The Times has gotten there early, though, thanks to its acquisition of sports subscription site The Athletic — and The Athletic’s 1.8 million paid subscriptions — earlier this month. (“Separate and apart from The Athletic, the Company believes it would have reached this target well before 2025 on an organic basis,” per the press release.)

The Times also publicly set a new goal of 15 million digital subscribers by the end of 2027 and “plans to increasingly promote a high-value New York Times bundled digital subscription.” (Will the paid bundle include Wordle, which the Times acquired for over $1 million this week? We’ll see, but uh … enjoy playing for free while you can, maybe.)

Additionally, the Times noted that it had “achieved $2 billion in annual revenue for the first time since 2012.” For a reminder of how much has changed, check out this Nieman Lab piece from the time.

And digital subscriptions have been just about the only happy tale the news media has had to tell about itself in recent years. Once a comparatively small part of American media revenue — around 20% for newspapers and 0% for terrestrial TV and radio — subscriptions are now the biggest piece of the pie for many publishers.

Which means it’s important to be clear when we talk about them!

I know I’ve complained about this before, but allow me to quote myself:

“Subscribers” is a term that can mean two things: “people who pay for regular access to your product” or “people whose email address we have.”

The context there was the implosion of Ozy, which at various points claimed it had “5 million” (!) or “25 million” (!!!) “subscribers,” neither of which seems particularly likely by any definition.

(Speaking of Ozy: In the past week, its Twitter account has tweeted 14 times. Those 14 tweets have gotten a total of 6 retweets and 9 likes, combined. In that span, it’s posted five videos to YouTube. They’ve generated 483, 374, 207, 200, and 42 views. So far, Ozy 2.0 is a lot like Ozy 1.0.)

But this is a issue that goes beyond the Currently Under Federal Investigation for Securities Fraud Division of digital publishers.

You’ve probably heard of Punchbowl News, the D.C. newsletter company started by some ex-Politico Playbook people. It sends out three editions a day, one free to all and two only to paying subscribers who pony up either $30/month or $300/year.

A few months back, Punchbowl announced it had reached a significant total: 100,000 subscribers.

The @PunchbowlNews team. 100k subscribers in six months. pic.twitter.com/GUUMtBf1Jj

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 15, 2021

Good for them! So 100,000 people are paying $300 a year — what a business!

Except no, actually, the 100,000 were just subscribers to the free email. The number of paying subscribers was closer to 3,000. Punchbowl didn’t say “We have 100,000 paying subscribers” — but as a company known mostly for its high-price subscription product, not making that clear is asking for trouble.

Imagine writing a story that said, without any context: “The New York Times has more than 28 million subscribers.” Wow, what a huge number! That really is how many subscribers its 70-plus email newsletters have, combined. But you wouldn’t say that, because when people think of “New York Times” and “subscribers,” they’re thinking about how many people pay the Times for access to its products, not how many email addresses it has in a database somewhere.

That’s especially true if you’re literally writing a story about how great the paid subscription model is. Like this one Monday in the Financial Times. It’s about The Information, which was an early mover in this high-price niche digital subscription space. The lede:

The Information, a technology news publication aimed at Silicon Valley insiders, has reached 225,000 active users, underlining the rise of specialist subscriptions as a business model for journalism.

Again, this is a story specifically about paid digital subs as a business model. I’d bet $10 most people who read that paragraph came away thinking The Information had 225,000 paid subscribers. But it’s not until the 12th graf that you get this:

The Information charges $400 a year for full access. The 225,000 figure includes paying subscribers and people who have subscribed to a newsletter, which is free. Lessin says The Information, which she started with her own money and has 49 employees, is profitable but declined to give specifics.

In what world is it useful to lump together “people who pay $400 a year” and “email addresses in a Mailchimp list” into a single category? “That new French restaurant downtown serves 8,300 people every night! About 40 order the $200 prix fixe tasting menu, while 8,260 enjoy a glimpse of the front door as they stroll past its storefront.”

That FT piece doubles down:

The Information is among a crop of young media ventures seeking to build specialised subscription businesses with a similar pitch: providing valuable information to a specific — and wealthy — audience.

Reporters from Politico, the US political news website, left in January to create Punchbowl News, a publication focused on “the people in Washington who make decisions”. The company charges $300 a year and has reached more than 100,000 subscribers.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

All this intentional muddling is enough to make the normally very astute @mediagazer think this story says The Information has "over 100,000 subscribers"

(It does not!)https://t.co/HXqvspgNuG pic.twitter.com/664j9GOA7Q

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) November 22, 2021

It’s natural for companies to want to brag about their big numbers. (Though I would hope a news company would at least think about being more straightforward about it.) So those of us who write about the media need to be the line of enforcement here.

Unless you’re writing a story in which the context makes it dead obvious, reserve the word “subscribers” for people who actually pay a media company money. Call the people who get a free email “email subscribers” or “newsletter subscribers,” not just “subscribers.”

You’ll do a better job of informing your readers, you’ll give the industry a more accurate vision of the state of affairs, and — most importantly — you’ll save me some annoyed tweets.

Twitter Blue is an odd name for the social network’s $3/month premium service, which it formally announced this morning after weeks of leaks. Is it the late-night version of Twitter where you can swear? Is it Sad Twitter? A service regulators will eventually force Twitter to spin-off?

But of course Twitter’s Celtics-inspired bird log has long been blue (thank heavens they abandoned that awful mucus green). And its verified accounts have made being a “blue check” either a mark of elite status, dastardly power, or both. So the choice isn’t that curious.

From the announcement:

We’ve heard from the people that use Twitter a lot, and we mean a lot, that we don’t always build power features that meet their needs. Well, that’s about to change. We took this feedback to heart, and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.

And for those wondering, no, a free Twitter is not going away, and never will. This subscription offering is simply meant to add enhanced and complementary features to the already existing Twitter experience for those who want it.

Starting today, we will be rolling out our first iteration of Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada. Our hope with this initial phase is to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more .

Testing out new subscription products in Canada is by now a media tradition; The New York Times’ paywall also debuted there, ten years ago. Testing in smaller anglophone1 countries lets corporations work out the kinks on a smaller scale before expanding to the U.S., which Twitter Blue is expected to do later this year.

So what do you get for your three bucks a month? Right now, a pretty underwhelming mix of features.

Undo Tweet: Typo? Forgot to tag someone? Preview and revise your Tweet before it goes live. With Undo Tweet, you can set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to click ‘Undo’ before the Tweet, reply, or thread you’ve sent posts to your timeline. Correct mistakes easily by previewing what your Tweet will look like before the world can see it.

Twitter users have been calling for an edit button for well over a decade.

looking for an edit button. Not finding an edit button. Giving up on the edit button idea

— Kirk Peterson (@BigA) November 10, 2006

But this is only an edit button if you catch your typo in the first 30 seconds. For a mistake found that quickly, a quick delete-and-repost will work fine for just about anything other than the biggest celebrity accounts and the worst unintentional slurs.

And if you choose to use this feature on mobile, you either (a) have to just…stare at your tweet for the next 30 seconds as you watch the time tick by, or (b) tap “Send now,” turning tweeting from a one-tap action to a two-tap one.

Maybe this will be a big hit with someone, but right now, it’s a little disappointing.

Reader Mode: Reader Mode provides a more beautiful reading experience by getting rid of the noise. We are making it easier for you to keep up with long threads on Twitter by turning them into easy-to-read text so you can read all the latest content seamlessly.

Note that, unlike most “reader modes” in web browsers and elsewhere, this isn’t about taking content published on the web, stripping out all the ads, and turning everything Helvetica.2 This is just for Twitter threads.

Twitter threads are indeed clunky messes for the uninitiated; like much of Twitter, they were a solution hacked together by users to solve a problem, not the result of a real development process. Twitter Blue’s reader mode blends all the tweets in a thread into one interrupted flow

Compare that to what that exact thread looks like on Twitter today:

The new version is probably a nicer read, but note that it comes at the cost of removing all the like and retweet buttons for individual tweets, which could hurt their reach. And frankly, if you like Twitter enough to spend $3 a month on it, you probably understand how to read a thread just fine already. The people this functionality would benefit aren’t going to be the people using it.

Bookmark Folders: Want an easy way to better organize your saved content? Bookmark Folders let you organize the Tweets you’ve saved by letting you manage content so when you need it, you can find it easily and efficiently.

As someone with Stage 4 Chronic Tab Addiction (CTA), I know well the impulses that lead one to want to categorize and juggle enormous amounts of content. And keeping track of individual tweets within the platform has always been a bit of a challenge.

You could always use likes as a sort of bookmark system, of course. But that flattens the “I approve of the news announced in this tweet” like, the “I think you’re cute, please see that I liked this in your mentions” like, the “this tweet was well played, good on ya” like, and the “Oh, this is actually important for work” like — all of which are perfectly legitimate uses of that little red heart.

Twitter unveiled Bookmarks in 2018 as a way to deal with one problem: People know that you’ve “liked” one of their tweets, but they don’t know if you’ve bookmarked it. (This is an especially useful distinction for journalists.) But your bookmarks were still a flat, unfiltered mess, a neverending scroll, which limited their usefulness.

Bookmark folders could solve that.

Consider this use case: You’re a reporter just starting work on a story. You want to see what people are saying about Topic X on Twitter, so you search some searches and check out some tweets. Before, if you wanted to keep track of, say, 10 or 12 of them, you either had to (a) like them, in which case they’d be mixed up with everything else you like, (b) use bookmarks, in which case there’ll be no easy way to find them in your bookmark haystack, or (c) use something outside Twitter, like keeping them each open in browser tabs or dumping them into Evernote or OneNote or Drafts or wherever you like to hold digital stuff.

Compare that to being able to quickly create a “Topic X” folder in your bookmarks and put the tweets there. They’re segregated from the main flow and easy to find days, months, or years from now. This is the feature that’ll earn my $3 a month.

The last element of Twitter Blue: “Subscribers will also get access to perks, such as customizable app icons for their device’s home screen and fun color themes for their Twitter app, and will have access to dedicated subscription customer support.”

Real customer support is welcome. But a very large share of Twitter’s direct customer interactions are about abuse on the service — telling Twitter that someone is threatening violence, spewing bigotry, stalking someone, or something similar. And Twitter’s responsiveness to those reports is famously…inconsistent, both in terms of its decisions (what to do with a particular tweet or user) and its responsiveness.

So will Twitter Blue subscribers who report an abusive Nazi now get priority service, faster replies, and more thorough communication? Nice for them, I guess, but that kind of customer service doesn’t seem like something that should be limited to a paying elite.

One last note: $3 a month (well, $2.99) is pretty darned cheap. Certainly cheaper than most digital news subscriptions, and cheaper than most SaaS subs overall. With all the talk of subscription overload — and how much those $4.99s and $7.99s and $9.99s can add up as monthly bills — it’s interesting Twitter is aiming this low. Maybe that’s a sign of how inessential most of its initial feature offerings are. Or maybe it suggests Twitter sees a market opening at this price point — that $2.99 is the “aw, hell, why not” price level that will trigger a sale in a meaningful number of people.

Twitter earns about $4.30 in quarterly revenue for every active user it has. Adding a Twitter Blue subscription — $3/month, $12/quarter, $36/year — is a substantial increase in ARPU even at that low of a price point. I’ll be interested to see how much more experimentation there is on this lower side of the pricing spectrum.

1. N’interprète pas cela comme un manque d’amour, Québec.
2. Yes, reader, I know that’s San Francisco, not Helvetica.

At issue, really, was whether or not Apple’s 30% tax on everything flowing through its payment system was an abuse of its monopoly over installing software on iPhones and iPads. (The same, roughly speaking, applies to Google’s control of its Android app store.) The two tech giants were suddenly under increased pressure — from developers, regulators, and potentially courts — to seem less, er, extractive.

At the time, I wrote that one beneficiary of this contretemps could be news outlets. Publishers don’t produce games (usually), but they do sell plenty of monthly and annual subscriptions. And many of them do so through Apple’s payment system — often jacking up the price a few bucks to make up for Apple’s vig.

Well, well:

Apple on Wednesday announced a reduction to its longstanding App Store commission rate — one of the most substantial changes to how iOS developers earn money in the history of the iPhone maker’s digital app marketplace — as part of a new program for small businesses.

The new App Store Small Business Program, as it’s called, will allow any developer who earns less than $1 million in annual sales per year from all of their apps to qualify for a reduced App Store cut of 15 percent, half of Apple’s standard 30 percent fee, on all paid app revenue and in-app purchases.

The company says the “vast majority” of iOS app developers should be able to access the program, but Apple declined to say what percentage of its more than 28 million registered app makers would qualify. Apple also declined to specify how much of its App Store revenue would be affected by the reduced commission.

Until now, news publishers selling a subscription via the App Store have paid Apple 30% for the first year and 15% for an individual subscriber’s years after that. But, of course, every subscriber has a first year, but not all of them have a second. For a publisher who qualifies for this program, it should boost take-home revenue for a new subscriber by [launches Calculator app] a little more than 21%.

(N.B.: Complete details for eligibility are set to arrive “in early December,” so there might end up being qualifications that go beyond the $1 million number. That cutoff is for App Store revenue only, not your total revenue, so all but the largest news companies will likely be eligible. You might suddenly see companies like Gannett — which currently has 97 different apps on the App Store — redefine those apps’ “publisher” as the local daily in order to get under that $1 million bar.)

What does all this mean for publishers? Well, they’ve got a few options to consider.

• If they currently sell subscriptions in the App Store, they can just…take the money! Send Tim Cook a nice holiday card, tweet something nice about Ted Lasso, and enjoy the revenue boost.

  The Arizona Republic, for example, charges $9.99 a month for a subscription via Apple. That has meant it only got $6.99 a month, after Apple’s cut, for new subscribers. Now it’ll get $8.49.1

• If they’re currently charging more in the App Store than they do for direct subs, they can choose to narrow that gap and lower the price. For instance, The Washington Post will happily sell you a digital subscription for $10 a month directly — but if you buy it via Apple, they’ll charge you $14.99. $14.99 minus Apple’s 30% cut is $10.49; essentially, the Post is passing on Apple’s cut to the reader.

  If the Post thought it would get a lot more App Store subscribers by charging, say, $12.99, it could lower the price and end up ahead on both subscribers and revenue. (A 15% Apple cut of $12.99 would still net $11.04, more than what they were getting before.)

