The Telegraph wants to grow its registered readers
to 10 million. The goal is to shift away from valuing mass-reach audience
numbers in favor of building a more loyal readership of logged-in users.
The benefits of doing so are clear.
Advertisers will always want more detailed first-party audience data to improve
campaign targeting, and registered users tend to be more ripe for converting
into paying subscribers than flyby readers. That’s why there has been a flurry
of registered-user drives at publishers such as The
Times of London over the last year.
To get itself to 10 million, the publisher will
invest in its newsroom, hiring 39 additional editorial staff. The publisher has
identified six areas that it believes will help cultivate registrations and in
which it wants to thrive: politics, sports, luxury and lifestyle, business of
technology, money and travel.
“A registered reader — as opposed to an anonymous
one — is far more valuable to the business than the vast majority of our
audience as it stands now,” wrote The Telegraph’s CEO, Nick Hugh, in a letter
to staff.
The publisher will also restructure teams
internally to place its journalists closer to developers, data scientists,
analysts and engineers in the office, though it’s not ready to give
specific details. New editorial products like newsletters, events and
messaging products will follow next year, though details are scant.
The changes described in Hugh’s message
to staff are The Telegraph’s biggest since it dropped its metered
paywall model in 2016 in favor of a hybrid model, in which 20
percent of content is behind a paywall and the rest is open-access.
The Telegraph wouldn’t confirm latest
subscriber or registered-user numbers, saying only that they’d grown by
some 300
percent four months after dropping the metered paywall.
Naturally, both will be much lower than the bulk of its audience that consumes
content for free, which was 23 million monthly visitors in October, according
to comScore.
Monetizing digital ads is tough,
particularly display, which Google and Facebook heavily dominate. That
continued pressure on publishers’ digital ad revenues is causing many to
embrace more reader-revenue models. The New York Times has undergone a total
pivot to reader revenue, and the Guardian also generates
more money from its paying members and donors than it does from
advertising. Now, The Telegraph wants a piece of the action.
Download a preview of a research report available exclusively to
Digiday+ members highlighting the biggest challenges for agency executives.
“The Telegraph has clearly looked at the success of
The Washington Post and New York Times and is trying to follow their example:
invest in journalism to attract paying members,” said Joe Evans, media analyst
at Enders Analysis. “The [six] verticals they’re concentrating on will form the
core proposition to get subscribers through the door; then, they can
cross-subsidize by serving those readers profitable sponsored content or
affiliate links in the high-value categories the editor name-checks: luxury and
lifestyle, technology, money and travel.”
The shift to a product-first quality consumer
proposition that motivates logins seems sensible on paper. To entice people to
register, and potentially ultimately subscribe, the newspaper will need to do
more than ever to stand out against local competitors with equally ambitious
propositions.
“The question is whether the paper can really
commit to the strategy. Is 39 new editorial roles much compared to the rounds
of layoffs the business has undertaken when it was in cost-minimization mode?”
said Evans. “Will they be able to stop worrying about day-to-day traffic
numbers? The concern for traffic has led many news outlets to concentrate on
entertainment, celebrity and overblown opinion pieces, things which get readers
onto the site but don’t convert them to loyal, registered or paying readers,
and it will remain very tempting to chase those numbers on a piece-by-piece
basis.”
There has never been more pressure for publishers
to prove their own audience data is unique. Likewise, it’s just as competitive
for publishers pitching branded content briefs. Therefore, any major difference
in approach to areas like platform partnerships and new device innovation
attract agency attention.
“The Telegraph has taken a very
different road to the likes of the Guardian, for instance, on its relationship
with platforms, and in particular, Apple News, and that helps it stand out,”
said Julian Purnell, partnerships and emerging media director at digital media
agency Essence. “The fact it’s now gone
in early to experiment with the Amazon Echo show is interesting
because brands are still unsure of how to tap the smart-speaker space and how
to monetize or capture an audience there. The Telegraph could have first-mover
advantage there.”
Fonte: Digiday
GET THE NEWSLETTER
I'M NOT INTERESTED
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário