Ultimate Guide to Acquisition, Conversion and Monetisation for Publishers

Ultimate Guide to
Acquisition, Conversion

Guide to Acquisition, Conversion and Monetisation for Publishers

and Monetisation
for Publishers

Ultimate Guide to
Acquisition, Conversion
and Monetisation
for Publishers
In association with
3 Executive summary
4 Introduction: the challenge
4 Know your ‘frenemy’
5 New reader discovery
6 Tactics for acquisition
7 The monetisation endgame
9 Publisher subscriber conversion rates
(exclusive data)
10 Non-news content revenue
11 The international opportunity
11 Does it work? It’s already working!
12 Eight key take-homes for publishers
seeking to improve their acquisition and
conversion rates
Includes exclusive insights from Piers North, chief
revenue officer at Reach, Jo Holdaway, The Independent’s,
chief data & marketing officer, CityWire founder Richard
Lander, VP Digital at WELT Michael Reiner, Enders
Analysis CEO Doug McCabe, Mill Media founder Joshi
Herrmann, and Scott Messer, founder of Messer Media.
Contents
THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
3
Executive Summary
Author of this guide Jim Edwards is a consultant on editorial strategy
for digital newsrooms. He is a former editor-in-chief for News at
Insider and was also founding editor-in-chief of Business Insider UK
Publishers face significant challenges from major tech platforms
that are increasingly hostile to news businesses. Google’s AI
news summaries and algorithm updates since 2023, as well as
the forthcoming Privacy Sandbox, will reduce news visibility
and advertising revenues. Facebook’s news referrals have
dropped by 50%, and Apple’s focus on its Apple News app and adblocking features further complicates the landscape.
Publishers must adapt their acquisition strategies by fostering
direct relationships with readers and emphasising unique
content. Successful examples include Mill Media, with its
exclusive, long-form reporting, and Axel Springer’s Welt,
which combines premium news content with exclusive sports
highlights.
Engagement tactics involve prioritising logged-in, registered
users, as shown by The Independent’s 6.5 million registered
readers. Contextual advertising, as used by CityWire and Reach
PLC, offers a cookie-proof alternative to traditional ad targeting.
Diversification into non-news revenue streams, such as events
and e-commerce, is essential. Expanding internationally can
also provide growth opportunities, despite typically lower
revenue per user from foreign subscribers.
This strategic shift is proving effective, with UK quality titles
gaining 2 million subscriptions since the pandemic. Publishers
like The Guardian and Mail+ are successfully building reader
revenue models, demonstrating resilience and potential for
sustained growth.
4 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
Introduction: the challenge
Google’s use of AI — in which Google’s
summaries of the news have pushed down the
actual sources of those stories in one-quarter
of US searches — sends yet another signal to
publishers: The major tech platforms are often
hostile to the news business.
It’s getting harder to reach new readers, harder
to fund free news with advertising, and harder
to turn casual eyeballs into paying customers.
That’s because the major tech platforms have
turned away from news:
■ Google has been dialing down news since
2023, with at least two updates to its
algorithm that have reduced the presence of
news in its search results.
■ Next year, the search giant will abandon the
third-party cookies that allowed advertisers
to target readers on news sites and replace
them with a new set of APIs called Privacy
Sandbox.
■ Sandbox will offer advertisers less
functionality and will likely reduce revenues
for publishers.
■ Facebook has all but switched off the news:
referrals to news sites from the Meta app
have declined by 50%.
■ Like Google, Apple has developed features
to replace actual news with AI, and to
allow users to block the ads that fund news
(although the latter appears to have been
placed on hold, for now). Apple removed
cookies from its Safari browser years ago.
The iPhone company would much rather
people get their news from its Apple News
app, where it takes a cut of revenue that
historically would have gone to publishers.
■ Advertisers have drawn up lengthy,
outdated “block” lists that preclude placing
ads on serious news coverage. Those lists
often contain words like “shoot” to prevent
brands from appearing next to stories about
killings but they come with the unintended
consequence of removing ads from stories
about football or fictional murders in TV
dramas.
■ Those ad dollars have moved to online retail
sites like Amazon, Target and Walmart. Even
though online adspend has increased, the
total going to news sites has declined.
