Tuesday 18th June: What the Digital News Report 2024 said about podcasts

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

A shout-out for our friends at The Audiencers who are coming back to London on a leg of their world tour (mad/brave/brilliant women…) They’ve got a brilliant workshop dedicated to retention-minded acquisition this Thursday 20th then a great line-up of speakers from around the world for the festival itself on Friday. Check out the agenda here.

Yesterday was Digital News Report Day, for all who celebrate/commiserate. If you’re after the top-line coverage, I can highly recommend Five trends to watch in the UK from our friends at journalism.co.uk. But fresh off the back of the Podcast and Newsletter Summit last week, I spent a few hours last night after the kiddos had gone to bed diving into what it said about both.

I’ve rounded up the podcast findings here, and highlighted some opportunities (more female/diverse podcast hosts would go some way to helping…) But what I found really interesting was that newsletters got little more than a passing mention.

It’s not that they’re not important to publishers; video, podcasts and newsletters were highlighted in the Reuters Institute’s January survey as being top priorities. But they barely register as important news delivery vehicles for audiences. An opportunity for growth, or a sign of disinterest?

Thanks to Charlotte Tobitt for writing up one of the sessions from our Publisher Podcast Summit last week on premium podcasts. I foolishly only scheduled 20 minutes to talk to Ben Youatt, Immediate Media’s Head of Podcasts about their subscription strategy for podcasts, but Charlotte has done a great job of distilling our rapid-fire Q&A into a coherent and useful piece.

This is specifically about using personalisation for revenue emails, but there are some top-level principles I think are really important for personalising newsletters, and I’ve certainly taken some notes! The top tip is that you have the pieces to build great segments in-house, and if you don’t have a method for doing that, there’s a job for the quieter summer period.

Monthly subscriptions may be largely worthless for many publishers, FT Strategies argued last week. They pointed out that monthly subscribers have extremely low survival rates, with less than a quarter remaining after one month. I found this analysis from Jack Marshall valuable, with one suggestion being that 'conversions' should only be recognised when subscribers move to more intentional 3, 6 or 12 month tiers.

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