Friday 10th November: Satisfaction with subscriptions is on the up

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There’s just one month to go until Mx3 AI; a live event in London from Media Voices and Media Makers Meet. We’ll be featuring sessions on AI in local, national, consumer and B2B media, as well as discussions on innovation, developments and regulation.

The rest of this newsletter is pretty much a bonfire so here’s a good news story to buoy your spirits on this murky Friday morning. More consumers are satisfied with the value for money they get from publishers’ digital subscription products now than in 2022, according to new research conducted by Toolkits and National Research Group.

In a study of 1,007 U.S. consumers who subscribe to digital publications, 85% reported being “completely” or “mostly” satisfied with the value for money they receive from their subscriptions, up from 75% in August 2022.

You might be wondering if the increase is due to people cutting subscriptions they don’t engage with. Well, yes and no. We know from wider industry trends that subscribers continue to grow for many publishers, so although some may be pruning publications they find less valuable, overall it looks like publishers are actually doing a better job of engaging and delivering value to the majority. Cheers to that.

I thought my growing boredom with social media (and reluctance to sign up to anything new) was down to an increasingly demanding family, so it’s actually really interesting to hear that it’s much wider than that. It’s something many other millennials are experiencing too. An excellent essay, and I’d love to hear if this reflects your experiences too, millennial or not!

Predictably, the biggest casualties of the Meta (and soon Google) vs. Canada debacle are smaller publishers. Gretel Kahn spoke with three leaders of small Canadian publications impacted by the Meta blackout to find out how the law is impacting them. One expert estimates 20-30% of audiences for these organisations that rely heavily on Facebook have disappeared overnight.

Very sad news, although not entirely unexpected. I did enjoy the commentary in here from lyzlenz though, who said, “It was a place where women could unabashedly write about culture, politics, and everything with voice humor and the full range of human emotions. The fact it was killed by inept men is truly a metaphor.”

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