Friday 23rd June: How personalisation can increase subscription success

June 23, 2023

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

When it comes to engaging Gen Z and young millennial audiences, there is a disconnect between publishers’ tactics and audience preferences— leading to missed opportunities for publishers. That’s the big finding of Digiday's new State of the Industry report, produced in collaboration with Arc XP. Based on surveys of 116 publishers and 114 Gen Z and young millennial consumers, the report maps the current state of publishers’ engagement tactics against the preferences of younger media audiences. Download your copy of the report to learn more.

How personalisation increases the odds of subscription success

Subscriptions are the most consistent source of revenue for newspapers. However, to grow subscriber numbers, they sometimes need to throw away consistency and experiment.

digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2023/06/22/how-personalization-increases-the-odds-of-subscription-success

Chris has been writing for DCN about the use of personalisation in the fight to win more paying customers. He spotlights the Independent’s “unknown to known” approach, taking anonymous readers to registered users and then leveraging behavioural data to track propensity to pay.

Chair of the digital-only publication, John Patton, told Chris, “This improved our pitch and led to revenue of about £2 million. That’s going to be a big number like £10 million in two [or] three years.” More evidence that the more data a publisher has on its users, the better its chances of converting them.

Of course, publishers need to experiment to find their ideal approach and Chris asks, to what extent can you experiment without confusing your readership? His conclusion is the ability to tailor messaging at the individual level helps users to understand that they are being served deals based on their usage habits, not some arbitrary marketing decision.

Inside Popbitch: 'It's a lot of actual serious work'

In an interview with Press Gazette, Popbitch boss Camilla Wright speaks about newsletters, showbiz journalism and her business.

pressgazette.co.uk/news-leaders/popbitch-interview

Another great interview from Press Gazette’s Will Turvill. This time he’s been talking to Camilla Wright, the founder of weekly celebrity gossip newsletter ‘Popbitch’. It’s a great read throughout, but Wright’s admission that now might be, “a good time to be part of a bigger organisation,” is interesting and goes very much against the flow of journos leaving established outlets to set up on their own.

Reddit goes to war with its volunteer moderators

What began as a simple dispute over API terms seems to have become an existential debate over the future of Reddit itself.

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/reddit_api_moderators.php

Thousands of Reddit’s most popular subreddits have gone dark, with moderators changing their status to private to protest Reddit charging third-party apps for for API access. The volunteers who have taken their communities offline are seen by many as valued members of the Reddit community. The company seems to see them as ‘insignificant weirdos’ who are holding the site hostage. My money’s on the weirdos winning.

People don’t want robots picking their headlines, but they don’t really want editors doing it either

"People do not usually have contrasting views of human and algorithmic selection. If they are skeptical of one, they’re likely to be skeptical of the other."

www.niemanlab.org/2023/06/people-dont-want-robots-picking-their-headlines-but-they-dont-really-want-editors-doing-it-either

This year’s Digital News report highlights an increase in social media networks, search engines, news aggregators, and other platforms using algorithms to select news. It asked respondents how they felt about automatic story selection vs human story selection. The data returned showed that people are skeptical of all forms of news selection, whether done by humans or by algorithms. That old trust issue again?

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