Monday 28th February: Growth strategies from successful publishers

February 28, 2022

Good morning! This newsletter is brought to you by Esther.

This is a nice tie-in to our guest on the podcast this week; 6AM City's Ryan Heafy (see below). He talks about what he learned about growing their newsletters, and creating a playbook to ensure that new launches are up and running - and making money - within a matter of weeks.

David Tvrdon brings together some well-known, and some less prolific examples of growth strategies from publishers of all sizes. He also looks at the pros and cons of some popular strategies like introductory offers.

One of my favourite features is one Gazeta Wyborcza is using. Their Club premium tier gives the opportunity to pass on two additional subscriptions to friends or relatives, and is taken up by nearly 70% of Club members. In terms of expanding longer-term relationships and networks, this is a great idea.

You know things are bad when Facebook actually takes a moral stance. Parent company Meta has barred Russian state media from running ads or monetising on its platform anywhere in the world. Google has also stopped Russian state-owned media outlet RT from receiving money from ads on their websites, apps and YouTube videos.

Several large online publishers, including Vox Media, BuzzFeed and Bustle, are testing their own versions of mobile-optimised article pages instead of using Google's AMP framework. It's the latest in a series of AMP-related headaches for the tech giant. Publishers expect non-AMP pages to garner at least 20% more ad revenue than AMP pages in most cases, without affecting loading speeds.

Meme pages and viral content creators are trying to dominate the news space when it comes to the Ukraine conflict. Now more than ever, it is vital that publishers are trusted - and show their processes when it comes to reporting - in order to minimise the impact of these opportunists.

This week's podcast:

This week's guest is Ryan Heafy, Co-Founder and COO of 6AM City, which is just about to hit 1 million subscribers across its 24 daily newsletters. We spoke about his unconventional route into media (via Black Hawk helicopters), and how it helped 6AM launch in 16 cities in a year.

Our Earlybird rate for Publisher Podcast Awards tickets (using discount code PPAEARLYBIRD22) expires this Wednesday. If you're planning on joining us on 27th April to celebrate the best in publisher podcasts, flip, flap, fly and buy, buy, buy 💸💸💸