Monday 21st March: Publishers lift paywalls in Ukraine and Russia

March 21, 2022

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In this week's news round-up, we talked about The Times' subscriber boost in the days since the Ukraine invasion began, and whether they were right to maintain their paywall while other publishers dropped them.

What we didn't discuss was the fact some of this coverage absolutely affects the lives of people in the area. And in these countries, some publishers are lifting their paywalls on a geographical basis. The Economist has given free access in Russia and Ukraine, while Dow Jones has lifted paywalls on four of its sites in Ukraine.

The NYT hasn't dropped its paywall but has created a channel on Telegram to post free stories, photos and videos from its live blog. These and other publishers in the Digiday piece are great examples of publishers balancing the need to fund journalism with recognising their mission as a public service in times of crisis.

Gaming IP extends into film, TV and music, to the point that the vast majority of the public is reached by a gaming brand. It means that there is a huge commercial opportunity for publishers to cater to gaming audiences and, as Future plc’s latest research project demonstrates, that cohort is larger and more diverse than many would assume. It's well worth watching where Future is turning its attention, given the success of its recent bets.

Apple News+, the tech giant's premium aggregation service, got off to a lumbering start when it launched in 2019. But now it seems to be slowly finding an audience - well, as much as we can tell from auditing figures from digital magazines. People, the leading magazine on the service, was accessed by nearly 213,000 News+ subscribers in the second half of 2021, up 220% year on year.

A crap website loses you users, and consequently, revenue. That's not rocket science. But can you measure just how much money pop-ups, fiddly GDPR banners, newsletter sign-up boxes and autoplay videos actually cost? Qualtrics reckons you can, and have rounded up the results of 50,000 US respondents accessing websites over the past few years. The study was focused on commerce websites, so sadly we can't put a number on our local news sites yet. The point is, poor UX loses you real money.

This week's episode:

In this week’s episode we hear from Hannah Storm, founder and director of the Headlines network, an organisation working to improve the mental health of people working in the media. She tells us about why mental health can be bad among media professionals, and what organisations and individuals can do to make things better.

Building audience engagement with email is high on every publisher’s agenda. But building revenue with email doesn’t get nearly the same attention. In this special Conversations episode, Chris is joined by Passendo's Andreas Jürgensen, Anders Rantzau Rasmussen, and Access Intelligence’s Michael Ring to discuss how publishers are growing their bottom line by optimising and automating in-email ad serving.