from 89 countries took part in the INMA’s largest annual event about news media subscriptions. During the Town Hall, INMA shared learnings from the European Subscriptions Academy 2022, featuring thought leadership from Google News Initiative and FT Strategies. The recording and presentations can be found here.

The importance of framework

FT Strategies’ Daisy Donald, principal consultant and head of Americas, and Tim Part, senior manager, shared insights on how publications can design a framework that prepares them for a breakthrough in digital subscriptions.

FT Strategies is the consulting arm of the Financial Times and specialises in helping publishers around the world build better relationships with their audiences as a way to future-proof their businesses.

The North Star framework plays a crucial role in the FT’s ability to reach its goals, and Part said that this strategic model helped the company achieve its goal of having 1 million paying subscribers in 2019 — which was one year ahead of schedule.

“We have seen this work over three years now, working with 24 publishers, and we do believe it can work for everybody,” he said.

Part explained there are four elements to the methodology:

• The North Star goal or long-term vision.
• Outcomes, which determine what success will look like.
• Hypotheses, which are how you think you can achieve the desired outcome.
• Experiments, which are how to test and validate the hypotheses.

Once these four components are established, there are specific layers that publishers need to be aware of. For one, it requires ongoing administration: “There is work to be done on an ongoing basis to reach this outcome,” Part said.

That means setting annual progress goals, ensuring you are constantly generating new ideas, and taking a structured approach to testing ideas in a robust, low-cost way.

FT Strategies has also identified four principles news publishers should adhere to when preparing for subscription growth:

• Empowerment. This ensures everyone in the company has the opportunity and permission to contribute to the North Star goal. “It’s very important they don’t feel it’s just another layer of administration,” Part said.
• Collaboration. “Everyone must be pulling together,” he said.
• Transparency. Sharing the strategy, roadmaps, and results with the team helps engage people and gets them thinking about what they can do.
• Being evidence-based. It is key for organisations to make data-informed decisions, Part said: “You’ve got to have insight, not just data, and let yourself be led by it.”

Putting governance in place

The one thing that pulls all these components together is a proper governance structure, Part said.

Although there are many ways to design that structure, Part shared that FT uses a broad, three-level design format that is comprised of senior leadership, a day-to-day operational level, and an experimental level.

The senior level focuses on defining the vision and outcomes, while the day-to-day operations prioritise the hypotheses and create a 12-month action plan accordingly. The experiment teams will implement and analyse the experiments, find new areas of opportunity and then pass on the insights they’ve gained.

All three levels are important, he said.

“This is actually a virtuous circle, not a hierarchy,” Part noted, saying that while the vision comes from the top, the best ideas come from the bottom. “Each level involves participants from all the various departments. It’s really important that everyone is involved. That’s really how you drive business growth.”  

Creating the right conditions for sustainability

Sulina Connal, managing director news and books partnership for Google, and Lisa MacLeod, principal consultant and publishing lead for FT Strategies, discussed how the world is changing and how that affects news publishers.  

For all the things that have changed in the news media industry, the basics have not, Connal said: Readers still need authoritative sources for information. And, as a search aggregator, Google also has a need to find reliable sources of information.

While nobody can predict what will come next in terms of disruption, this need will remain.

“The relationship … between those who produce content and their audiences, these are inevitable [needs] that will continue,” she said, noting that the way people consume that information may change, but the fundamentals are here to stay.

Google wants to play a role in the industry as the changes continue, becoming a creative partner in the digital experience: “These are creative digital experiences and we want to be a partner in this part of the journey,” Connal said.

That in a post-pandemic world, FT Strategies is seeing two different experiences for news media companies, MacLeod said: “Publishers that were already focused on reader revenue that had already concentrated on diversifying their revenue streams, that already had started a digital journey in some way recovering at a much faster,” she said. But those who had not already launched such a programme are on a downward trend.

Publishers are being hit by a decline in advertising and also are affected by the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, and the approaching recession.

“There are a lot of factors that are leading towards an extreme crunch in terms of business circumstances for those publishers,” MacLeod said. “But for those that are on the upward trend post-pandemic, I would say that correlates very strongly with having an extremely strong digital base, good audience understanding, stable technology — and almost certainly some kind of real revenue platform in place.”

European publishers are well poised for what’s ahead because they are farther ahead in the reader revenue model, MacLeod said.

“The discrepancy between Europe and the developing nations is absolutely stark, and we can really see that in the sustainability index,” MacLeod said, adding that the prospects for many newsrooms in developing nations are declining.

While publishers can’t control many factors, MacLeod said FT Strategies had identified certain pillars during its sustainability study for publishers: “One of the things that fed into that was having a favourable market context in which to operate. But in addition to that … we were specifically looking for those publishers that had a valued and differentiated product and a focus on strong audience engagement. These are the things that really do matter in terms of sustainability.”

Also essential are a viable business model and the ability to adapt, she said: “I would say having a viable business model and understanding your audience very well are probably the two most key points in sustainability.” 

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