Know your ‘frenemy’
Publishers need to wake up, says Scott
Messer, founder of Messer Media, a publishing
consultant who specialises in digital
monetisation: The tech platforms are not your
friends.
“The tacit agreement between content creators
and distribution platforms is broken,” he says.
“The platforms have largely figured out how
to do what they do without paying much to
content creators, whether it’s in traffic or actual
money.”
“They always come as ‘frenemies’. It was
always, hey, if you give me some of this, I’ll
give you some of that, and we’re gonna live a
symbiotic relationship. And then, once they
get to scale, they start turning the tables and
pushing terms on you. Lower revenue shares,
less distribution. Oh, you want to make sure the
readers see your article today? How about you
pay us to promote it, like a sponsored listing?
Frenemies are way more enemies than friends,”
he says.
In sum, the days of being able to fund a
newsroom with viral Facebook traffic and a
good programmatic ad stack are behind us.
5 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
Now, publishers are being forced to rethink the
“acquisition funnel” when it comes to users.
In a world without meaningful social media
referrals and declining search traffic, how
do news brands acquire new users? How
do readers discover your content in the first
place? And after that, what are the best ways
for brands to collect data, register, and then
generate sales from those users?
It means developing your own audience
strategies to persuade readers to come directly
to you, skipping the platforms completely,
collecting their data and attributing sales to
them. The good news is, many publishers are
already figuring this out: “If the platforms stop
distributing content, consumers may start
going directly to certain sources — like the old
days,” Messer says.
This white paper will take you through the new
realities of reader acquisition, conversion, and
monetisation.
New reader discovery
For the last decade, online news publishers
have prioritised quantity over quality. Mail
Online publishes a staggering 1,500 stories
per day — more than any single human could
possibly read. The Mirror publishes nearly
1,000; The Independent 500.
Readers are sophisticated and media-savvy.
They know how the internet works. They know
publishers are trying to game search results or
generate headlines that attract clicks. And they
know it is simply not possible for 500 stories
to all be beautifully written scoops based on
original reporting.
The publishers that have walked away from
the mass-traffic model to successfully persuade
readers to bypass the tech platforms and come
directly to them all have something in common:
unique content.
Mill Media, the group of local news email
newsletters based in Manchester, now has 7,750
paying subscribers and 110,000 free subscribers,
largely based on word of mouth, according
to founder Joshi Herrmann. The company
got there by focusing on stories that its staff
reported themselves, usually exclusively, and
often at length. A typical Mill story is 2,000
words long.
“I would say, it’s basically impossible to build
a really strong subscription business if you’re
doing stuff that even vaguely approximates
what’s already out there. You have to do stuff
that feels very, very different. We are always
trying to make sure that what we’re doing looks
and feels really different to what’s already out
there,” Herrmann says.
The result is that The Mill has a conversion rate
of 35%, Herrman says. “If we get 100 [readers to
look at the site], 35 of them will join our email
list. I’m very, very happy with that.”
The Mill uses Substack as its CMS and
Herrmann says he likes it because of its
notoriously intrusive sign-up gate: It’s virtually
impossible to read anything on Substack
without handing over your email address.
The site publishes one story per day. It
could not be more different than it’s bigger
competitor, the Manchester Evening News.
“One of Mark Thompson’s early findings [when
he became CEO of the New York Times] was
‘less volume, more valuable’ — literally the less
volume, the more valuable it is, because people
6 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
are not paying to read 250 articles, they’re
paying for your curation,” says Doug McCabe,
CEO and director of publishing and tech at
media research company Enders Analysis.
Thompson is now an investor in Mill Media.
At Axel Springer in Berlin, Welt has 225,000
paying subscribers based on a core offer of 12.99
euros per month. Subscribers are then rewarded
with exclusive video from Bundesliga football
matches. “After the game is over, you’re gonna
get a five-minute summary of that, for paid
users,” says Michael Reiner, VP Digital at WELT.
The football highlights function like icing on
the cake. The cake itself is the news product.
“Football is not the core of our brand. The core
of our brand that we are super-known for in
Germany is our economics, political, editorial
work,” says Reiner.
