Wednesday 15th July: 7 ways COVID is impacting subscription strategies

July 15, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

You remember Knewz? News Corp's purported 'bias-free' digital news aggregator (that manages to hugely favour right-wing outlets anyway) that launched six months ago? No? How about nausea, do you remember that? If the answer is no to those questions, visit knewz.com and be reminded of both.

Writing for Digiday+, Lara O'Reilly takes a look at Knewz's entrance into the market, revealing that "Knewz.com’s total unique monthly visitors hovered between the 1 million and 1.7 million mark between February and May". Its boss Noah Kotch - formerly of MailOnline and Fox News - argues it's ahead of expectations in terms of audience.

Elsewhere in the piece, however, the knewz is decidely less rosy. Downloads of the app have tailed off and there is currently no revenue strategy in place.

The Washington Post is the latest publisher to offer audio versions of its articles. They expected the feature to appeal to readers during their commutes, but were "surprised and pleased" to see steady adoption and use over the past month as people continue to work from home. People are listening to and consuming far more WaPo content than normal whilst doing other things, much like podcasts.

Subscription-based publisher Zetland stopped using Facebook and Instagram for advertising during July, instead it’s moving some of that spend to sponsoring podcasts. By July 9, it had met 50% of its monthly membership target, 20% from podcast sponsorship.

COVID has put a dent in the podcast market, but despite everything, it's still projected to grow 14.7% this year to top $1 billion by the end of 2020 (if we all make it that far). It's a downgrade from the 30% forecast at the start of the year, but still demonstrates the resilience of podcasting.

This week's episode:

Marianna takes us through the responsibilities of broadcasters to counter disinformation, whether it's a losing battle to engage with conspiracy theorists, and the role of platforms like Google and Facebook when it comes to the spread of lies, damn lies.

We know our audience - so we know how hard you all work. That's why we know you know how hard producing a weekly podcast, daily newsletter and our other products can be. If you fancy buying us a coffee to help us through it (and to cover our tech costs), you should also know that it makes our day each and every time.