• If they haven’t yet offered subscriptions through Apple, the idea is now more appealing. Ever since Apple debuted iOS subscriptions in 2011, publishers have had to weigh the pros and cons.

  Pro: Subscribing to something on your iPhone is ridiculously simple — no forms to fill out, no credit card to enter, just a couple of taps. Virtually frictionless. Pro: Most of American news outlets’ best customers use iPhones.

  Con: Apple takes that cut — meaning you either just lose that revenue for the length of their subscription or you jack up the price to cover it, making it less appealing to readers. Con: You’d rather own the customer relationship yourself — so you have the knowledge of the customer in order to tailor marketing and offers, not Apple.

  Five or six years ago, most American newspapers seemed to think the cons outweighed the pros and stayed away from App Store subs. Over the past few years, as digital circulation revenue has become crucial to publishers, more have decided to dive in, if with some reluctance.

  This cut will likely convince a few more execs it’s worth the hassle to dance with Cupertino. And for those publications already in the App Store, they’ll probably feel more comfortable directing marketing toward it as a subscription option — rather than treating it as a suboptimal sidedoor they’d rather you not discover.

Whichever choice a publisher makes, this is good news. Let’s hope Google follows suit for Android.

Look at this case. Epic — by virtue of publishing the most popular and top-grossing game in the world — had about as much power as an App Store publisher can conceivably have. But Apple still wouldn’t reduce its cut of Fortnite revenues — to the point that it was willing instead to let the situation blow up into a huge public mess. And now that that mess is increasing its regulatory risk, it’s willing to do something much more systemic, like cut the rate to 15% for small app publishers. It would rather cut the rate for hundreds of thousands of publishers in half than set the precedent that one pulling a “give us a side deal or we’ll pull our content” routine gets rewarded.

Congratulations to Epic for prompting this change — even if, as a giant game publisher, it won’t directly benefit from it. The Fortnite fracas raised the broader issue of App Store monopoly in the public’s mind, and Apple responded in order to build some goodwill, get a few headlines about how it supports the little guy, and hopefully stave off regulators a little longer. That’s good for news publishers. But it should also remind them that the power relationship between the tech giants and newspapers is awfully one-sided.

1. Note: These are hypothetical examples. It may be that the Republic or the Post are above the $1 million in App Store revenue and thus won’t be eligible for this new cut. I would certainly hope the Post is there, at least.

Now: Can it do the same for podcasts?

Spotify is reportedly considering a subscription service just for its podcasts, a segment it’s invested in heavily the past couple of years. It was originally spotted by Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein

Looks like the premium podcast plan would be ad-free and some mix of exclusive extra content at price points somewhere between $3-$8. pic.twitter.com/ArK8xYg0CM

— Andrew Wallenstein (@awallenstein) November 6, 2020

The various options being subjected to Qualtricsification range from $2.99 to $7.99 a month. They all involve access to some variety of exclusive content — with or without ads, with or without early access.

Will it work? It’s hard to bet against Spotify, which has played the game very well in its growth from Stockholm startup to 144 million paying subscribers in 92 countries. But there are a number of things that make a podcast subscription service a significantly tougher sell than music was.

You’re competing with free and easy.

Music has been for sale for more than a century, dating back to sheet music and player piano rolls. When Napster & Co. came along, free music was thrilling, but also confusing and unreliable to many. More importantly, music companies were highly motivated to sue P2P file-sharing services into the ground, which they accomplished with Napster and most of its peers. A few high-profile, high-dollar lawsuits against random schmoes who downloaded a samizdat copy of The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album went a long way toward discouraging P2P. So when Steve Jobs and Apple came along with 99-cent downloads — straightforward, legal, tied to the explosive growth of the iPod — the market was ready for it.

Podcasts are different. Podcasts have been free by default for as long as they’ve existed. There are plenty of apps that make the acts of subscribing, downloading, and listening to podcasts straightforward. That’s hard to compete with. Imagine if, when Spotify first launched, there was already a free product that gave you access to all the world’s music — but Spotify said that, for $9.99 a month, you could also get this super-good tier of premium, exclusive music. If the choices are “98% of the world’s music for free” and “100% of the world’s music for $9.99/month,” most people are going to be happy with the free option.

You know who else thought they had content that was awesome enough to get subscribers, despite an endless sea of free competition? Quibi.

Previous attempts haven’t gone too well.

The poster child for paid podcasting is Luminary, which launched to much excitement (and then much annoyance) last spring. It hasn’t taken off: Despite raising at least $130 million from investors, Luminary had only 80,000 paying subscribers one year in, Bloomberg reported.

But others have tried, too. Audible Channels, launched in 2016 and backed by both the might of Amazon and Audible’s audiobook dominance, never got very far. Stitcher Premium has been around for nearly four years and hasn’t set the world on fire. (It was recently bought by SiriusXM, which has its own established paid model.)

Things can change, of course. There wasn’t much of a market for paid digital news until The New York Times put up a paywall, after all, and it took the better part of a decade to really get that business whirring. But at this point, there’s been very little evidence of a market that’s just itching to pay for podcasts.

Podcasts don’t play well with each other in a subscription.

People need to be at least somewhat passionate about a podcast to want to pay for it. They need to think that its absence from their lives would be bad enough to merit 2 or 5 or 10 bucks a month. But those passions are hard to stretch across a broad-based subscription. If Spotify’s premium package includes, say, 40 shows, what share of them is any individual user going to be passionate about? HBO had to establish a reputation for quality and exclusivity — the idea that an “HBO show” was a thing — to get subscribers. Netflix had to have a huge library of existing TV shows and movies that weren’t easily available elsewhere, and then its own catalog of exclusives. A package of premium podcasts is likely to be less coherent editorially than, say, the package of premium stories you get with a subscription to The New York Times.

The subscription model is less congruent with the ad model than in other media formats.

In the digital news business, most smart publishers know not to be too reliant on a single revenue type. If you’re all about advertising, you’re subject to the vagaries of the ad market and constantly worried about attracting new audience. If you’re all about subscriptions, you risk dropping out of the public conversation and making it harder for people to sample your wares.

But news sites can generally pull this off because the two types of revenue come from two different audiences. At most, the majority of pageviews they get — and thus the majority of ad impressions they serve — come from users who click on one or two stories a month. They’re unlikely to be candidates for a subscription, but you can monetize them in this other way. Your subscribers, meanwhile, are your superfans — the 2% or 3% of your uniques who come back all the time and consume dozens or hundreds of stories a month.

What lets these two models coexist? The metered paywall. If you don’t put up a “Subscribe Now!” until someone’s fifth article, you’re letting the grazers be while serving them ads. And you’re identifying your potential superfans — those who hit 5 or 10 or however many articles.

It’s not clear how well that sort of model can work with podcasts. Limiting someone to, say, two premium episodes a month is a higher bar, technologically and in terms of marketing, that a clear free/paid split. And podcast audiences tend to be more loyal than news site readers: They subscribe to individual shows and listen to a large share of the episodes that get delivered to them, which is a level of commitment far greater than clicking a random link on Twitter.

All of that means, I think, that a podcast subscription model would make it very hard to successfully monetize those shows with advertising — which is the way nearly all podcasts are monetized. News sites could work both angles; podcasts will find that tougher.

Spotify, of course, would enter this business with a ton of advantages. It has a massive existing userbase to market to. It already charges more than 100 million credit cards every month. It’s spent a ton of money buying up high-value content, whether that’s The Ringer, Gimlet, or its exclusive distribution deal with The Joe Rogan Show.

Those are all advantages, and betting against Spotify has not typically been a good call over the past decade. But it’s still not clear the market’s there — whether at Spotify’s scale or even something smaller.

And…yeah, that happened. But I don’t think there’s any reason to change my expectation that these bundles won’t do much to increase the number of Apple News+ subscribers.

The key unanswered question going into today’s Apple event was how the bundles — which are all branded as Apple One — would be structured and priced. And here’s how it breaks down, along with the price you’d pay for each service individually:

Apple One Individual: $14.95/month
Apple Music (normally $9.99)
Apple TV+ ($4.99)
Apple Arcade ($4.99)
50GB of iCloud storage ($0.99)
Total without bundling: $20.96
Bundle savings: $6.01

Apple One Family: $19.95/month
Apple Music ($14.99)
Apple TV+ ($4.99)
Apple Arcade ($4.99)
200GB of iCloud storage ($2.99)
…all for up to five people
Total without bundling: $27.96
Bundle savings: $8.01

Apple One Premier: $29.95/month
Apple Music ($14.99)
Apple TV+ ($4.99)
Apple Arcade ($4.99)
Apple Fitness+ ($9.99)
Apple News+ ($9.99)
2TB of iCloud storage ($9.99)
…all for up to five people
Total without bundling: $54.94
Bundle savings: $24.99

Twenty-five bucks a month is a real savings! But even within Apple’s generally upmarket customer base, the number of people who’ll be attracted to a $30/month price point is much smaller than at $15/month. And that smaller, richer group is the only one who might be drawn into News+ by Apple One. (Think about it: A year of Apple One Premier would run you $360. A year of Amazon Prime — which offers a distinct but philosophically similar bundle of services — is just $119.)

The best news for News+ today was the launch of Apple Fitness+, a Peleton-like service for workouts at home, but without the pricey bike — $1,895 and up — and at a lower price point. I suspect it’ll be an appealing pandemic-era product — and if it draws people up to Premier, News+ can come along for the ride.

Something left unsaid, understandably, at today’s event is how these bundles will affect how much money that gets passed along to non-Apple content producers — record labels for Apple Music and, of most interest to us here, publishers for News+. Right now, publishers collectively get about $5/month for each Apple News+ subscriber; Apple keeps the other $5. How much will publishers get from each Apple One Premier subscriber? Presumably something less.

On the other hand, for most of these services, Apple’s cost structure is relatively fixed. Each additional TV+ or Arcade or Fitness+ subscription is basically pure profit, because Apple’s already paid for the cost of making Ted Lasso or licensing Grindstone. Apple Music and Apple News+ are the services where (more subscribers) = (higher payouts to outside media companies). Apple could decide to eat more of the bundling cost on its owned-and-operated services.

Then again, multitrillion-dollar companies rarely get there through their generosity to suppliers.

El País announced on Monday that it has nearly 110,000 subscribers. Of those, 64,200 are digital-only, 37,923 are print and digital, and 7,842 are to Kiosko y Más, the digital version of the print newspaper. About 20% of those subscribers are from outside of Spain.

As the news industry’s finances have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic, the success of El País’ subscription program shows that people are willing to pay for news. El País employs more than 400 journalists around the world and has bureaus in Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City, Mexico, and São Paulo, Brazil.

The announcement reads, in part:

The current data indicates a promising outlook for the EL PAÍS subscription model, which was launched in May, two months after the pandemic broke out. But it is just the beginning of a long journey. In the United Kingdom, a country with nearly 70 million inhabitants, the British daily The Times reached 100,000 subscribers a year after they began to charge readers — despite having a market as vast as the English-speaking community. The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal have been on this road for more than two decades; and The New York Times, which all news outlets look up to, given its successful business and digital transformation, made a hesitant start in 2011, but did not see a full bloom of its digital subscription model until 2016, when Donald Trump was elected US president. In Spain, the newspaper El Mundo made the first step to a subscriber system at the end of October last year; the communications group Vocento has been progressively moving its local newspapers in this direction for years; and it is expected that the Spanish newspapers Abc and La Vanguardia will also switch to this model soon. The subscription model has also been pursued by some online news outlets, most recently El Confidencial, while elDiario.es has been using this system since it was founded.

Miguel Carvajal, the director of the master’s in journalism innovation program at the University of Miguel Hernández, compiled a list of Spanish publications with paid subscribers and members alongside the years that they launched those programs and the most recent month and year of the data.

El dato de @el_pais (64.000 nuevos suscriptores, exclusivos digitales, en 4 meses) tiene un mérito especial frente a otros casos con matriz impresa, porque no agrega usuarios de productos previos (Orbyt, Kiosko y Más o papel).

Tabla actualizada: https://t.co/so71PMmLhh pic.twitter.com/Juh8PoR5uj

— Miguel Carvajal (@mcarvajal_) September 5, 2020

ElDiario.es, an online publication in Spain, has 56,000 paying members since it launched in 2012 with a membership program out of the gate. The total number of paid digital subscriptions and memberships, based on the table, is about 347,000. El País accounts for 18% of that, according to Dircomfidencial.

Read the full announcement in English here and in Spanish here.

.⁦@el_pais⁩ ha sumado 64.200 suscriptores digitales desde el lanzamiento del nuevo modelo el 1 de mayo.

En total tiene 110.000, sumando los 37.923 de la edición impresa y 7.842 de Kiosko y Más.

Son cifras esperanzadoras. Más detalles en este hilo https://t.co/JoPWdA3237

— Eduardo Suárez (@eduardosuarez) September 6, 2020

EL PAÍS logra 110.000 suscriptores tras lanzar su modelo de pago digital via https://t.co/8a3VZhdmF2 “no solo crecen los suscriptores, sino el número de personas que se han registrado. #ElPais

— Ana Lopez (@analopezh) September 7, 2020

Producir información de calidad es caro y alguien tiene que pagarlo. No serán los anunciantes. Medios de pago o no hay calidad. No hay de otra, señores ciudadanos. https://t.co/BA52Wut0Rm

— Melvin Peña J. (@melvinpenaj) September 6, 2020

Un fantástico inicio para un camino de largo recorrido. Felicidades @el_pais ! https://t.co/HLwwHxfTRv

— Susana Sánchez Riu (@SusanaSRiu) September 6, 2020

EL PAÍS cuenta con un equipo de más de 400 periodistas y la red de corresponsales de habla hispana más amplia del mundo. El ADN de EL PAÍS es global, europeo y cada vez más americano —un 20% de los nuevos suscriptores ya viene de fuera de España—. @el_pais https://t.co/6uX9AZTYzv

— Amanda Mars (@amanda_mars) September 6, 2020

In case you haven’t heard: Last week, Epic tried to get around Apple’s in-app purchasing system — in which Apple takes a 30 percent cut of sales — by adding its own purchasing system to Fortnite on iOS. That’s against Apple’s rules for the App Store — so Apple kicked Fortnite out. Epic, having gotten the response it expected, immediately sued Apple (and Google, which had followed the same playbook on Android), saying that the two giants’ app store policies are unfair monopolies when it comes to software distribution on mobile devices.