Some publishers use live blogs as a reader
discovery tool, according to Alex Lehner,
marketing manager at Norkon. When big
news breaks, or when there is a major setpiece event with a large, built-in audience
(like an election or cup final), it gives news
brands something to shout about. The sense of
urgency you can generate with a live blog can
act as a funnel through which engaged readers
can be converted into registered readers, and
ultimately paying readers.
Rikstoto is Norway’s leading horse racing
and betting site. It uses Norkon’s Live
Center blogging tool to publish last-minute
commentary and analysis, especially
immediately before races start. The V75
meeting on Saturday consists of seven races.
The whole thing takes three hours to complete.
Rikstoto product owner Kristoffer Eide
discovered that a lot customers don’t have time
to watch all the races. They just want the info
before they bet, and the results afterward to see
if they won.
Live Center can be used to generate affiliate
revenue with bookmakers by guiding readers to
gambling sites that have partnership with your
news brand. That can generate a registered,
monetised reader.
“Live blogs are really playing the role of an
entrypoint to reaching wider audiences. It’s the
first step in the funnel,” says Lehner.
The Live Blog software also contains a
discovery tool aimed at the audience on Google.
“You have to do a couple of things to tell
Google that you are having a live blog and not
publishing an article, and that includes some
markup … So that tells Google, OK, I need to pay
special attention to this because there’s going
to be frequent updates,” Lehner says. By telling
Google ‘this is a live blog’, it’s prompting it to
come back and crawl your live blog a couple
of times per hour versus a static article that is
called on once and then it’s good.”
Crucially, in all these cases, success in
attracting readers without the help of the tech
platforms is dependent on how useful and
distinctive your content is.
“Unfortunately, there’s one question everybody
has to ask themselves before they get to
solutions”, says Messer. “Does my site deserve
to exist on the internet? Do you have something
valuable for readers? And is it unique? If your
answers are ‘no’, look, it’s gonna be really hard
to save your business.”
Tactics for acquisition
In the good old days, news went viral on social
media or acted as explanatory content for
search, and you could pull in readers en masse.
7 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
But by definition, those readers were stumbling
upon headlines serendipitously, either by
browsing a social media feed or searching
for an answer to a question. They were rarely
looking for a specific news outlet. They were
looking for something else — but finding news.
Although it is possible to monetise the pages
those readers land on via ads, they aren’t as
lucrative for publishers because those readers
disappear almost as soon as they’ve landed.
In fact, there’s an increasing recognition that
an unlogged-in reader isn’t worth much to
publishers.
A registered, logged-in reader, by contrast, has
a measurable lifetime value to a publisher.
Increasingly, publishers are declining to let
readers see content unless they register.
The Independent now has 6.5 million loggedin readers. Half of those are fully registered,
and half of those again are “fully engaged”,
according to Jo Holdaway, The Independent’s,
chief data & marketing officer.
“Fully engaged” means they have registered on
the site, given a name, email address, and age,
from which the Indy can infer their gender.
The Independent publishes most of its news
for free but now asks readers to log in to see it,
especially if they are trying to read two or more
articles. “If you’re not a wholly subscription
product, it’s difficult to, [ask] you know, ‘what’s
what’s in it for me to log in’?”
“We put our registration gate on the site and
asked our readers for that value exchange in
return for reading premium content,” she says.
“We also introduced a lead generation budget
on Facebook … which worked brilliantly.”
The Indy is now publishing 30 or more email
newsletters. Simon Calder’s travel email is the
largest with 300,000 recipients.
As a result of all that, Holdaway is now looking
forward to the death of third-party cookies. For
too long, she says, adtech vendors stripped data
from publishers and sold it to marketing clients,
via cookies. With all that gone, publishers’ firstparty data is now the most valuable asset in the
online ad world.
“The fact that through third-party cookie
deprecation some of these potentially more
dubious adtech vendors will not be in existence,
very sorry for the people who work for them,
but they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing,”
she says.
The monetisation endgame
Once on-site, some publishers are finding that
contextual, or subject-matter-based, advertising
is the way to replace cookie-based retargeting.
The obvious advantage is that all the targeting
data is generated and kept by the publisher
— there is no “leakage” to advertisers or their
adtech middlemen.
