Friday 12th January: A new membership focus for Hearst UK

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

Hearst has been bitten by the membership bug. Elle UK, Women’s Health UK and Men’s Health UK have all rolled out membership plans, with more Hearst brands planning to do the same in the future.

But the question which came to my mind reading this, and indeed when the original announcements were made a year ago, is why has it taken this long to launch memberships for brands like Women’s Health? Sure it’s not exactly a ‘niche’, but subscribers to the magazine are prime targets for content-adjacent products like training plans, workout videos, and communities. Given the strength of the content, membership plans like this really prove their value when compared with other fitness course offerings from non-publishers.

I think it’s a very, very good time to be a publisher with ‘interest’ brands, whether that be gardening, fitness or cooking. Time and time again, people are showing they will pay for high quality content and services that indulge their passions. I just wonder why it’s taken Hearst so long to get stuck in.

More from Media Moments 2023

• Platforms: Publishers blink as Meta cuts off money and traffic

• Broadcast: Streaming services cement their dominant position in broadcasting, but sport still supports linear

• Print: Inflation increases pressure on newsprint, but magazine publishers are still finding niches

This snippet of news snuck through just before Christmas so I almost missed it! Not one to sit back in the tech wars, Apple is, of course, developing its own framework to create large language models (LLMs) - basically it’s developing its own version of ChatGPT (apparently its engineers have named it Apple GPT). The company is looking to secure multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles.

This is a topic we’ve discussed extensively the last few months, from community posts about a renewed Gen Z interest in print, to our own round-up of the year in print, published last week. Still, it’s nice to have a big-picture look at the state of the market from The Conversation.

I noted in the newsletter earlier this week that price hikes across publications potentially meant more of a focus on revenue per user this year. But analysis from the FT has found that many top streaming services have also jacked up prices by around 20%, with analysts speculating that this allows apparently more tempting discounts to be made. “A higher headline price makes sense, even if nobody actually pays it,” said Axate’s Dominic Young.

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