Which…isn’t a bad argument.

The past couple of years have been filled with complaints about the aggregated power of Google, Apple, and a few other tech titans. For app stores, though, the imbalance of power has been too big to prompt any real change. Apple took a 30 percent cut of App Store purchases when it launched in 2008; it still does today.

But it’s one thing for small developers to complain; it’s another for Netflix, Epic, Spotify, or Sonos — much less Amazon or Facebook — to raise a fuss, legal or otherwise. Apple cut a special deal to quiet its most potent opponent on that list, Amazon. Epic, though, seems prepared to push this to some sort of legal conclusion.

Different outlets have responded to Apple’s setup (which Google roughly mirrors) in various ways. The Financial Times famously pulled its mobile app from the App Store in 2011 over both data and rev-share concerns. (It returned in 2017.)

Some raise their subscription rates 30 percent to both (a) cover Apple’s cut and (b) hopefully push some would-be subscribers back to a direct subscription. (Though Apple’s rules don’t even let you tell the user they can get a better deal over at your dot-com.)

And some — most, from what I can tell — simply eat the difference. Want to subscribe to The New York Times on your iPhone? If you’re looking at NYTimes.com in your browser, you might get one of any number of offers the Times is testing and thinks might work for you. (In a logged-out window, I just got offered $1/week for the first year, then the full $4.25/week standard rate after that.) But if you’re in the Times’ iOS app, you get a rigid offer for $16.99 a month.

So on the website, the Times will get $52 for a new subscriber’s first year, then $221/year every year thereafter. On the App Store, the Times will get $142 for a subscriber’s first year, accounting for Apple’s cut, even though it would like to charge less to hook in new subscribers. And ever year thereafter, the Times gets $173 — $48 less than it would like. (Apple reduces its cut from 30 percent to 15 percent after the first year of a subscription.)

Apple’s rigid policies also make it harder to test different kinds of subscription offers — a free one-month trial versus 99¢/week for the first three months versus a discount rate for the first year, and so on. Propensity-driven paywalls are a real source of growth in digital subs for publishers, and they’re just about impossible to pull off in the App Store.

The explosion of SaaS has meant there are a ton of companies selling subscriptions on the App Store. But the vast majority of them were born in the iPhone era and have set up a cost structure attuned to the distribution costs they expect. But most subscription publishers existed long before the iPhone and have large fixed costs — like a newsroom that produces new content everyday — and a subscriber base that is still mostly not using app store purchasing. All that means the pricing crunch can be even more severe for them.

It’s even more galling knowing that Apple only applies its restrictions to digital content — a print subscription doesn’t face the same cut — and that Apple has a separate payment system, Apple Pay, that takes a traditional, credit-card-processor-sized cut. (So if I pay my neighborhood sushi place to bring me dinner, Apple only charges 0.15 percent through Apple Pay. But if I subscribe to SushiNewsToday.com on my iPhone, Apple gets 30 percent?)

How is this all going end? Who knows — Epic seems determined, and you get the sense this could be the moment in which a decade of frustration finally turns into action, either by the tech giants voluntarily or by regulators, Congress, or the courts. An easy, secure one-tap subscription was a huge deal a decade ago, when screens were tiny and people were nervous about entering credit card numbers. But today, any number of tools and vendors have made buying an online sub pretty darn straightforward.

I see three potential outcomes. One, Apple and Google stand their ground and Epic can’t convince a judge that it’s an antitrust violation.

Two, Apple and Google agree to cut their shares under some set of cases, as Apple did in 2016 when it dropped to 15 percent after the first year of a subscription. Maybe it exempts certain categories. (I hear robust news organizations are important to democracy.) Maybe the cut drops to zero after a certain length of time. Or maybe they just try to reduce their share to, say, 20 percent and hope that quiets the crowd.

Three — the one I consider the most likely — is that a court or regulator eventually agrees with Epic that Apple and Google’s functional monopolies on mobile software distribution are a constraint on trade and a violation of antitrust law. (That court or regulator could be in the United States; it would more likely be in the EU.) The likely outcome would be a ruling that Apple and Google have to allow alternate in-app payment systems on their devices — the way Microsoft was ordered to allow other default web browsers or AT&T was forced to allow other long-distance companies access to the phone network it built.

But I suspect that would still be years away, and you haven’t made too much money betting against the tech giants in recent years. These monopolies generate huge revenues — about $29 billion over the past year — and neither Google nor Apple is likely to give them up lightly. After all, just this morning, Apple became the first company in the history of the world to be worth $2 trillion — only two years after it became the first to hit $1 trillion.

The Dallas Morning News‘ latest experiment to boost digital subscriptions is something you’ve seen before. If you’ve ever been tempted to buy a lipstick off Instagram because an influencer gave you a discount code (guilty), this works in the same way.

want to support @dallasnews and help me achieve my final form as an influencer for local news?

visit this link and use the promo code MALLORIES for a free (!) one-month digital subscription https://t.co/VxOT62ghwF

— mallorie sullivan (@malloriesullivn) April 21, 2020

This is how journalists flirt pic.twitter.com/eRvfblc0J1

— Jesus Jiménez (@jesus_jimz) May 12, 2020

Readers can plug in a promo code at checkout to get one free month of digital access to The Dallas Morning News. The newspaper is currently offering a monthly digital subscription at $1.99 per week ($8.62 total, plus tax).

Director of digital strategy Nicole Stockdale said the idea came out of a meeting with DMN’s “digital cabinet,” a group of people across the organization that gets together to discuss new ideas and experiments. Assistant sports editor Scott Bell suggested that the sports section would be a perfect place to try these out because of the unique relationships sports writers have with their readers. They worked with the marketing department to set up individual promo codes and launched them in mid-January.

Just as Stockdale was getting ready to open up the codes to the rest of the newsroom, the Dallas Morning News had to shift to a remote newsroom because of Covid-19. She paused rolling it out further to adjust to the new reality, but after a few weeks of seeing traffic and engagement increases, it seemed like a good time to move forward. Staffers who wanted a code received one on April 21.

“We see so many [journalists] who are out in their social feeds and talking to their friends and describing in heartfelt detail why this work is so important, or what they did to get this news, telling the story behind the story, and asking people to subscribe,” Stockdale said. “Seeing those messages, we knew this was a good time for us to be able to bring those promo codes back and give people one more tool to help make that case.”

What these promo codes are not, Stockdale emphasized, are an additional burden on reporters to meet a quota. No one is required to garner a number of subscriptions and the results aren’t tied to their performances. So far, 112 promo codes have been used and two-thirds of those users became paying subscribers at the end of the first free month. No one who became a paying member has canceled a subscription, Stockdale said.

“What makes this different is that these are the conversations that journalists are already having with people that follow them on social media,” Stockdale said. “What they’re doing there is telling these important stories about why subscriptions matter or what they individually did to get this story. Being able to link the promo code to heartfelt messages of why local journalism is so important right now is like a one-two punch that we thought would be powerful with readers, especially right now when we do see an influx of new readers who are finding this journalism that’s really important to them in this unprecedented time.”

In terms of total subscriptions, DMN ended its fourth quarter of 2019 with 35,759 digital-only subscriptions. On that earnings call, CEO Robert W. Decherd also said the company had added 3,600 subscriptions in the first quarter of 2020, putting the total at 39,359 at the end of March.

The idea of journalists dipping into promotion still makes some folks uneasy (I wrote about how this is the case in public radio in December) because it feels like they’re dipping into the business side. But Stockdale argued that journalists are the ones uniquely positioned to ask for subscriptions because of their existing relationships with readers and because they know their own work best.

“Some newsrooms, and probably our newsroom five years ago, may have been hesitant to jump into the fray because there’s this feeling that still lingers that it feels weird for the journalists to be selling subscriptions,” Stockdale said. “You see that hesitance a lot less, and I think it’s going away. There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t be out there telling our stories and helping people understand the value of a subscription and how the support that they give to local news in the form of a subscription helps make possible the work that we’re doing.”

Money for nothing [by Caroline Crampton]. Podcoin, an app that promised to “pay you to listen to podcasts,” shuts down today. It began operation in December 2018 and claimed to hit 10,000 active daily users in April before being added to The Meet Group’s network of mobile apps. (Albeit seemingly without money changing hands — perhaps not surprising since the CEO of Podcoin and the CEO of The Meet Group are brothers.) Now, because it “just failed to sustain momentum,” it is going offline less than a year later.

The mechanism behind Podcoin was questioned by users right from the get-go (as in this Reddit thread, for instance), but here’s how it was supposed to work: For every 10 minutes of podcasts that you listened to via the app, you earned one “podcoin,” which could then be redeemed against rewards such as Bose headphones and Amazon gift cards. In its FAQs, the company referred to the act of listening as “podcoin mining,” positioning their product as a kind of hybrid podcatcher and cryptocurrency, I suppose. On that page, they also detail various checks and balances meant to ensure the listens were genuine, rather than generated by bots.

I’ve been ambiently interested in Podcoin since the first time I saw someone post about it in a podcasting Facebook group that I belong to. It seemed a perfect distillation of some of the more questionable ventures that crop up now and then in the podcasting space. It was created by Geoff and David Cook, siblings from the family who made myyearbook.com and then sold it in 2011 for $100 million. The more I looked into this venture, the more intrigued I became. For instance, this passage — part of the answer to the not-unreasonable question “How is it possible to pay me to listen?” — is wild:

What is wrong with the larger app ecosystem that the idea of rewarding you for your time is so strange. Why is that some corporate overlord should aggregate all your time and leave you even unhappier than you were before while they resell your information to the highest bidder?

From what I could see, Podcoin had no visible means of generating revenue, although there was a long-term plan to charge podcasters to have their shows featured. And although there were various streak incentives that would deliver more “podcoin,” it would still take hours of listening every day for years to earn enough for most of the rewards, a fact quickly picked up by most of the people I’ve seen discussing whether to bother with the app.

That said, some people were obviously engaging with the app, at least if the user figures were to be believed. I went in search of these Podcoin users and ended up speaking to three different people who’d experimented with the app, to find out how a system like this looks from the inside.

Suzy Buttress, who makes The Casual Birder Podcast, told me she was “thrilled” when she first heard about the app since it sounded like a way for her to spread the word of her show to more listeners without having to spend money. (She’s an independent podcaster with a self-described “very limited” marketing budget.) “It felt like a win-win situation. Here were people who already listened to podcasts, being encouraged to listen to more,” she told me over email. Podcoin offered a free two-week promotion after a podcaster “claimed” their show on the app, and Suzy had seen others posting about “incredible uplifts in listeners, of thousands at a time,” she said.

However, her own experience was somewhat different. “During my two-week promotion I received 76 listens and 20 subscribers — far fewer than I was receiving via my other efforts (as evidenced through the podcast destination listening stats that my host provides).” After that initial fortnight, to continue to be featured, a show needed to insert ads for Podcoin, and based on the poor showing Suzy decided against promoting the app and instead chose to stick to the “traditional ways” of raising the profile of her show.

David Couto, who makes Sleepy Time Tales, said he became intrigued by the app both when he initially saw it ranking fourth in the user-agents for his show (he used Chartable to see this) and when, like Suzy, he saw other independent podcasters posting on social media about their Podcoin successes. He similarly saw little return from claiming his show on the app but told me over email that he was intrigued by one aspect of the analytics offered, which allowed him to see what other shows his listeners were listening to.

Scott Ertz, editor-in-chief of Plughitz Live and host of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, told me that he also initially heard of Podcoin via an online podcasting community, when another member was asking for the group’s opinion of whether an invitation he’d received from the app was “a scam.” Scott decided to look into it in more detail and reached out to CEO David Cook for answers.

“After talking to him via email, I no longer believed that it was a scam (though I also didn’t believe it was a good idea), and decided to give the platform a shot as a podcaster and claimed my shows,” Scott said. However, the promised two-week featured periods for all of the 11 shows he runs never materialized, and he feels like the app had little to offer. “The idea of ‘paying’ listeners is a cute way to get media coverage, but it never had any real-world value for either listeners or podcasters,” he added.

I sent out a lot of inquiries, but I couldn’t find any dedicated user of Podcoin as a listener to tell me about what rewards they might have earned in the nine months or so the app was active. Although based on some rough calculations and the fact that there was a six-hour-per-day “mining” limit, I’d be surprised if many of those Bose headphones actually shipped.

And now, Podcoin shuts down, its superficially attractive promise of payment for podcast listening revealed to be untenable, just as everyone who looked closely at it thought it was. (Although it might not be gone forever; the company’s post about the closure says “We did learn A LOT, and we’ll be applying it to a future app.”) However, before I wrap up this small dispatch from the venture-funded fringes of the podcasting tech scene, I must just share with you this quote from the company’s FAQ page:

We think it’s odd that nearly every venture-backed app today burns money hand over fist and gives nothing back to their audience, and yet, our model is the strange one.

Make of that what you will.

[Nick’s note to the kicker above: ]

Existing players in this space include Slate’s Supporting Cast (which I wrote about in February), a new startup called Supercast (which Caroline wrote about last week), and emerging initiatives from companies primarily focused on other media formats, like Patreon and Substack.

These efforts appear to be fueled by twin observations: first, that the number of podcasters (and therefore potential customers) has ballooned to astronomical levels over the past couple of years, and second, that conventional podcast advertising, long the industry’s default economic engine, feels increasingly constrained within a layer of established publishers and similarly established newcomers (i.e. legacy brands, celebrities, and so on). As such, there’s a potent opportunity to create better tools, systems, and pathways for the wide universe of everyone else to access alternative means of monetization. The question is what those tools will be — and who’ll be able to effectively build them for the masses.

One recent addition to this cadre of note is RedCircle, a San Francisco-based startup founded by Mike Kadin and Jeremy Lermitte, a pair of tech-industry operatives who, as they’re quick to tell you, hail from Uber, the often-controversial ride-sharing giant. “When we looked at the [podcast] industry, we made the observation that there just wasn’t a lot of sophisticated technology in place,” said Lermitte when we spoke over the phone last week. “A lot of the tools we built for Uber were around providing marketers and operations people with tools to run and grow their cities, and so we felt like we could actually apply a lot of what we’ve done for and learned from Uber to create value for a lot of people.”

When the startup made its first press push back in April, much of the emphasis was on a cross-promotion-oriented audience development tool. Since then, RedCircle has expanded its value proposition to offer a broader suite of solutions, including free hosting, standard analytics, and most importantly, infrastructure to help podcast creators directly monetize their shows through channels like donations and premium subscriptions. The website does a pretty good job showing you how the backend of its platform works right off the bat, so I won’t get into the technicals here.