One of the most sophisticated examples of this
Acquisition
8 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
is CityWire, the news service for professional
money managers based in London. It’s free
to read — if you are an investor. But to lift the
registration gate users must hand over their
name, job title, location, employer, how much
assets-under-management they’re working
with, and what their investment intentions
are. After that, with permissions and GDPR
requirements satisfied, the site is free.
“We will not ask you for money to read our
website. What we love is knowing all about
you,” says Richard Lander, founder and director
of CityWire.
CityWire has a platform named Goldmine that
monitors all the content-based category tags
on the site, and that can be used as a way of
generating lists of prospects for the advertisers
who want to sell them funds.
“Say you’re BlackRock, and you wanted to send
a communication to European fund buyers
about your new U.S, tech fund. We can send it
out and say it went to X-hundred people. It has
a click-through rate, an open rate, and also they
usually have a call-to-action in there, you know:
‘come and join our webinar click here’, which is
how they get the name,” Lander says.
Clearly, if you publish extremely rich data
with a transactional value, you can offer your
content free in exchange for a lot of information
from your readers — which can then in turn be
used as a targeting mechanism by advertisers.
But what if you’re on the other end of the scale,
publishing mass-market news for consumers?
Will advertisers pay to reach them based on
their interests?
Reach PLC — publisher of The Mirror and The
Express — and 120 other brands has built its
own contextual targeting system called Mantis.
It has 1,600 or more content-based “segments”
which it can use to build profiles of readers that
can be targeted by advertisers.
Mantis was built originally as a brand safety
tool, so that content about football that
contained the word “shoot” could be used by
advertisers whose block list would otherwise
have flagged it as a story about violence. But
its tagging system became so elaborate that it
became a targeting mechanism.
“Mantis is running on almost all our direct
campaigns. The growth is going to come from
the targeting side of it more than the brand
safety side,” says Piers North, chief revenue
officer at Reach. “Mantis segments are cookieproof because they’re based on contextual
segments, deep, contextual segments which we
obviously love because we’re a publisher.”
The value of it is that it allows Reach to
continue to publish news for free.
That’s important, North says, because it’s
extremely difficult to charge for content in the
mass market end of publishing. “The BBC is a
huge influencer in this, right? As long as you
have a state-funded publisher that operates in
the mass market field, I think it’s gonna be very
hard for commercial publishers, at-scale,” to
charge subscriptions, he says.
For those that do charge — such as Axel
Springer’s Welt — pricing becomes a major
strategy. Welt essentially puts its subscribers
on a stepladder. It starts with a free trial, then
readers are offered access for one euro, then
three months’ access for 5.99 euros, and then
ultimately they must pay 12.99 a month for
continued access.
9 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
Publisher
Visitors (avg
12 months to
May’24)
Digital
subscribers
Date of sub.
data Ratio of subcribers to website visitors (%)
1 The Athletic 11.2m 2.9m Mar 2024
2 Barron’s 4.8m 1.2m Mar 2024
3 Wall Street Journal 24.7m 3.7m Mar 2024
4 Which 3.6m 484.6k Jun 2024
5 US Weekly 12.9m 1.7m Dec 2023
6 Economist 5.8m 706.4k Sep 2023
7 Aftenposten 1.5m 165k Oct 2023
8 Financial Times 11.4m 1m Apr 2024
9 New York Times 113m 9.9m Mar 2024
10 Boston Globe 3.3m 261.6k Mar 2024
11 Verdens Gang (VG) 3.8m 270.5k Dec 2023
12 The New Yorker 7.2m 499.3k Dec 2023
13 National
Geographic 7.6m 395k Dec 2023
14 Globe and Mail 4.9m 246k Sep 2023
15
Times, Sunday
Times and
Times Literary
Supplement
13.3m 582k Sep 2024
16 Nikkei 23m 1m Dec 2023
17 The Atlantic 13.4m 500k May 2024
18 Moneycontrol 18.2m 681k Dec 2023
19 Corriere della Sera 17.4m 615k Mar 2024
20 Bildplus 20.6m 707.2k Feb 2024
21 Star Tribune 3.2m 100k Nov 2023
22 New Zealand
Herald 6m 179k Nov 2023
23 Harvard Business
Review 4.6m 128.7k Dec 2023
24 Telegraph 24.8m 688k Dec 2023
25 Le Monde 21.2m 540k May 2024
Enders Analysis sees an opportunity in
doing the reverse: Charging readers a higher
price at the start and then rewarding them
for their loyalty by making it progressively
cheaper. Publishers end up “training readers
to renegotiate rather than rewarding them for
staying,” Enders said in a January report on
the UK news industry titled “Green shoots of
recovery.”
