Nowadays, the resources that come from advertising are not enough to make a media outlet sustainable, experts from the United States, Spain, and Argentina shared with INMA members at a recent Webinar.

Claudio Cabrera, vice president for newsroom, strategy, and audience at The Athletic, which belongs to The New York Times, told attendees at the Paywalls: Lessons from the New York Times, Clarín, Mundo Deportivo and 15 Leading Media Companies Webinar that for six years, the paywall at The Athletic was hard. That meant users had to pay before seeing any content.

Six months ago, the company decided to open it and make it more flexible.

Sergio Fernández Marín, chief digital officer for Mundo Deportivo, of Spanish-based Grupo Godó, said explained the company currently does not use a paywall but rather a signwall — a model that prompts users to register, free of charge, to continue reading and consuming a limited amount of content on a Web site before the access closes and they “crash” against a paywall.

Sister media outlet La Vanguardia has a paywall they switch between “freemium and metered,” Fernández Marín said, which aims to lure readers to their content before trying to convert them into subscribed members. La Vanguardia is also doing tests with hard paywalls.

Javier Kraviez is chief digital officer at Argentina’s largest media outlet Clarín, which belongs to AGEA group. Specialising in analytics, Kraviez is an industrial engineer who has seen the entire transformation process at his company.

The original goal of implementing a paywall was to know who their real audience was and how it behaved, he said. Two years later, in 2017, he was part of a team that decided to go fully into a paywall model, “not just as an adventure, but as a need to provide sustainability to the business.”

Nowadays, trying to depend only on advertising is a “short-termed, dangerous path, and one that doesn’t place the reader in the middle of the strategy,” Kraviez said.

El Clarín later opted for a metered model, which grants user access to a large number of articles before prompting them to pay. The model also takes the burden off the newsroom’s back when deciding which articles are free and which are paid.

However, Kraviez acknowledged this model has certain drawbacks in terms of the subscriber base growth, which ultimately allows media outlets to keep evolving. For this reason, they decided to adopt a dynamic model, which allows for a greater subscriber conversion.

On the other hand, Marcelo Rizzi, chief technology officer at Clarín, who has more than 30 years’ experience going back to the print only days, said many mistakes were made by most media outlets when they started delivering all their content for free when the news Web sites in the Latin American region began to appear, in 1995 and 1996.

“There are many disciplines necessary for the functioning of a media group these days,” he adds.

He also emphasised the need to work as a team. For instance, Clarín created an SEO group, which does coordinated work with people from advertising, technology, and the newsroom.

Big data is also part of what Rizzi does, and it’s used to support the business with “metrics, new discoveries, and insights regarding audience behaviour.” The idea is to go for a big number of registered users and the wider audience, according to Rizzi.

Creating a sustainable paywall model

For Kraviez, the current paid or subscription models pretend to revalue what people that produce content do on a daily basis. This, says the expert, is a marathon, not a 100-meter race: “If we go too fast when trying to implement what others are doing, there’s a big possibility that we end up crashing,” Kraviez said, meaning companies need to find a sustainable model that lasts over time.

In that respect, Esteban Oliva Menéndez, CEO of Nomadic and moderator of the Webinar, said copying successful models from others is not always possible because every country and culture is different. So what might work for The New York Times might not work elsewhere: “They’re just different markets,” Oliva Menéndez said.

An example of models that work for some but not for others is the one at The Athletic. “The difference with The Athletic is that since 2016 they started to hire the best sports reporters available,” explained Claudio Cabrera.

These new hires came from large media outlets that were downsizing and, at the same time, they were reporters with interesting numbers of social media followers.

Therefore, whenever these reporters had breaking news or an exclusive, the contents would be promoted through Twitter and, three clicks later, the user would find the paywall. Despite this, users were willing to pay for a specific content, so that’s the reason why a hard paywall worked fine for The Athletic during the first stages.

Out of about 210 articles published per week on The Athletic — 140 on weekdays and 70 on weekends — between 80% and 85% are original or exclusive content.

Preventing copy-paste practices

Mundo Deportivo’s Sergio Fernández added that locking this kind of exclusive article prevents other smaller media outlets or Web sites from copying your content and publishing it, which could make the original content become relatively irrelevant.

Audiences in Spain, unlike the ones in the United States are not willing to pay for content, Fernández said: “If they [Spanish people] see the chance of saving one or two euros, they will.”

Kraviez clarified that a large portion of the audience in Argentina, for example, is not willing to pay for content, but there are those who see the value and don’t mind paying for what they consume, mostly if they feel they have an emotional tie with any given product.

Rizzi added that another challenge is establishing what content should be paid. “We must reconsider what is the added value we’re providing our audiences with.”

The Athletic choose about 10% or 15% of the content to be paid by taking certain factors into consideration, such as the potential of an article to bring in subscriber conversions, Cabrera said. They also have a scoreboard that helps them decide which articles should be locked behind a paywall. For example, an open article that is doing well in Google searches might be closed later.

Monitoring article performance with tools

Fernández Marín is emphatic that general information and news should be open, whereas some op-eds, depending on the topic, could be closed.

Content teams must analyse the articles that, over time, have the highest conversion rates, Kraviez said, and this task must be done years after the article has been published. The analysis from this can result in good practices and optimisation of the content that he referred to as “decisive.”

Monitoring the models is a must, according to Oliva Menendez and Marcelo Rizzi, since this is a very dynamic and changing variable.

Cabrera and Fernández also mentioned tools that content producers can use to monitor audiences, traffic, and how a certain piece behaves to know exactly if a piece should be closed or freed.

Nevertheless, in this market, one tool might not fit everyone.

“We have to ask ourselves, a good tool for whom?” said Clarín’s Kraviez, who explains that technologies must adapt to companies and not the other way around. Fernández said that even within the same country, one tool might not necessarily fit different media outlets.

Media companies should know how to distribute certain articles, through channels such as AMP, a technology that allows pages to load instantly in mobile devices, or Instant Articles, which is news presented in Facebook with a special, user-friendly format, Kraviez said. Not every article should appear on these platforms if publishers want to keep their content’s original design and format, he added.

The three media executives did not have an answer for media companies can attract young, “rebel” audiences that are not used to consuming content in a traditional fashion, although Fernandez recommended using tools such as TikTok or Twitch as new distribution channels.

Cabrera mentioned The Washington Post using TikTok — not as a means to grow their audience but to accompany young audiences for years, until these youngsters are no longer so young and feel they can pay for content. “It’s a bet into the future,” he said.

The key for media to ensure their survival is to continue to invest in good journalism and relevant content, no matter what kind of content the media outlet delivers, Kraviez said, instead of dedicating to “mass production and mass audiences at any cost.”

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