RedCircle’s plan, it seems, is to develop an ever-iterating platform that will be a lot of things for a lot of podcast creators. Which is also to say: RedCircle will very likely continue to expand the toolset it’s offering, up to and including eventually building out an alternative on-platform advertising marketplace. (I’m told that the company has already gotten a few brands on board with that program.) In our phone call, Kadin and Lermitte emphasized a focus on independent publishers, which they seem to define broadly; their current client list includes YouTubers (Approachables), reality TV figures (Dear Albie), and sports radio talent (Tony Bruno).

At the moment, the startup claims to be gaining some steam. Kadin and Lermitte say that they’re growing 38 percent month-over-month; when pressed, they said that number refers to growth in downloads of podcast episodes hosted on the platform. Personally, I’d be more interested to see growth metrics tethered to direct revenue volume transacted on the platform, but I suppose we all have to start somewhere.

Speaking of which, we should talk about RedCircle’s business model. In its current iteration, the startup’s revenue engines are primarily attached to its direct monetization tools: Podcasters using its donation service will be charged 4.5 percent of their received donations (plus Stripe fees), while podcasters using its premium subscription service will be charged 12 percent (plus Stripe fees). Again, RedCircle is likely to expand its services, which means that its revenue channels will also expand along with it.

Given the current business model, I asked Kadin and Lermitte if people should think about RedCircle as, say, Substack or Memberful, but for podcasts. The duo prefers a different reference point: Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce platform giant that offers a suite of services (payments, marketing, customer engagement, shipping, and so on) to a wide range of online merchants. It’s an appealing model, given that Shopify, which is publicly traded, brought in over $1 billion in revenues last year. And you can probably derive the startup’s endgame from this metaphor: If RedCircle is successful, it can become an entire layer of the growing podcast ecosystem.

Of course, the metaphor has its limits. It’s fairly reasonable to conceptualize the growth potential of the online merchant category as theoretically infinite. After all, as long as people need goods and services, there will always be an ever-growing, ever-iterating, and ever-evolving pool of online merchants to meet those needs. But is it appropriate to think of media companies (and podcast publishers specifically) along similar lines? Or are the boundaries of that pool significantly smaller and much more defined?

Lofty questions, these. They’re worth mulling over, I think, not just in the context of the ambition of upstarts like RedCircle, but also in terms of how we should think about the broader trends informing the creation of these ventures. To reframe the questions in the prior paragraph: We know the number of podcasts has ballooned. To what extent is that volume sustainable? In other words, is there enough listening (and subsequent direct revenue engagement) to keep most of those podcasts around?

But those are broader considerations, and I’d understand if you think it to be navel-gazing. For now, and for whatever proportion of those new small-to-midsize podcasts will persist, there exists a definite need for an alternative economy along with tools to support it. Whether RedCircle — or Supporting Cast, Patreon, and so on — ends up being the main solution over the long term remains to be seen. But the opportunity is nonetheless very much there.

Shout-out to Gastropod, the indie podcast about the history and science food by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, which turns five this week. Five! In podcast years, that’s old enough to be buying your first house but still be riding on your family’s phone plan. Graber and Twilley have built something wonderful, independent, and free. Here’s to five more.

Thirst Aid Kit returns on Thursday. Reminder: The podcast is now with Slate.

Gimlet’s StartUp will return for a mini-season in October, where the marketing vehicle-turned-autobiographical documentary-turned-hybrid of the two will cover the company’s acquisition by Spotify. Once that’s over, I’d love to hear about the experience of the mini-season from the perspective of Spotify’s comms department. I can’t even begin to imagine.

PodFund has announced three more creator investments, including a podcast studio. They are DIVE Studios, Domino Sound, and Osiris Podcasts. Here’s the blog post.

Adventures in music licensing: a case study. So there’s this upcoming independent project that I’ve been tracking pretty closely. It’s called Moonface (stylized as MOONFACE), it’s a six-part fiction podcast by a team led by KPCC alum James Kim, and it’s set to be a bilingual production, carrying out its story in both English and Korean.

MOONFACE is an incredibly personal show. It was inspired by many things, but mainly my experiences with:

Wanting to be white
Fear of being a stereotype
My parents

The trailer is out now. The show debuts on October 9. pic.twitter.com/YwMdnDPKIX

— James Kim (@TooManyJames_s) September 16, 2019

Also, it’s going to feature a good deal of licensed music (including tracks from Clairo, Big Thief, and Peggy Gou), which is something I’ve long wanted to see done more widely in podcast production. Getting the rights to use music is a pretty costly transaction, though, often prohibitively so for independent productions made on a shoestring budget. So I thought I’d check in and talk with Kim about his (admittedly atypical) experience getting labels on board with his project. The chat ended up touching on a broader series of topics around the idea of music and podcasting. A lot of it could be useful to you.

I decided to run this as an “as told by” piece, for readability’s sake. Here’s Kim:

Moonface will drop in its entirety on October 9.

Three things I find interesting

• A new project tracking public media mergers, appropriately called the Public Media Merger Project. Shoutout to Elizabeth Hansen, friend of the newsletter and the person who’s leading the project.
• From Quartz: “How Neil Young’s failed anti-streaming business helped the music industry.” Neil Young, catalyst of dialectics.
• Google says it’s making adjustments to how it is storing audio recordings off its Google Assistant-powered products, seemingly as a response to backlash over privacy issues. Here’s the official blog post, and I found the Wired writeup most comprehensive if you’re starting out with this thread.

Paywall tech company Piano has now introduced a propensity paywall — taking what The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Schibsted, and others are doing internally to nudge the errant site visitor or intrigued newsletter subscriber to pony up and pay up. It’s got the fancy moniker of LT[X], pronounced without the brackets and intended to be thought of as “likelihood to (action).”

Propensity/dynamic/intelligent/other slick-sounding-named paywalls use dozens of signals to measure each visitor’s likelihood of subscribing and determine the prods they need to improve their score. (Piano’s system uses 76 metrics to start.) It could be, for instance, an extra free article or two each month, a newsletter invitation when you’re about to close the page, or a targeted social media ad with special deals. Now publishers don’t have to DIY it, but be aware: It takes Piano two to three weeks to set up each outlet’s paywall based on the signals and past data they need to crunch. Another thing that lasts two or so weeks: the window of time to really snag a new subscriber, according to Piano CEO Trevor Kaufman.

“People’s focus on a site tends to be very intense at given periods of time…90 days from now, your loyal audience will largely be a different group of individuals with maybe 30 to 40 percent overlap,” he said. “We wanted to make our system more adaptable to accommodate that. Having a machine learning framework to say who’s likely to churn, register, and subscribe has been a critical step in us making those experiences more tailored.”

Propensity doesn’t stop at the paywall, though; this is about getting people involved beyond a single subscription and making the most of their lifetime value. How likely is it that a regular subscriber will buy an event ticket? Or sign up for another newsletter?

“Even with subscription websites, the page metrics [tend to be] metrics that have driven short-term value, as opposed to long-term value,” said Michael Silberman, Piano’s SVP of strategy (he was previously at New York Media). “That starts to transform the way you think about operating a media business, from pageview to customer lifetime value.”

That is a sensible, if not earth-shattering, statement. But it helps to have the tools and the metrics to actually put it into action.

Since launching the propensity paywall in June, Piano has witnessed it in action for two clients: one saw a 20 percent increase in its paid conversion rate and the second saw a 75 percent increase in visitors converting to subscribers. Now it’s in place for five clients across eight sites — they decide who goes first based “a lot on client need and potential impact,” Silberman said. In general, Piano services 1,300 publishers like The Economist, Hearst, Business Insider, and TechCrunch, though publishers need to opt into this paywall setup. (Piano wouldn’t share which clients are using it, but that would be useful information to have, considering the range of news organizations and their audiences and varying propensities to subscribe.)

This can be a big help to the digital marketing of digital newspaper subscriptions. I'm glad the Philadelphia Inquirer is about to start using it. https://t.co/CkyUks4ofg via @NiemanLab @phillyinquirer

— Ken Herts (@kenherts) August 6, 2019

Silberman’s team built the machine-learning algorithm that’s the bedrock of the propensity paywall using the random forest technique. They beta-tested with the aforementioned one site for two months to suss out its reaction to live prediction data and also the proper situations to use it. “Do you show the subscription offer plus the offer to register for temporary access? Do you show them just the offer and not register? Another use case might be that different meter height for users depending on their subscription propensity score,” Silberman said.

Each site also can fine-tune its propensity factors: “For a local newspaper website, one of the things we’ve discovered — no surprise — designated market area [DMA] is important. For at least one of them it’s not where the user is in terms of DMA but if the content is from that local DMA,” he said. “Another client knew going in that a lot of their users were converting on the content of one particular author. We added ‘count of articles read by x-author’ as a metric as opposed to generic ‘number of authors read’ in the algorithm.”

When the system is live, Piano scores users in sets of 10 from 0 to 100 to assess the existing propensity distribution, with the biggest group usually in the second or third lowest scoring section. Then the LT[X] paywall kicks in, giving visitors more options and hopefully the publisher more subscriptions.

“Commercial experiences in general are becoming more 1:1,” Kaufman said. “It’s not just the messaging, but the pricing, the purchase experience you have, the products you’re offered — should all be relevant to you.”

The platform has hosted subscription and membership boot camps for publishers before, helping dozens of local news outlets refine their reader revenue strategies. But Facebook has still taken a hands-off approach to, you know, sharing revenue with content creators or members of the industry decimated by Facebook’s and other companies’ digital advertising. Now Facebook is giving the reins of subscriptions via its Instant Articles to publishers, and it won’t be taking the 30 percent cut it usually takes from a similar product for creators.

The first piece of its announcement is the expansion of subscriptions in Instant Articles for all “eligible publishers” (Facebook’s lingo). It’s been in testing for the past 18 months with 40 publishers worldwide, including Tribune Publishing, India’s Business Standard, and paywall tech company Piano, according to Facebook’s announcement.

The second tool is News Funding, a product tested with about a dozen publishers including Mexico’s Animal Político. Here’s how Facebook describes it:

News Funding is designed for local and niche publishers interested in using a Facebook-based membership model. Supporters pay a recurring fee to back the publisher’s news gathering work, and in exchange gain access to supporter-only exclusive content or other benefits. Some publishers also have experimented with providing supporters access to local cultural events.

Digiday’s Max Willens points out that News Funding is identical to the creator-focused Fan Subscriptions, except for the absence of the 30 percent cut. The impact of the first tool so far seems trivial to some publishers, Willens reported:

But so far, Facebook’s home-grown subscription-driving tool, which allows publishers to convert Facebook users into subscribers using Instant Articles, has not made a big impact on publishers’ hunt for subscribers. Publishers that participated in the tests of Facebook’s tools gave the tools a so-so grade after a year of use, saying that neither Facebook’s nor Google’s tools were driving meaningful subscriber growth. Facebook declined to share top-line statistics about how many subscribers its tools had helped publishers acquire.

“To date the number of conversions is so low that it makes no difference to me,” said a source at one publication that’s used Facebook’s tool, who declined to share a specific number of subscribers to avoid being identified.

Facebook says its testing and publisher feedback resulted in a welcome screen “to encourage new subscribers to follow a publisher’s page and see more of that publisher’s content in News Feed.” (You may recall pages in the feed aren’t doing too hot.) Apparently the welcome screen increased the articles read by subscribers on Facebook by 40 percent.

In a report from Digital Content Next and the Lenfest Institute, Matt Skibinski and Rande Price outline the for-profit and nonprofit approaches to increasing readers’ contributions, a key focus of the industry in a world where Google eats 37 percent of digital advertising, Facebook takes 22 percent, and Amazon continues to grow at 8.8 percent. The New York Times, the shining star example, makes about 40 percent of its revenue from digital, with a strong subscription backbone.

Lenfest’s previous data shows that publishers can push the top engaged five to 10 percent of their audiences to become paying subscribers — but again, that doesn’t mean that everyone is. Tribune Publishing eased up on its advertising-driven pageview focus and tightened its meter from 15 articles per month (how 2012!) to three over the past few years; tested price increases on longtime subscribers; and developed a digital marketing team dedicated to increasing digital subscribers:

As Tribune rolled out digital subscription models to its other properties including The Orlando Sentinel and The SunSentinel in 2013, and the Chicago Tribune in 2015 — it initially continued this conservative approach, with meter limits generally at 10 or more articles per month. The company’s results in its early years of charging for access were modest. Yet over the past several years, Tribune has seen a renaissance in its digital subscription program. After reaching less than 50,000 digital subscribers across all of its non-California properties in 2015, over the next three years the company’s digital subscription revenue started growing steadily. Tribune reported 89 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the first three quarters of 2018 totaling 227,000 digital subscribers according to its latest publicly-available financial report…

The company lowered its meter limits again in August of 2018, reducing the meter limit from five articles per month to three. Once again, their “meter stop rate” — the percent of users stopped by a meter limit — rose to 2.6 percent, bringing them from median performance to about the 70th percentile among publishers on this metric. Tribune saw no decline in their conversion rate for users who were stopped, and as a result their digital subscription starts increased 104 percent when compared with numbers from Q1 of the same year. ([Tribune senior vice president of digital marketing Mark] Campbell noted that a comparison to Q2 results was not available due to his team’s aggressive A/B testing during that time in preparation for the meter limit change.) Put simply, the company more than doubled its monthly subscription yield per unique visitor…

Campbell said Tribune’s team was emboldened by other publishers such as The Boston Globe, that have been aggressive in raising subscription rates for customers over time with significant success. “For us,” he said, “that would be the high-end price point. After you have gone through an introductory period, and then six months at $1.99 per week, and then six months with $3.99 per week.” This strategy has led Tribune to increase its rate per subscriber by 33 percent year over year.

The Guardian and Slate both emphasized the mission of their journalism and appealed to readers’ desire to support its quality. (We noted in November 2017 how The Guardian revamped its ask and got rid of swag to raise more reader revenue than ad dollars.)