“Many newspapers offer sizeable discounts
to new subscribers, but do very little (from a
pricing stand point) to actively reward loyal
subscribers. Instead, subscribers are typically
offered discounts at the point of cancellation:
according to a Reuters report, 18% of UK news
subscribers renegotiated their subscription in
the last year”, the report says.
Exclusive data:
Publisher conversion rates
For this guide we have researched an exclusive
ranking of subscription newsbrands with the
highest ratio of digital subscribers to online
audience.
Figure 1:
Leading
subscription
newsbrands and
their subscriber
conversion rates
Ration of monthly unique
global website visitors
(last 12 months) to digital
subscribers
Source: Web visitors: Similarweb.
Subscribers: Press Gazette research;
AAM; FIPP
25.6%
25.5%
8.8%
7.8%
7.2%
6.9%
5.2%
5.0%
4.4%
4.3%
3.7%
3.7%
3.5%
3.4%
3.1%
3.0%
2.8%
2.8%
2.5%
8.8%
11.2%
12.3%
13.0%
13.6%
15.0%
10 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
Topping the list of brands included in our
analysis are The Athletic and Newscorp
financial newsbrand, Barron’s which both had
conversion rates of 26% – well above most
industry benchmarks.
Monthly unique global visitors to the Athletic’s
desktop and mobile websites averaged 11.2
million in the 12 months between June 2023
and May 2024 according to digital intelligence
platform, Similarweb. This is stacked up
against its 2.9 million subscribers as of March
2024. Barron’s meanwhile averaged 4.8 million
monthly visitors in the last year compared to its
1.2 million subscribers.
They were followed by Wall Street Journal
with 24.7 million monthly visitors, 2.7 million
subscribers, giving it a conversion rate of 15%.
Many things factor into how successful a
publisher is at converting its audience to paying
readers. These include how long the publisher
has had a paywall in place since those that
have had longer to build up their paywalls
will likely have a better ratio. The Wall Street
Journal and New York Times, both of which
are among out top ten best performers have had
paywalls in place for over a decade with The
Wall Street Journal a particularly early mover
having charged for its content since 1995.
They are among seven brands on our list with
a conversion rate of over 10% which include
five specialist titles focused on areas such as
sports, consumer reviews or finance – The
Athletic, Barron’s, Wall Street Journal, Which,
Us Weekly, as well as the Economist and
Norwegian news daily, Aftenposten.
INMA says that of 238 newsbrands looked at
by INMA, the median news brand increased its
number of digital-only subscriptions by 14% in
the first three months of this year compared to
the same period in 2023, while total revenue
from digital-only subscriptions was up by 19.5%
during the same period.
Non-news content revenue
Pop quiz: In terms of reader engagement, which
parts of the New York Times do you think
readers spend most time with?
It’s not the news product.
Rather, games (Wordle), cooking, and The
Athletic dominate the eyeballs of Times readers
(see page 14 of this investor presentation). Less
than half of global time spent with NYT apps
goes to news.
It is increasingly common for newsrooms to
generate revenues from non-news products.
Fortune has an e-commerce offering called
Fortune Recommends. It’s an affiliate
marketing program with Red Ventures’
Bankrate as a partner.
Likewise CityWire isn’t just a publisher of
financial information — it hosts conferences for
its readers and the fund managers who want to
reach them.
11 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
Similarly, The Economist hosts 160 events per
year, in dozens of countries.
In the mass market, Reach is also a beauty
product company. It has sold 500,000 OK
magazine Beauty Box subscriptions in which
customers receive a monthly box of beauty
products, sometimes with a celebrity link. It has
generated £2.3 million in revenue, with annual
growth of 67%, the company says.
The international
opportunity
English-language news providers get their
subscribers predominantly from their home
countries in both the UK and the US, according
to a study by Enders.
The Washington Post, for instance, has 2.3
million subscribers of which only 270,000 live
outside the US, the study says.
