Wednesday 13th July: Tips to supercharge audience growth

July 13, 2022

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As the fight for attention online intensifies, attracting and retaining audiences has become something that publishers are finding increasingly challenging. For Charlotte Cijffers, audience growth has become an area of expertise from her work with publications like Dazed, Attitude Magazine and more recently, the launch of Rolling Stone in the UK.

She spoke to us on the podcast a few weeks ago, and as part of that conversation, I asked her for some advice for other publishers who wanted to grow their digital audience. Here, I've written up four of her tips.

Given The Atlantic's announcement yesterday that they had digitised their entire archive (and that they expect to recoup the costs within two to three years), Cijffers' first point about the value of publisher archives is particularly pertinent.

The FT's podcasts are fuelling growth in the U.S. They've seen a 29% year-over-year growth this year in its U.S. audience, and now 25% of its global audience is U.S.-based. Although it no doubt hopes to turn some of those new listeners into subscribers, most of the opportunity here is in audio ad revenue. But it's also important for them to be reaching "younger and more diverse audiences."

The same-day cancellation rate likely includes subscribers who only wanted access to one article, or who felt the full paid experience was lacking after a quick look around. New data suggests some just really hate the idea of auto-renewal.

Another point of view - this time from the inside - on the 'are pageview targets good or bad for local media' debate. A quick look at the Liverpool Echo's page suggests that editor Maria Breslin perhaps has a different definition of clickbait to the rest of us.

This week's podcast:

This week we hear from Max Towey, Co-Founder and CEO at RocaNews. Roca is a start-up building a community around the news that lowers the blood pressure; they believe alarmist and partisan coverage has been responsible for much of the news avoidance we’re seeing today. Towey tells us how RocaNews is aiming for balanced and informative coverage of just a few stories a day, and are hoping to rebuild the younger generation’s trust in news.

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