Both companies began to pursue similar strategies, albeit starting from different places. In 2014, Slate launched its membership product, Slate Plus, with a set of features that [Slate’s director of product development David] Stern described as “mostly transactional in nature,” such as additional members-only content. “We surveyed people and the major reason they were signing up was to support the company,” he said. “But there was a non-trivial amount of people who subscribed for some benefit.” The product generated 7,000 memberships in the first year, which, while not insubstantial, paled in comparison to the size of Slate’s massive audience. According to The Lenfest Institute’s benchmarks, that membership rate — about .05 percent of Slate’s unique visitors at the time — falls at the median level. However, over time, as publishers build their membership bases, the top performers typically can convert 5-10 percent of their unique visitors into paying members. As such, Slate believed that their membership program had more potential.

The Guardian and Slate both tested members-only podcasts and behind-the-scenes initiatives to learn what their readers would pay for. Slate’s Slow Burn podcast, which revisits political scandals past, mixed a free version with mission-driven promos of its members-only Slow Burn episodes. (Slate is now building Supporting Cast, inspired by Slate Plus’s success, to help podcast publishers set up membership programs.)

The free version of Slow Burn generated 1.5 million downloads per episode, and the podcast as a whole drove 6,000 memberships in 2018…The key to success for both Slate and The Guardian has been exactly this kind of balance. Both organizations told versions of the same story: one in which readers are becoming members for a mix of valuable benefits like extra content and a broader desire to support the publication’s mission and journalism.

Journalism like The Guardian’s Cambridge Analytica reporting and Slate’s Trump administration coverage drove spikes in membership, too — particular if the organization made a special point to ask for that support.

The Guardian generated 340,000 members and supporters giving on a monthly basis and more than 350,000 giving one-time contributions (plus more than 230,000 subscribers to their digital or print editions) in the past twelve months. Interestingly, [The Guardian’s communications director Brendan] O’Grady noted that more than 50 percent of the company’s one-off contributions, which typically coincide with the publication breaking big stories, come from North America. In all, over the past three years more than one million people have given some form of financial support to the Guardian — including one-off contributions, rolling memberships and subscriptions.

Similarly, Slate has seen a flurry of membership sign-ups that it attributes to readers’ appreciation of its tough and skeptical coverage of the Trump administration. “We saw a big bump around the election—a much bigger bump than we had previously seen around an election or inauguration,” Stern said. In the three-month period covering the 2016 election and President Trump’s inauguration, Slate sold nearly 13,000 memberships, 3x the number of the three months prior. “That was entirely because readers wanted to support Slate.”

The full report is available here.

The added feature won’t make the same kind of splash as Spotify’s $230 million buy, of course. But Substack has garnered more than 35,000 paid subscribers across the newsletters it hosts, up from 11,000 when we last wrote about them in July 2018. That’s a big chunk, especially considering most of the newsletters also have a free tier, and now it can expand to podcasters as well.

“We wanted to build through the core strength of Substack. You’re not paying for stuff or a product; you’re paying for a relationship with a writer, maybe now a podcaster, you really trust,” Hamish McKenzie, the company’s cofounder, said.

There are a lot of routes this feature could take: Is it for writers to dip their toes into podcasting? For podcasters to incorporate a newsletter? For podcasters to make money just from podcasts but via email? McKenzie and fellow co-founder Christopher Best say it’s for both, any, all. And that could be helpful to the writers and podcasters laid off in recent months. (The 200-plus jobs sliced from BuzzFeed followed the cut of its podcast unit in September, which also raised fears of a bursting podcast bubble. That fear doesn’t seem well supported anymore.) The company, which went through Y Combinator, takes a 10 percent cut of the paid tier and has also raised $2 million since its founding in 2017.

The guinea pig for this expansion is Anthony Pompliano, who writes the daily paid (weekly free) Off the Chain crypto analysis newsletter for investors. Conveniently, he’s already been hosting a podcast of the same name. The show is a deep-dive interview released every few days, but its Substack audio complement is styled as a daily 5-to-10-minute audio letter, McKenzie and Best said. And paid subscribers face the same price tag for newsletter and/or audio content (the free subscribers receive one recording a week): “It’s not paying for the newsletter or the audio file. It’s the connection to the mind of Anthony Pompliano,” Best said. (They’re looking for other beta testers.)

Substack will still use its regular email service to deliver notifications to users when a podcast is published, and the web player is a super-simple hit play button, go do things with your life while listening in the background process that many podcast fans have acclimated to. (It works on mobile and desktop and the web page pleasantly doesn’t have to be active for it to work.) “I pay, I get an email. Our audio product is the same thing,” Best said. “You don’t have to do a bunch of dancing around to get it hooked up to your podcast app. You just get an email and play the podcast.” McKenzie and Best said that the steps to share audio mirror the newsletter systems they’ve already built.

Substack pitches its creators on owning the full relationship between them and the reader/listener/subscriber/absorber. (“Every journalist should own a mailing list. It’s the best possible insurance against the volatility of the media business and social media,” McKenzie tweeted the week of the BuzzFeed bloodletting.) They’re working on a discovery tool to allow more users to sift through Substack’s plentiful newsletters but have it on the back burner after “just helping writers [and podcasters] make more money,” Best said. Creators “are making valuable cultural products and we should make that have a monetary value as well.”

Can I pay an extra $5 to actually stay logged in @NewYorker https://t.co/csBj5XkWNU

— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) January 16, 2019

My god, @NewYorker just apply one of those big brains to being able to keep me logged in.

— Brett Martin (@brettmartin) February 21, 2018

I am a New Yorker subscriber and I am logged in and yet the site's paywall is blocking me, which is a very stupid version of Hell.

— Tyler Coates (@tylercoates) January 9, 2018

I'm thinking of storing my most secure data in my @NewYorker account, because it is darn near impossible to get or stay logged in even if you know the password.

— Benjamin Weiner (@cloud149) August 5, 2018

You can subscribe to the New Yorker for 20 years, write for it, *get hired* by it, & you still can't stay logged in. pic.twitter.com/JqRkNutYzl

— Kathryn Schulz (@kathrynschulz) December 28, 2014

To be fair to The New Yorker, it is not the only site that gets complained about. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times — basically any news site people actually pay to access in significant numbers — also receive their share of complaints from subscribers who can’t stay logged in. But New Yorker login woes are the only ones that have achieved — as NewYorker.com editor Michael Luo put it in a recent interview — meme status. You know, “The ‘New Yorker is terrible’ meme that everyone chimes in on,” he said ruefully.

Over the summer, The New Yorker told Slate its login issue was a bug that had been solved. But several months later, I was still seeing these tweets. So I decided to investigate further.

Before getting on the phone with Luo, I tried logging into my own New Yorker account. When I got into the site, The New Yorker recognized me only as a user, not as a subscriber. It also thought I still lived in New York. I knew I was a subscriber: New print issues keep coming to my house in Cambridge, where I stack them on my coffee table. “I can’t believe this! I’ve been a subscriber for 17 years!” I thought indignantly. “I got my own subscription as soon as I moved out of my parents’ house!”

But then, reaching back into the recesses of my brain, I remembered that I had not been a continuous subscriber for 17 years. I let that first print subscription lapse in 2013 when I had a baby and the increasingly large pile of unread issues began sparking serious guilt. I finally re-upped in 2017, when my second child was old enough that I was reading again, but this time I subscribed using a different email address so that I would be recognized as a new customer and be eligible to get, um, a certain bag. My computer’s password manager had remembered my old email address/password combination, but not the newer, current email/password combination. I eventually found that information and successfully logged into my real — real as in current — subscription.

Even at that point, though, The New Yorker’s site experienced a delay before recognizing that I was a logged-in, paying subscriber. The first story that I clicked on hit me with a paywall. Then, as if seeming to shift slowly into gear, the site sort of visibly shuddered, refreshed, and let me read the story. All of the “please subscribe” messaging on the site, however, remained. Confident that the problem at least was not only me, I was ready to talk with Luo.

“Right now, there isn’t actually a specific bug that is happening,” Luo said. “That’s what’s driving us a little crazy.”

The New Yorker now receives about two-thirds of its revenue from subscribers and, like most news outlets, wants to grow digital subscriptions — so it is a huge priority that the subscriptions function correctly and that the experience is a good one, Luo stressed. This is also, “from a nerd standpoint, a really complicated technical challenge,” as the company tries both to protect customer privacy and make things good for users. But, of course, this is a challenge that many companies solve, so what’s with all the customer complaints in The New Yorker’s instance? A bug last year was indeed responsible for keeping some people from logging into stories (like Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein investigation) that were getting a ton of traffic; that was fixed. What remains is not one specific bug but, probably more frustratingly, a combination of: Technical fixes, on a long to-do list, that The New Yorker has not yet gotten around to; clunky old Condé Nast technology; user error; and a good measure of “this is just how the internet is.”

For instance, people read New Yorker articles across a wide variety of digital devices — from desktop and mobile, in The New Yorker’s app, from links within newsletters, from links on social media. “If you’re reading a newsletter article on your phone in Gmail, it’ll open a particular browser. If you’re in the iOS default mail app, it’ll open in [Safari]. And if you’re clicking within Twitter or Facebook, they have an in-app browser,” Luo said. “You’re opening each within a specific environment, and each of those environments requires you to log in, and in some cases we just can’t manage how they maintain your login information.”

In other cases, the technology is under The New Yorker’s control. People who subscribe to The New Yorker’s email newsletters and have a paid subscription think that if they click on a link in their email, that link should open in their New Yorker app, which they’re already logged into as a paid subscriber — and that should be possible, Luo said. “That requires some work on our app end that we’d like to get done. That’s the way the Times does it.” It’s just an item on a long to-do list that hasn’t been addressed yet. The company is constantly working on upgrades and fixes, Luo said — for instance, “if we have your email address in records from when you subscribed, it should recognize you and automatically link your subscription so that you don’t have to enter an additional piece of information. Little things like that smooth the process, and we’ve been at work on a lot of those little things, just sort of knocking them off one by one.”

Luo also suggested one other thing that might be fueling some of the Twitter complaints. In recent months, The New Yorker has tightened the paywall. Previously, non-subscribers could access six free articles per month on the website; now, it’s four. The New Yorker Today app used to let you access 10 articles for free; that’s now also down to four. It’s possible that many paying subscribers assumed they were logged in, when they actually were not logged in and were just hitting the paywall sooner than they used to. And a handful had probably never renewed their subscriptions at all, and only remembered that when the paywall popped up.

Finally, The New Yorker is both saddled with/blessed by its relationship with Condé Nast’s web infrastructure. During my call with Luo, I had the experience — similar to the simultaneously satisfying and alarming feeling of going to the doctor for a weird rash and hearing the doctor say “Well that’s weird” — of introducing him to a subscription page on The New Yorker’s site that he said he had never seen before. “I don’t exactly know how this thing works,” he said.

It was, specifically, the “customer care” page of The New Yorker’s site. It’s separate from the “View your profile” page and also must be logged into separately, with a 4-digit code. It’s where you go if you want to change your mailing address or report a missing issue; it’s also, as far as I can tell, run by some strange and possibly forgotten corner of Condé Nast rather than by The New Yorker itself. Every Condé Nast publication has a similar page, and — of course! — they’re all completely separate from each other; if you have subscriptions to multiple CN magazines, you still have to log into each of them on its own, and you can’t manage multiple subscriptions. (Although Condé Nast plans to take all of its websites behind paywalls by the end of 2019, there are still no current plans to merge these “customer care” backends, a company rep said. “It’s certainly something we’ll look at down the road, but the priority for this year is getting our brands behind paywalls that are tailored to their audiences.”)

Okay, so the customer care page was a foreign corner that we wouldn’t talk about. But why was it so hard, on NewYorker.com, to tell whether I was actually logged in or not? Why did I keep seeing invitations to subscribe when I already was a subscriber? It wasn’t that this was — any of this — was really such an urgent problem. (My casual testing suggested that it was greatly affected by which browser I was using and whether I had adblocking extensions turned on.) It was just these little things that, well, were noticeable, and annoying. The New Yorker will soon charge $149 a year for a print-plus-digital subscription, up from $120. An annual digital-only subscription is currently $90. I pay $132/year for Netflix, $119/year for Amazon Prime. I rarely if ever have to log into my Netflix or Amazon accounts, which multiple people in my household access across different devices. They’re just there.

On the one hand, maybe it’s unfair to have tech-company-level expectations for a single magazine, which is not a middleman in the same way that Netflix and Amazon at least once were (but, as they release more and more of their own programming, are increasingly not). On the other hand, when you’re paying roughly the same price for the products, how can you not compare them at some point? There will have to be a point when the digital media site isn’t always coming up short, when the digital media experience isn’t always worse. We may not quite have reached that point yet, but as publications increasingly look to their readers to support them, we are going to hit it soon. Customer service concerns will become less media Twitter niche complaints — and more inextricably linked with the product itself.

This piece was updated to note that The New Yorker did not change its social media policy. Rather, Google ended its First Click Free policy, and now Google users can see four free New Yorker articles per month via Google links. ]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/why-wont-the-new-yorker-keep-you-logged-in-mystery-solved-kind-of/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/here-are-the-local-news-organizations-boosted-in-facebooks-membership-accelerator/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/here-are-the-local-news-organizations-boosted-in-facebooks-membership-accelerator/#respond Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:58:52 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=163833 After leading a cohort of metropolitan newspapers through a subscriptions accelerator this year, Facebook is now kicking off its next round, focused this time on membership in nonprofit and digital-only local news organizations.

The membership accelerator, now one of three different threads in Facebook’s olive-branch programming for local news, started with an in-person gathering in Austin late last month and continues for three months. Facebook extended the subscriptions accelerator, piloted with 14 newsrooms beginning in February, throughout the rest of 2018 and is transitioning it to a retention focus in 2019.

The programming is led by former Texas Tribune publisher/New York Times digital strategy executive/now independent media consultant Tim Griggs (he spoke with us about the training earlier this year) and a group of industry coaches and experts including the Christian Science Monitor’s David Grant and Mother Jones’ Brian Hiatt. Participants receive grant funding, attend regular webinars, and gather two more times in person over the next three months.

The accelerators’ participants were selected by Facebook rather than via an external application process, with input from the Lenfest Institute, the Local Media Consortium, the Local Media Association, and the News Media Alliance for the subscription side; the Institute for Nonprofit News, Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, and the News Revenue Hub for the membership one.