That’s an extreme example but the domestic
skew is normal — especially for US titles.
There are two publishers that stand out as
having expanded far beyond their domestic
audiences: The Financial Times and The
Guardian both have larger subscriber bases
abroad than they do in the UK. At the FT the
international skew is extreme: Just under 1
million subscribers live in the UK but a further
1.5 million are foreign.
The obvious opportunity is to expand into
English-language markets that are not your
home country.
The Independent, The Mail and the Sun have
all invested heavily in US newsrooms in recent
years. Business Insider and the New York
Times have significant London newsrooms.
Newsweek’s London newsroom is rumoured to
employ more journalists than its New York HQ.
The only disadvantage of expanding abroad is
that, generally, the average revenue per user
for “foreign” readers is lower than those of the
title’s home country, Enders says.
Does it work? It’s already
working!
The “walled garden” strategy works, according
to Enders Analysis, which estimates that
“quality titles” in the UK have added 2 million
subscriptions since the pandemic.
The Guardian, The Telegraph and the FT all
have 1 million-plus paying digital subscribers
and their lists “have been resilient to the
cost-of-living crisis, as these are high-end
audiences,” Enders says.
In 2016, The Guardian had zero reader revenue.
It now has $112 million in reader contributions,
according to Steve Sachs, the paper’s managing
director of the Guardian US. Email is now 24%
of revenue.
Now, all eyes are on Mail+ from MailOnline.
When the paywall was launched in 2019, many
were sceptical that readers would pay — a few
years earlier The Sun had tried a paywall and
given up on the effort. But by last year Mail+
had 150,000 subscribers.
“Critically, the Mail’s recent subscription efforts
with UK audiences is pushing reader-charging
into the popular titles: a potential gamechanger,” Enders says.
12 THE FUTURE OF MEDIA
This guide was produced in association with Norkon
Norkon’s live reporting platform for publishers enables up-to-the-second live news,
financial market data and audience interactivity.
It offers SaaS solutions for addressing editorial and journalistic live reporting needs, delivering financial news in an
intuitive way and gamifying the stock market to attract new audiences.
Norkon’s solutions enable news and media organisations to monetise website traffic by capitalising on the user
engagement, website revisits, subscriber conversion and further reducing churn by keeping existing subscribers
continuously engaged.
Find out more: www.norkon.net email@ sales@norkon.net
Tech Platform Hostility:
■ Google’s AI news summaries have reduced
visibility for actual news sources in searches.
■ Algorithm updates since 2023 have decreased
news presence in search results.
■ Google’s Privacy Sandbox will replace thirdparty cookies, likely reducing publisher
revenues.
■ Facebook referrals to news sites have dropped
by 50%.
■ Apple prefers its Apple News app, taking a
revenue cut from publishers.
Ad Revenue Challenges:
■ Advertisers avoid serious news due to outdated
block lists, shifting ad dollars to online retail
sites.
■ Decline in ad revenue despite increased online
ad spend.
Shifting Acquisition Strategies:
■ Publishers need to develop direct relationships
with readers, bypassing tech platforms.
■ Unique and distinctive content is essential for
attracting and retaining readers.
Successful Publisher Examples:
■ Mill Media focuses on exclusive, long-form
stories, resulting in high conversion rates.
■ Axel Springer’s Welt combines premium news
content with exclusive sports highlights.
Engagement and Data Collection:
■ Prioritizing registered users is crucial, as seen
with The Independent’s 6.5 million logged-in
readers.
■ Contextual advertising offers a cookie-proof
alternative to traditional ad targeting.
Diversification of Revenue Streams:
■ Publishers are exploring non-news revenue
streams like events, e-commerce, and beauty
products.
■ Expanding internationally offers growth
opportunities, although with typically lower
revenue per user from foreign subscribers.
Walled Garden Strategy:
■ Quality titles in the UK have added 2 million
subscriptions since the pandemic.
■ The Guardian has successfully built a reader
revenue model, now generating significant
revenue from reader contributions.
Challenges and Opportunities:
■ The mass-traffic model is less viable; quality
and unique content are more valuable.
■ Publishers need to innovate in content delivery
and monetization to survive and thrive in a
challenging landscape.
Key take-homes for publishers seeking to
improve their acquisition and conversion rates