Netwerk24 began as a news service eight years ago and has become South Africa’s biggest subscription-based news portal, growing from a pure news site to a leading destination for the Afrikaans market.

It could not have happened, Editor-in-Chief Henriëtte Loubser said, without collaboration.

As the online home for Media24’s Afrikaans publications, Netwerk24 is known for its award-winning journalism. During this week’s members-only Webinar, Subscription models for a niche market: Lessons from Media24, Loubser shared some of the strategies and lessons that have made it so successful.

“Collaboration was key to our growth,” Loubser said, noting that initially the company had three daily Afrikaans newspapers spread throughout the country, as well as a national Sunday newspaper. Each had its own Web site, as did some of Media24’s local newspapers, but in 2014, “Media24 had the foresight to realise that rather than each newspaper trying to go it alone, our best chance of digital success would be to unite.” That led to the creation of Netwerk24.

The company switched off the individual sites and brought them together. It also implemented a paywall, which was a bold move at the time. That didn’t work immediately, as the company offered 10 free articles per month before readers had to pay. The strongest stories were still held back for print, and the company found most readers only read the online stories they could access for free.

In October 2015, Netwerk24 created a separate digital-only newsroom, but the business model still wasn’t gaining traction.

“Six months later, the company made a really big move and decided to move all the journalists from the daily newspapers over to Netwerk24. Ever since, they’ve been producing copy digitally first with breaking news as it happens in the moment,” Loubser said. “The daily newspapers choose which content they want to package for the next day’s print newspaper. Newspapers have core teams, but we work in one big newsroom.”

This also marked the implementation of a hard paywall, where readers got a 30-day free trial but had to pay for digital content. In addition to having to train readers to adopt a paid digital mindset, Loubser said getting journalists to adapt to the cultural shift was no small feat:

“On top of [getting journalists to work digital first], you have journalists from different newspapers now together in one team with loyalties running very deep to these newspapers,” she said. “It took a lot of empathy and respect but also clear and decisive leadership to achieve this.”

Loubser acknowledged there were many “growing pains” with digital workflows, but the teams became stronger every year.

“I think it was actually cemented during the pandemic, the cohesiveness in the newsroom, because of the way we had to work,” she said.

Building on success

One of the main lessons Netwerk24 learned about success was the importance of finding what was working — and then amplifying it.

As the new business model gained traction and the company saw the success resulting from joining forces, it made another bold move in November 2017 by adding Media24 Afrikaans magazine content to the site. The plan was executed in a short timeframe — just six months — and teams had to work aggressively.

“We moved very fast once we made the decision,” Loubser said. “So a lot of development work had to be done in six months, putting the tech team under severe pressure. But it was all worth it because subscribers now had access to the most popular magazines in the country.”

A rebranding accompanied this change, with a new logo and a new slogan: “Everything in one place.” The change resulted in steep subscriber growth. Now, the homepage includes magazine content.

“News and lifestyle content happily lives together, drawing in different audiences,” Loubser said.

Expecting the unexpected

Netwerk24 has remained flexible and agile, constantly changing its content model. During the pandemic, the goal was “to keep as many print titles as possible sustainable and profitable.” That meant reducing the frequencies of some titles and switching others to a PDF-only format.

At the same time, the company was innovating and experimenting for the future: “Although we value our legacy titles and also the audience’s loyalty to them, we now have a newsroom that innovates and experiments for the future,” she said. “In the past four years, we’ve added an array of infotainment, entertainment, and edutainment to our offering to keep our audience engaged.”

It developed a multimedia strategy that has included audiobooks, flash dramas and comedies, and podcasts.

“The flash dramas and comedies are so cool because the series has up to 48 episodes, but each episode is only five minutes long,” she said, explaining it typically broadcasts new episodes Monday through Friday, leaving “a nice cliffhanger” at the end to draw the audience back the next day. Then on the weekend, the shows are marketed to promote binge-watching.

The shows are a partnership with Media24 TV and bring in top-notch producers and scriptwriters. Each series also features some of the country’s most iconic actors, which she said was boosting jobs and formats for the Afrikaans arts industry.

They also held competitions for and produced three audio dramas. 

“During lockdown, Nathaniël, an extremely popular Afrikaans artist, did a podcast for us — 15 minutes each, 10 episodes, where he just shared the magic of every day that he experiences,” she said. “It by far outperformed any of the podcasts we’ve done so far.”

New projects are being nurtured and grown, including a gardening diary by the Sunday newspaper Rapport with instructional videos and a project where a magazine writer named Gerda Engelbrecht did a daily vlog while walking the Camino for 40 days. That has been so successful that a tour operator has asked Netwerk24 to be a media partner; they will collaborate on in-person tours beginning in October.

Lessons learned

“The winning lessons in this category is to have endearing personalites on a series,” Loubser advised. “And cheap is not always nasty; with the help of selfie sticks and the phone, [Gerda] filmed and edited [the walks] on her cellphone herself.”

In addition, the power of repackaging should never be underestimated: “Create a loop from video to the newspaper to the magazine and back to video again,” she said. “We realise we still have a lot of work to do because we’re competing against social media big time.” 

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