Here’s the full list of the 17 membership accelerator participants; you can find much more about nearly all of them in the Nieman Lab archives:

• MinnPost, a regional Minnesota nonprofit newsroom founded in 2007 which reached sustainability as early as 2010 via memberships, advertising, and events
• PublicSource, a nonprofit newsroom launched in Pittsburgh in 2011 now with10 full-time employees supported primarily by local foundations
• Richland Source, a Mansfield, Ohio publication conceived by the CEO of a local printer and copier supplier in 2013, which has primarily relied on advertising revenue in the past
• VTDigger, Vermont’s eight-year-old, online-only nonprofit news organization with a staff rivaling the size of the state’s largest newspaper
• CALmatters, the three-year-old California state policy explainer
• The Rivard Report, a San Antonio independent journalism outlet that transitioned to nonprofit status in 2015
• Berkeleyside, the Bay Area local news site which raised $1 million from 355 readers in a direct public offering (also known as crowd-investing), asking followers to chip in with at least $1,000
• WhereBy.Us, the parent company behind a growing network of newsletters for the “curious locals” target audience, which has asked its followers to consider crowd-investing in the startup
• Spirited Media, serial digital news entrepreneur Jim Brady’s latest experiment, focused on building a nationwide digital local news chain (which pivoted to memberships after laying off folks last year)
• Patch — yes, Patch, which lives on past its much-hullabalooed troubles a few years back
• Bridge Magazine, part of the Center for Michigan, a self-described “think-and-do tank” based in Ann Arbor
• City Limits, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet based in New York City and founded in 1976
• Wisconsin Watch, part of the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which was almost forced off campus by state legislators a few years ago
• KOSU, the public radio station of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• DPTV, Detroit’s public TV station
• WABE, Atlanta’s public broadcasting for radio and TV
• KUER, Utah’s NPR station

You can read more about the accelerator’s training here.

A new report from the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, written by Natalie Stroud, Yujin Kim, and Jessica Collier studied different ways news organizations proffer themselves to potential subscribers through the lens of paid Facebook ads promoting their subscriptions.

In a nutshell: “People aren’t persuaded by logos or messages conveying what’s at stake, and they want to sign up for free newsletters more than they want to pay for a subscription,” Collier said.

In a study funded by the American Press Institute, CME worked with six news organizations that already have a reputation for bringing in subscription or donor money (only three newsrooms were included in the experimental portion). The news organizations, ranging from a large local newspaper in the southwest to a small regional newsmagazine in the west, then tested the following strategies on either a promoted Facebook post, an email, and/or an advertisement in their newsletter:

• A subscription offer with a photo — of either the organization’s logo, a journalist at work (recording an interview with a video camera, interviewing a man with a pen and paper, or interviewing a man holding a cell phone), or a depiction of a top story covered by the newsroom (such as a forest fire or the aftermath of a hurricane)
• The wording of the subscription offer (“Get the news you need to stay informed…” vs. “Don’t miss out on the news you need to stay informed…”)
• The type of offer — for a free newsletter or paid print/digital access

The experiment took place for one month between April and May 2018, using a combination of 23 different tests and hitting almost 500,000 Facebook or email accounts. And they spent nearly $5,000 per newsroom during that time, with not too many subscriptions as a result. The topline findings:

• On Facebook, logos reduce click-through on subscription appeals relative to other images, such as journalists doing their work.

• When soliciting subscriptions via email, messages emphasizing what you’d lose without news frequently result in lower click-through rates compared to other strategies, such as telling people what they’d gain from a subscription or just giving them details about the subscription.

• Ads for free newsletter subscriptions garner more clicks than do ads for paid print/digital access.

• For the messages and images tested here, there is little evidence that Facebook ads alone yield an acceptable return on investment.

The CME researchers also note that many more people actually clicked through to the subscription page than actually ended up subscribing, hinting that there could be an issue with that page. These findings can be added to the funnel for getting to the funnel of loyal audiences/subscribers. A similar study by CME and City Bureau focused on news consumers in Chicago at the beginning of this year found that individuals are more likely to donate money to a free news site than pay money to access the news.

But perhaps the newsletters are just sowing the fruit of reader relationships to come. As Spirited Media’s Brian Boyer framed it: “The website is for adding newsletter subscribers, and the newsletter is for making members.”

Read the full CME report here.

In October, Canada is set to become the first G-7 country to fully legalize the recreational use of cannabis nationwide. (Uruguay legalized it back in 2013, and a top Georgia court made it legal there a couple weeks ago.) As each province irons out its own policies, Canada will be entering uncharted territory when it comes to how marijuana should best be regulated, grown, marketed, sold, and consumed. How to best cover a Canadian industry that’s growing with global consequences, is also uncharted territory.

For The Globe and Mail, it’s an enormous business story that touches every part of its newsroom, from reporters in regional bureaus to the investigations team. Medical marijuana has been legal and regulated in Canada now for nearly two decades, and the Trudeau government had been making overtures around recreational legalization for some time.

“Our coverage evolved slowly at first, with the legalization of medical marijuana. We’d done some coverage around problems in the supply chain, and problems in quality of product. But I’d say we probably didn’t get really serious about covering the business of cannabis until early 2017, when the government’s timeline became clear,” Derek DeCloet, who leads The Globe and Mail’s business coverage, told me. “More companies grew up, went public, got large. There were acquisitions. They made financing moves for their businesses. Activity increased markedly in 2016. So last year, we started to cover it more intensely.” That included dedicating one reporter, Christina Pellegrini, entirely to the business of cannabis.

“To be honest, I don’t have the formula for you for how we’re organizing it,” DeCloet said. “It’s a thing that has evolved quickly enough that we’ve also been doing things a little bit on the fly as well.”

One new reporter will likely be focused significantly on the government/policy side of cannabis (e.g., controlling sales through government entities versus encouraging many more private retailers). Others will focus on the business side (e.g., cannabis companies will try to build brands the way beer and wine companies have done — what will that look like?). Or the corporate side (e.g., there are lots of individual companies; maybe mergers are coming, maybe some companies will crash). Then there’s a consumer side as well (e.g., what’s the etiquette around consuming marijuana?). The Globe and Mail’s wider newsroom stands at around 260 people.

The paper’s overall cannabis coverage push includes a three-pronged approach, according to Neal Madan, managing director of corporate development and strategic planning at the Globe. First, it’ll continue to build out coverage for a newish cannabis hub on its main site (like many Globe stories, some of these are also behind a hard paywall).

It’ll invest in events, with a series starting August 22 that explores the Canadian landscape after legalization. And it’ll soon launch a very pricy subscription product, initially in email newsletter form, which will be its own premium tier on top of a regular Globe and Mail subscription. The newsletter is set to launch sometime in September and will start at $999 CDN per year.

“It’s pretty clear the cannabis industry will be an area of frenetic activity. The world’s eyes will also be on Canada as we become a hub of financial activity in this sector,” Madan said. “We’ve been tracking internal data around readership that shows us cannabis is one of our most searched and highly read topics. Readers are consuming it in large quantities, both in terms of the number of articles that they’re looking at, as well as the amount of time they spend on them.”

He wouldn’t share subscription targets, saying only “it’s fair to say that this is being priced appropriately for a premium, professional-grade product,” and “our idea is that we can add value to this area that lives by standards of the Globe, and we think that this has tangible value.”

As a privately held company, the Globe and Mail doesn’t release specific numbers on its finances or subscribers or readers. The company says it’s profitable, at least as of this J-Source story from December. (There’ve been whispers, though, that The New York Times has more Canadian digital subscribers than the Globe, or any other Canadian news organization.)

The premium newsletter is supposed to be an “even deeper dive that’s distinct from our regular cannabis coverage on our site,” Madan said, into “regulatory rules, corporate development and operating strategies, M&A activities, research and development, robust industry data, and analytics.” The Globe has been in touch with various industry professionals to gauge interest in such a product; potential subscribers include everyone from people working in the cannabis industry to policymakers and financial or legal advisers.

“When we evaluate any potential new product, we try to address questions using external and internal data, while also drawing upon own experience and intuitions,” Madan said. “Does the Globe have credibility in this content area? Is there a sizable audience interested in this subject matter? Do they have a need for this specific product, or can we create a need? are there enough people willing to pay for it so as to make it profitable?”

Usable industry news will be more conducive to a high-priced subscription product.

“I think what [the Globe and Mail is] doing is smart,” said Nushin Rashidian, a co-founder of the subscription-driven publication Cannabis Wire, which covers the socioeconomic, policy, and research issues facing the global cannabis industry. (Rashidian was also a lead researcher on the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s work on platforms and publishers.) “Canada’s industry is roughly the size of California’s, but their real value proposition is the fact that all these companies are going global or going to go global, so their potential subscriber base is actually massive. These companies are exporting to Germany, they’re looking at Brazil, Australia.”

The Cannabist, once a standout project from The Denver Post, has struggled to maintain its editorial offerings (cuts delivered by Digital First Media’s owner Alden Global Capital certainly didn’t help). The Canninfornian, a project of a group of Digital First newsrooms in California, doesn’t seem to have a strong business model to back it, either. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, NJ.com has been selling its premium Cannabis Insider newsletter for $29.99 per month (or $299.99 for an annual subscription). The Boston Globe seems to be making moves for a dedicated cannabis section, based on its job postings for a cannabis reporter, as well as a dedicated section producer.

“We’re certainly not alone in covering this, but I think we’re probably alone in the level of investment we’re putting into it going forward,” DeCloet said. “It’s not untilled terrain, but it’s quite new terrain, so there’s a lot we have to do to cover it properly. We think the industry has a lot to learn as it goes from being primarily a black-market industry to a legal industry. We’ve got a lot to learn.”

That’s one way that American Public Media is fundraising for In the Dark, the investigative/true crime podcast hosted by Madeleine Baran (and named as one of the best podcasts of 2018 by our podcasting expert Nicholas Quah of Hot Pod, with accolades from critics at Vox as well). In its two months of existence, more than 250 people have joined the group, which is for donors only. (And $50 is only the minimum donation.)

“I’m a millennial, so I’ve been focusing more on experiences for listeners and how they can dive deeper into the programs they love,” said Emily Kittleson, APM’s national fundraising manager. She said more than 1,000 people have donated to In the Dark this season (a “big increase in donations” compared to the first), and the number of donors in the group is comparable to how many would actually accept a material incentive, like a mug or a tote bag.

As Facebook’s algorithm pivots toward “meaningful interactions,” publishers are considering ways to monetize groups in ways that actually make them valuable, for both the organizations and for the paying members. Local news organizations often have groups just for subscribers, and topical publishers have created interest communities for their audiences or set up groups sponsored by advertisers, for example.

On the heels of its subscription accelerator for select local news publishers, Facebook has introduced a subscription component for some groups (but none related to news — more about decluttering your house and meal-planning). This could help the money flow more directly to the content creators (though it’s safe to assume Facebook would eventually take a cut), but it is a strictly-a-test-and-don’t-get-your-hopes-up experiment, according to Facebook.

The In the Dark Donors group is not a part of this test. But by keeping it closed and vetting potential members through a donor registry cross-check, the members of this group contributed at least $12,000 (according to my basic math calculations, though I’m sure the existence of a Facebook group wasn’t the sole driver of that amount).

In the Dark is about law, order, and criminal justice, but not in a sensational, CSI way. (Another podcast about a death investigation you may have heard of is now under criticism by the estate of the man it centers around.) The second season of In the Dark investigates the conviction of a black man tried six times by the same white prosecutor in Mississippi. Curtis Flowers is still in prison, on death row — so “giving somebody a mug for donating doesn’t feel right,” Kittleson said. Instead, listeners congregate in the group to brainstorm ways to send Flowers support mail, organize a political campaign against the district attorney, and connect with Baran and the other journalists working on the podcast. The season ended this month, but the conversation seems to have just begun.

As a nonprofit, APM needed to strategize ways to encourage listener donations, especially for such a resource-intensive podcast. Baran and the nine-plus-member team spend a year poring through tips and carrying out the investigation that is then featured in each season. (The two seasons so far have totaled roughly 20 hours of audio.) Kittleson had experimented with a Facebook group for some of the other podcasts she manages fundraising for, like Terrible, Thanks for Asking, a podcast about straight-talking human pain and awkwardness. She created a group with just a $5-a-month (or one-time gift of $60) barrier to entry in order for listeners to connect with each other; it has drawn more than 1,000 members. But with the heavy lifting of In the Dark, Kittleson felt its group was worth a bigger ask.

“It was a tough decision,” she said, after comparing the average gifts for the first season, other podcasts at APM, and for investigative journalism at Minnesota Public Radio. “I tried to set it at a place that would be pushing people to give just a little bit more than they might be originally comfortable with but not way out of the price range.” Some donors chip in more than $50 when joining, she added.

Fans who don’t want (or can’t) contribute at that level are welcome to follow along with the podcast’s Facebook page. Kittleson reinforces that message in the group’s member-filtering questions, and the page itself has a bustling community with 7,800 followers. (Facebook data indicates that many of those are from the town where the crime that sparked Curtis Flowers’ trials took place, she added.)

But the page is subject to Facebook’s algorithmic whims (like, well, the rest of the platform is). The group provides members with notifications about new episodes (when Kittleson posts to start an episode discussion chain as they’re released), updates on Flowers’ case (and his family), and Baran’s work on the story. Members who have committed money to the podcast may be more likely to have productive, engaged conversations. They’ll also be there for donation drives and APM campaigns in the future, if Kittleson chooses to post about it there. Plus, the Facebook algorithm favors the “meaningful interactions” of groups over pages and all that jazz.

In the show’s off-season, the group’s admins don’t plan on monitoring it too much or introducing more information, aside from updates on Flowers’ case, but the members are welcome to take the conversations basically wherever they want. (Baran says she reminds members who ask her about what they could do to help that it’s not her job to “advocate any particular action. We just report the facts, and leave it up to the listeners as to how people want to respond”).

But Kittleson is intrigued by the possibility of Facebook’s infrastructure taking on her administrative overhead fielding the group’s donors. Facebook could likely add in or remove donors instantly rather than waiting for Kittleson to cross-check with their database, but that also means Facebook has the contact data for their specific donors in their court. (Kittleson said she hasn’t removed any donors from the group yet — it’s a one-time donation, but subscription-driven groups would likely be a recurring event to be cross-checked.) And while the details are still being wriggled out — remember, it is ONLY A TEST — there’s a chance Facebook could pull a transaction fee from the donations, either on APM’s side or the donor’s side. A Facebook spokesperson told me they are still evaluating the possibility of what a Facebook cut would look like beyond the test, though the administrators of subscription groups will receive a monthly payment from Facebook starting two months after the test launches. All payments are processed through iOS or Android in-app payment methods, depending on the user’s account, and TechCrunch noted that Apple and Google typically take a 30 percent cut of the payments during the first year of subscription and 15 percent after.

