Sharing the latest insights pulled from benchmark data, Piano’s senior vice president of strategy Michael Silberman was quick to celebrate the positive subscription results in 2020: the top 123 news publishers saw median active subscriptions growth of nearly 58%. 

Some of it came from the “COVID bump,” Silberman told participants during the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit 4.0 on Tuesday, but the fact that the higher acquisition rate did not disappear entirely lies in publishers' rapid strategy shifts.

“We think the pandemic accelerated experimentation and learning for publishers, and started to more aggressively move them from audience focus and tactics employed early in subscriptions businesses toward the more sophisticated tactics that are required as a subscription business matures,” he said.

Piano’s research across the customer journey shows user patterns and publishers’ tactics to impact those patterns changes over time. One thing that doesn’t change much, Silberman said, is the proportion of low engagement audiences. Despite the surge in traffic across 2020, the share of users in low engagement, one-off visitor behaviour hovered at about 68%. The high engagement groups are more interesting, Silberman said. 

“One of the things interesting about eight or more active days seems to be a tipping point where a majority of visitors are going to come back within a week,” he said.

Active days are often a strong predictor of subscription likelihood. Piano has been advising clients to focus on these most active users as a first step in their subscriptions business. But, Silberman said, a sizable share of audiences convert on their first active day in a month. Piano recently dug into how that share of highly active audiences versus fast converters changes over time.

In the first year, clients saw 43% of conversions driven by users visiting five or more days in a month, and only 33% are driven by first-day visitors. By the second year, those ratios flip: 41% of conversions happen on the first day, and 32% are from the five-plus days cohort.

This phenomenon happens pretty rapidly, Silberman said. By the third month the subscription product has been in the market, the share of 10+ active day visitors drops and the one active day converters grows.

“You need to pivot pretty quickly in the first few months to adopting tactics that are going to convert those lower engagement users,” he said.

The Summit continues on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout February, offering 13 hours of programming. You can register here to watch live or at your leisure. 

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