Can publishers trust the platforms with their subscribers — and their money?

“There’s always the issue of being totally dependent on Facebook delivering this thing that we want to give to our fans,” Kittleson said. “If Facebook decided there was for some reason inappropriate content on our page, could they just shut it down and we lose that connection?”

Just over 11,000 subscribers of Substack newsletters are now paying for content, distributed fairly evenly across multiple publications, according to two cofounders of the subscription-focused startup, Hamish McKenzie and Christopher Best. On average, these subscribers are paying just a shade under $80 per year, they said. (Our coverage of Substack’s development in the past year here and here.)

“Call it, say, 10ish medium-sized publications making up the bulk of that. It’s not all one publication, or even just two or three,” Best said. “We wouldn’t be celebrating if there was a false distribution. We’re happy with the spread,” McKenzie said.

Substack, founded last year as a multi-purpose service for individuals to spin up subscription news operations, is now made up of Best, McKenzie, their third cofounder Jairaj Sethi (formerly of Kik, where Best was CTO and cofounder), and Nathan Bashaw, briefly head of product at Gimlet and one of the original builders of Product Hunt.

“Hundreds” of people are using Substack to send email newsletters on the free tier, according to McKenzie, and several dozens of those are charging their readers. Roughly 40 or so indie publishers could be counted as “making meaningful money.” Substack, still in beta and free to use, currently takes a 10 percent cut of a newsletter’s revenue only at the paid subscriptions tier. (The company was part of the winter 2018 YCombinator class and announced it raised $2 million in seed funding from a mix of investors back in May.) At the top end, open rates for free newsletters on its platform cluster around 60 percent, with “nothing really below 20 percent on the lowest end.” (The cofounders wouldn’t share with me any absolute subscriber numbers for the newsletters it hosts, deferring to individual publishers for what they might want to share and when.)

Its points of pride have been publications like Bill Bishop’s Sinocism China newsletter (the first official publication on Substack; Bishop is also an early investor), which charges $168 a year; Daniel Ortberg’s humor newsletter The Shatner Chatner, which is $50 a year or $5 month-to-month for exclusive issues; and Helena Fitzgerald’s Griefbacon, essays around love and relationships, also for $50 a year or $5 each month. And what would a newsletter platform be without a cryptocurrency offering? Substack also hosts Anthony Pompliano‘s Off the Chain, $100 a year or $10 month-to-month. It also works with the magazine Outside on a newsletter focused on women’s outdoor gear, called Dawn Patrol, for $60 a year.

Recently, Substack has been mostly focused on making platform improvements — “we’ve done a lot of work on the basics,” Best said — adding a discussion feature for paying subscribers of its newsletters. It’s also beefing up the analytics end to let authors see critical metrics, such as how visitors to their sites are converting to newsletter subscribers, how frequently a subscriber is opening an email, which links subscribers are clicking on, growth charts for all the individuals on an email list, and paying subscriber growth over time.

“We’re going to get to a level of sophistication where we’re inventing new statistics, but right now we’re focusing on the basics: what sort of content works, what sort of frequency works, and so forth,” McKenzie said. So what does their data say about what send frequency and what formats of content encourage more subscribers? It varies from publication to publication (sigh).

Substack doesn’t push individual users of its platform to turn on subscriptions — some authors do ask for Substack’s advice on that front — after they reach certain thresholds of subscribers or open rates, but high open rates and higher proportions of subscribers who open regularly are obvious data points of encouragement in that direction.

“We have people publishing everywhere from five times a week down to once every two to three weeks, all being successful. The most important thing is knowing who your audience is and what they need and what they want; it’s them feeling like they have a connection with the author that gets people to pay,” Best said. “When you’re orienting towards paying subscribers, you do start to see some metrics that don’t necessarily matter — just getting a huge number of clicks, in an advertising-driven world that is an end unto itself. But it doesn’t matter from a subscription perspective. On the other hand, you still have to get people to show up and see what you’re doing; you also have to show them the value of what you’re sending them.”

Best said he’s also working on a discovery element of Substack for down the line — “getting to a scale where it’s us maybe also helping people who are subscribed to one Substack publication looking to discover other great stuff.” But, he emphasized, the fundamental value of Substack is nurturing that “relationship readers have with the writer” and “helping individual publications become their own self-sustaining, growing units.”

A version of this exchange happened when I tried to cancel my ClassPass account. A similar version happened when I tried to cancel my Boston Globe a few years ago when it kept being delivered to the wrong address.

We all have our own subscription auto-renewal and cancellation grievances. (My colleague Laura collected a bunch of news organization-related ones on Twitter.)

Me: *tries to cancel @nytimes subscription on 27 January*

NYT, just over *4 months later*: oops

pic.twitter.com/FOe3iFzm0n

— dan hon (@hondanhon) June 2, 2018

Had to call NYT to cancel digital sub. Spent 15 min on hold. First rep tried to retain per training, but when I told him I had meeting to get back to, just cancel it — he hung up on me.

So I had to call back later that day, hold for another 15 mins to *finally* get it done

— Cory Brown (@tcb) May 31, 2018

But a California law that went into effect July 1 aims to stop companies from blockading customers looking to cancel their services — along with the practice of sneakily sliding them into another month’s subscription without much clarity on the real, full cost of the service. Among the changes: It bans companies from forcing you to, say, call a hard-to-find telephone number to cancel a subscription that you purchased online.

I moved & updated address. No papers came; I marked them undelivered. Eventually the courier called me, irate, accused me of taking $ out of his pocket. He'd been delivering to old address. I attempted to update address again – still no papers. Finally had to cxl home delivery.

— Tiffany Hamilton (@feathersandwax) May 31, 2018

California’s Senate Bill No. 313, which adds further protections for consumers to an existing law, would (according to its official legislative summary):

…commencing on July 1, 2018, require a business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer that includes a free gift or trial, to include in the offer a clear and conspicuous explanation of the price that will be charged after the trial ends or the manner in which the subscription or purchasing agreement pricing will change upon conclusion of the trial.

The bill would prohibit a business from charging a consumer’s credit or debit card, or the consumer’s account with a 3rd party, for an automatic renewal or continuous service that is made at a promotional or discounted price for a limited period of time without first obtaining the consumer’s consent to the agreement.

The bill would also specify that if the automatic service offer or continuous service offer includes a free gift or trial, the business is required to disclose how to cancel, and allow the consumer to cancel, the automatic renewal or continuous service before the consumer pays for the goods or services.

And while it’s just a California law, it also applies to any company (or publisher) with paying customers in the state — so, pretty much everybody, GDPR-style. (Credit/blame State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, the bill’s sponsor, for the new rules.)

Ryan Nakashima, an AP technology writer who’s been conducting some adblocking and subscriptions research at the Bay Area News Group in California, mentioned to me that in an exit survey of people who were canceling their subscriptions, some cancelers had also called out the cancellation process itself. These are real complaints that the new bill will try to address.

The text of the bill also notes that “a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that a consumer can send to the business without additional information.”

Tried to cancel my print subscription to a Gannett paper. There was no apparent way to do it online. You HAVE to call and talk to person.

— Jonathan Groves (@grovesprof) May 31, 2018

I reached out to some of the major subscription news organizations in California before July 1 to see what progress they’d made on getting compliant, what sorts of reasons for cancellation they’ve seen from readers, and whether they would have made any of these pricing-transparency and subscription-mechanism improvements had there been no law. I got a lot of basic, affirmative statements. (Many other companies I reached out to declined to comment, citing upcoming vacations.)

“Assuring customer satisfaction is always top of mind to McClatchy and its newspapers. We are aware and in compliance to new requirements for automatic renewal offers (‘auto-renewals’) per the California law,” read an emailed statement attributed to Dan Schaub, corporate director of audience development at McClatchy, passed along via a PR person. McClatchy owns California papers such as the Sacramento, Fresno, and Modesto Bees. “McClatchy adheres to all laws and regulations, and we have taken steps to allow our customers to access their account information easily on all of our websites.”

“We are indeed updating our system and customer service pages to conform with the regulations by ensuring that online subscribers can cancel online, as I imagine all publishers are,” Neil Chase, executive editor of the Bay Area News Group, wrote me in an email. The San Jose Mercury News, East Bay Times, and Marin Independent Journal are part of BANG, which falls under the infamous Digital First Media.

“Our subscriptions are currently managed through the centralized team at Tribune Interactive/tronc,” a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times wrote in an email. “We are indeed making changes to our systems to accommodate this new law. Of course it impacts the L.A. Times/San Diego most, but it also impacts California-based subscribers to any publication.” (I tried to follow up for details with a Tribune Interactive/Tronc spokesperson, who punted right away with a reply: “We are not going to comment on a paper we don’t own.”)

While the new rules should make it easier for a customer to cancel a subscription, lots of publishers still have work to do to make it easier for people to subscribe in the first place.

The New York Times now has around 2.33 million paid digital-only news subscribers (not counting subscribers to Crosswords and Cooking). 15 percent of those subscribers are from outside the United States. The New York-based, East-Coast-centric news organization is now seeing higher growth rates outside the U.S. than within it.

Canada was the biggest market for the Times outside the U.S., even before the Times began officially devoting more resources to growing its reporting and subscriber base in the country. Now Canadian subscribers make up around 27 percent of the Times international subscriber base, according to a Canadaland interview with Times Canada bureau chief Catherine Porter this past spring; that works out to something like 94,000 subscribers. (2,330,000 × .15 × .27 = 94,365.) By some estimates, that’s more paying Canadian digital subscribers than any Canadian news organization can claim.

The Times officially began building out its presence in Australia at the beginning of last year, as part of a three-year, $50 million-plus global expansion plan — and now Australia is its fastest growing market for subscribers. (Again, by percentage growth — the Times didn’t share country-by-country subscription numbers.)

So how has the Times approached building up coverage, using a relatively lean editorial staff, that can convince English speakers in other countries to pay for the Times, despite many local alternatives have been covering their respective countries for longer?

“One of the things we always talk about is our cocktail of content — that is, what mix of New York Times stuff is going to make somebody, particularly somebody far away, or somebody who doesn’t feel today the Times is for them right now, think that this is totally relevant for me, and I want to have a relationship with that news organization?” Jodi Rudoren — newly promoted to associate managing editor for audience this month — told me. (Rudoren will still be overseeing the Times’ international expansion efforts as part of the new role; the work is just reframed slightly to fall under the wider mandate of expanding coverage and identifying underserved audiences.)

The individual components aren’t surprising.

“Local stuff will overindex everywhere,” Rudoren said, so a Times push into a new geographical region necessarily means more geographically specific coverage. Then, “we make sure we make stuff that’s big everywhere. Every piece of content we produce for Australians may be overindexing in Australia, but that’s still probably a smaller number of Australians than all the Australians who are reading, say, our Harvey Weinstein investigation.”

She pointed to the organization’s approach with Peter Goodman’s piece on the repercussions of a near-decade of budget-cutting in Britain; about 20 percent of the story’s readers came from the U.K.

“Then, when we’re able to connect the global and local, it’s very powerful for people,” Rudoren said. A Q&A with Maggie Haberman (American) and Times Sydney bureau chief Damien Cave (also American) in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s meeting with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is one example of that Timesian cocktail.

“Then the last ingredient, is how we stir that cocktail. We don’t want to do commodity news in local markets. We need to have the Times special sauce, whether that’s more analysis, more visuals. We are not trying to match The Australian page-for-page, or any other local paper that might be in that market.”

This approach muddles a simplistic demographic portrait of an international Times subscriber. In Australia, for instance, “we’re still aiming for an audience of Australians, and a global audience at the same time, to some degree,” Cave, told me. “Our audience both in Australia and outside Australia is diverse, and includes a whole lot of people in the country who may have moved here from other countries, and includes Australians who live in other parts of the world. I get emails from Australians in Malaysia. I get emails from Americans in Sydney.”

Rudoren was hesitant to pin down a playbook for how the Times launches in other countries, though the editorial push in Australia was something of an incubator for audience development ideas and testing that “cocktail of coverage.” Both she and Cave used “experiment,” “learning,” and “audience-focused” liberally.

“We’re starting to experiment with things like going to audiences that have already gathered, whether it’s a large Facebook group like Yanks Down Under, or poetry groups, or arts organizations that have gathered audiences — anyone we think naturally could be New York Times subscribers,” Cave said. “These are things we’re thinking about now: If someone doesn’t know about us, how do you get the Times present in their lives as often as possible?”

The Times manages its own Australia Facebook group of more than 7,000 members, which Cave said has been a useful audience sample and sounding board, helping the Times “learn more quickly how to cover this place in a way that’s less likely to offend.” (When the Times announced its Australia bureau, its illustration of a kangaroo and a reporter coming out of its pouch set off a few “American outlet writes about quaint little Australia” concerns.)

Hiring requirements for @nytimes in Australia:
* Kangaroo riding a must
* Drop bear fighting desirable
* Good with cliches
* BYO cork hat pic.twitter.com/6YXY9yAvyb

— Karen Sweeney (@karenlsweeney) January 23, 2017

Editors of a new Australian literary magazine Liminal, focused on the Asian Australian experience, took over the Times Facebook group for a couple of weeks, for instance, and led discussions on the country’s changing demographics and culture. The Times has adapted its Metropolitan Diary into Australia Diary, which collects reader-submitted stories about the place (only one segment on vegemite so far).

The Times Australia also added a food critic who follows a traditional anonymous-reviewing, multiple-visits process, and it’s looking to add another correspondent. Times reporters have done events across Australia. The influence sometimes flows the other way: The Times style guide requires Indigenous and Aboriginal to be capitalized when used in reference to Australia’s First Peoples.

In Australia, Times subscriptions have “doubled over the past year,” according to a spokesperson. Cave’s Australia newsletter hits open rates above 75 percent. The main Times app now has an Australia section, and on NYTimes.com, there’s some small-scale geotargeting for some regions.

“We’ve been looking at more metrics like: If you read, say, two stories, what are the stories you read? What I’m trying to figure out is what are the proxies for deeper engagement — what are the proxies for repeated use and habituation in a place like this?” Cave said. “It’s what the whole NYT is trying to do, but I’m trying to figure that out on a more granular scale. Our readers are not going to read 100 Australia stories. So what’s the right mix?”

Along with the U.K., Canada and Australia are the company’s three largest non-U.S. markets right now — a group obviously unified by the strong market for news in English. Translating Times stories opens a new window to more readers, but it also adds layers of complexity. The Times’ Chinese and Spanish sites publish around 12 stories per day in their respective languages; it’s also starting to add landing pages for other languages, like French. The Times now has a Montreal correspondent, who kicked off a “road trip” based in part on reader suggestions, with some of the reporting and promotion process conducted in French and some of the stories also translated into French.

“Now we’ll add a more focused program of translating content into French for the Quebec audience to see how that works with engaging them,” Rudoren said. “We’ll probably try different versions of that with other audiences where we think we have bigger opportunities, like Germany and South Korea.”

The Times hasn’t formally tried to convert Chinese and NYT en Español readers into subscribers yet. (The paywall for readers coming to the main Times site from all regions is the same across the board.) It’s still trying to add to the available coverage in these languages.

After a consistent experiment with Spanish translations, The New York Times en Español officially launched in early 2016, and puts out an email briefing with a “quarter million subscribers or so,” according to Rudoren, gathering original, fully translated, and English-language stories from around the Times as a sort of “guide” for a bilingual readership.

The Times site in Chinese launched in 2012 and was swiftly blocked in China, which has left the Times targeting the Chinese diaspora more than mainland readers. A new briefing in Chinese is also in the works.

“Both sites are in their own ways refining their strategies in actually similar ways. We are going to integrate their offerings more into our core English report,” Rudoren said. “There are a lot of readers in both Spanish and Chinese who can read across languages to whom we want to offer a more robust experience that can lead to subscriptions. We’re continuing to refine our choices of what and how best to translate, and that is a much more complicated cocktail.” The Modern Love column in translation, though, is a consistent hit every week.

“The important thing in all these teams is that we are not doing it from New York, and they aren’t all American: They’re from the places their audiences are from,” Rudoren said. “Their decisions are completely informed by the local news cycles, the local social media conversations, the local search terms. They are looking at the Times report with the lens of readers in those markets and those languages.”

At least that’s the bet being made by The Logic, the new Canadian subscription news outlet that soft-launches today. Modeled in large part after Silicon Valley news site The Information, its focus will be on the innovation economy and its impacts across business, policy, culture, and more. The site in beta will offer a free, curated 4 p.m. email briefing and an initial paywalled offering of two reported feature stories per week — though the editorial ideas and business model underpinning the site have been percolating for some time.

“I got advice early on that you’ve got to be passionate about what you’re creating as a business, and there’s nothing I’m more passionate about than the fourth industrial revolution,” David Skok, The Logic’s CEO and editor-in-chief, told me ahead of the launch. (Think nanotech, Internet of Things, self-driving cars, robotics, AI, wearables, and yes, even blockchain — the deep integration of technology into our everyday lives.)

Skok, a 2012 Nieman Fellow and a former top digital editor at The Toronto Star and The Boston Globe, said The Logic emerged out of a perfect storm of upheaval and layoffs in Canadian journalism and the meteoric takeover of the innovation economy — the Ubers, the Amazons, the cryptocurrency startups, the AI developments — in people’s daily lives. The stories will be Canada-specific, but “there’s nothing that prevents us from pulling that lens back, for what we’re reporting on to be of interest in Toronto as well as in Helsinki.” (Skok mentioned planned coverage, for instance, of a downtown Toronto “smart cities” project spearheaded by Google parent Alphabet’s initiative Sidewalk Labs.)

“I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, but have often felt hamstrung by traditional sections,” Skok said. “Is it a tech story? Is it a business and tech or policy and politics story, is it a cultural story? Well, it’s actually all the above: The impact of technology on the cognitive, economic, and political ways we live is quite transformative.”

The Logic, a startup itself trying to feel out an unsteady Canadian ecosystem for journalism, will start with five full-time staff (Skok, Sean Craig, Catherine McIntyre, Zane Schwartz, and Amanda Roth) as well as a contributing editor based in San Francisco (Julia Scott), and two interns (Hanna Lee and Caroline Mercer). It’s supported currently by investment from friends and family and without major VC funding or any institutional investors. The price of a full subscription will be $300 a year — from anywhere in the world — though maybe down the line The Logic will introduce pricing tiers, Skok said. The first group of paying subscribers will be designated a part of “The Logic Council.” The site is committed to staying advertising-free. From Skok’s welcome email:

Please join us, and other Canadians committed to the country’s future, by subscribing to The Logic. We also hope you’ll spread the word by sharing our articles and discussing our coverage. In return for your investment, we commit to working as hard as we can to produce reporting that is consistently engaging, factual and fair. Reporting that serves you, not advertisers. As with most startups, we are entering the world in beta. Our growth and success depends on your support. By subscribing early, you will be providing us with the operating capital we need to invest in longer-term investigations. With more subscribers, we will hire more reporters.

As an early subscriber, you will also join The Logic Council, a membership community of service-minded leaders that, facilitated through our journalism, will aim to move our country forward through exclusive events and discussions on the issues that matter in Canada’s innovation economy.

Skok is betting there are enough Canadian (and Canada-interested) readers willing to support the low-volume, high-quality type of business publication The Logic wants to be. He said there’ve been a few other twinkles of journalism innovation in Canada lately, despite a rough past decade. A national report published last year called The Shattered Mirror estimated that a third of Canadian journalism jobs have been lost since 2010. The most recent Reuters Institute Digital News Report found Canada ranked near the bottom of the countries it studied for proportion of people paying for online news.

“I firmly believe that at this moment in time, for all the reasons many others have already documented, people are willing to pay for subscriptions in a way they weren’t just a short time ago,” Skok said. “You hear all the time that Canadians won’t pay for news online, but the thing is, many of them are paying for news from U.S.-based organizations.” As part of its global push for digital subscribers, The New York Times has been making a land grab in Canada and seemingly found success. Subscription sports site The Athletic has a profitable operation in Toronto and sites in six other Canadian cities.

The Logic is looking to double its audience size every year, which, according to Skok, is a lower target figure than media watchers might assume (he didn’t share specific numbers) because “our cost structure is so low” (WordPress for production, Piano for the paywall, contractors for the site design). For many legacy media companies, over half of their revenue often goes towards production and distribution, and far less than half towards the actual newsroom and supporting reporting, he estimates. The Logic aims to spend upwards of 70 of its revenue on its newsroom.

“We believe Canadians will want to support journalism. There hasn’t been a true business publication for Canada, a totally new one — there’s a lot of great work from already very established outlets — in almost 20 years. For me, I think we can play a role in filling a tremendous void,” Skok said. “Our target reader is someone who is willing and engaged enough to want to constructively disrupt the status quo. The makeup of Canada has changed dramatically over the last 10 to 20 years, and I believe there’s a whole generation of Canadians who’ve grown up and don’t see the way we’ve always done things the way we should be doing them now. Our hope is that we can convene and facilitate conversations among all those people.”

The bet: If you’re still reading a print newspaper in the 2010s, you’ve probably been doing it your entire adult life, and it’s a habit you don’t want to break. So rather than chase marginal readers, as papers did in the 1990s and early 2000s — “Let’s start a new weekly feature just for these young Gen X types!” — publishers pivoted to soaking their core readers for all their worth. Fewer subscribers but at a higher price meant roughly stable revenue.

But man oh man are newspapers testing that principle! Our hometown Boston Globe, an unusually expensive paper for a long time, is going through the roof, according to Don Seiffert in the Boston Business Journal:

The priciest regional daily newspaper in the U.S. is about to get pricier, with as much as an 80 percent increase possible for some home delivery subscribers…

A customer service representative at the Boston Globe’s subscription phone center told a Business Journal reporter Tuesday that the company is planning to increase its seven-day-a-week home delivery cost, after all discounts have expired, to $25.90 per week for subscribers in the Boston metro area.

That would add up to $1,347 a year to get a Globe on your doorstep every morning. (Or not get one, depending on delivery exigencies.) That would make the Globe the most expensive paper in the country, by some margin. The New York Times took some heat a year ago for announcing it would raise seven-day delivery in some parts of the country to $1,066 a year.

7-day home delivery of @nytimes in Ohio will now cost over $1,000 a year https://t.co/82kF3oPKeu pic.twitter.com/8pVF5i7BGN

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 1, 2016

This could well end up revenue-positive for the Globe. After all, it already has a super-expensive digital subscription (which tops out at $360 a year, again higher than the Times), it’s got an unusually attractive market, and it’s still a better paper than most of its competitor metros.

Plus, pushing people from print to digital doesn’t carry as absurd a revenue burden as it used to — the margins are certainly better on a digital sub than on trucking dead trees to people’s homes. And managing a large-scale shift in that direction — and reaping the huge production savings that would come with it — is in many ways the primary strategic task of American newspapers going forward.

But as more and more older readers grow proficient with their tablets and smartphones, it might also be wise not to give your remaining subscribers too many “Wait, I’m paying what to take the paper?” moments. And an 80 percent jump in cost certainly seems like something people will notice.

The $3 million, three-month-long pilot brings in 13 metropolitan newsrooms: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Omaha World-Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Tennessean, and Newsday.

These publishers will gather in person once a month, complete weekly trainings on digital subscription marketing, and design their own project for putting the trainings in action (supported by grant funding). But additional newsrooms across the country will also get access to some of the strategies through the Lenfest Institute, the Local Media Consortium (1,600 individual publications), Local Media Association (3,000 newspapers, TV stations, digital news sites, and radio stations), and the News Media Alliance (2,000 news organizations).

“The Accelerator has been designed by publishers for publishers,” Jim Friedlich, the Lenfest Institute’s executive director, said.

Of note: The News Media Alliance also just formed a political action committee to push U.S. lawmakers to focus on the “news media business and newsgathering interests” on behalf of the trade group’s members. Those interests indubitably include vying for audience and advertising dollars against Facebook and Google — as Facebook encourages publishers toward subscriptions in the accelerator.

“We’re saying, ‘Thank you, but we’re not there yet,” said NMA president and CEO David Chavern, in response to Facebook’s efforts.

Media heads have called for regulators to take a closer look at Facebook and other platforms. “In a Google and Facebook world, monetization of digital and mobile continues to be more difficult than we would have expected or liked,” CNN’s Jeff Zucker said yesterday. “I think we need help from the advertising world and from the technology world to find new ways to monetize digital content, otherwise good journalism will go away.”

Axios’ Sara Fischer pointed out that these “increased calls for regulation to curb the dominance of Google and Facebook make it easier for NMA to argue for repealing existing media competition laws that prevent news organizations from working together to negotiate better deals with major internet platforms.”

Mark Zuckerberg posited in January that if Facebook focuses on “concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together.” With the accelerator, Facebook is investing in that claim. The test for subscriptions in the Instant Articles included some local news organizations, such as The Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and then-Tronc properties the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as the (still-Tronc) Baltimore Sun.

Meanwhile, if you want to read up on recent subscriber behavior, a report was released Tuesday from the Media Insight Project from the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Drawing on more than 4,000 new subscribers to 90 local newspapers (though 65 percent of respondents were over age 65), the report found that 60 percent of respondents cited wanting access to local news as a factor in signing up. Twenty-five percent of respondents followed the news organization on social media before subscribing. Another key finding:

Print and digital subscribers are different. Digital subscribers in this study tend to be younger, male, and more educated than print readers. Digital readers are more often attracted by good coverage of a particular topic than are print readers (38 percent vs. 25 percent), and by noticing especially useful or interesting content (47 percent vs. 36 percent). Half of digital subscribers are triggered to subscribe by hitting a paywall meter, and they are more likely than print readers to be motivated by a desire to support local journalism (38 percent vs. 29 percent).

For the past couple of years, the Journal — home to one of journalism’s oldest paywalls — has been testing different ways to allow non-subscribers to sample its stories — refining a subscription prediction model that allows it to show different visitors, who have different likelihoods of subscribing, different levels of access to its site.

Non-subscribed visitors to WSJ.com now each receive a propensity score based on more than 60 signals, such as whether the reader is visiting for the first time, the operating system they’re using, the device they’re reading on, what they chose to click on, and their location (plus a whole host of other demographic info it infers from that location). Using machine learning to inform a more flexible paywall takes away guesswork around how many stories, or what kinds of stories, to let readers read for free, and whether readers will respond to hitting paywall by paying for access or simply leaving. (The Journal didn’t share additional details about the score, such as the exact range of numbers it could be. I asked what my personal score was; no luck there, since the scores are anonymized.)

“I think back to maybe eight months ago, when we were looking at all these charts with a lot of different data points. Now we’ve got a model that’s learned to a point where, if I get a person’s score, I pretty much know how likely they will be to subscribe,” Karl Wells, the Journal’s general manager for membership, told me when we spoke last week, with a Journal spokesperson on the call. “What we’ve found is that if we open up the paywall — we call it sampling — to those who have a low propensity to subscribe, then their likelihood to subscribe goes up.” (The Journal’s model looks at a window of two to three weeks.)

The Journal has found that these non-subscribed visitors fall into groups that can be roughly defined as hot, warm, or cold, according to Wells. Those with high scores above a certain threshold — indicating a high likelihood of subscribing — will hit a hard paywall. Those who score lower might get to browse stories for free in one session — and then hit the paywall. Or they may be offered guest passes to the site, in various time increments, in exchange for providing an email address (thus giving the Journal more signals to analyze). The passes are also offered based on a visitor’s score, aimed at people whose scores indicate they could be nudged into subscribing if tantalized with just a little bit more Journal content.

The cost of a subscription doesn’t vary based on a reader’s score. As of the publication of this story, the Journal has been offering $222 for a full year of digital all-access; there’s a student deal at $49 for a year.

“These passes play a role in making our subscription model more predictive,” Wells said, since now the Journal can collect additional data on the person who’s been hopping around the site for a while. “They also still put a value on our content, telling you we’re still a paid-for site, and that you’re being welcomed in as a guest to enjoy 24 hours of access.” A person willing to hand over an email is also more willing to eventually pay for a subscription. Other targeting possibilities open up as more people hand over their emails: the Journal could email a subscriber with a slightly higher propensity score a little more often, or recommend specific newsletters on topics they’ve already shown an interested in. (Passes are the least common of the site experiences a non-subscribed reader might see. They’ve been undergoing some technical upgrades, so if you’re hunting around for one right now you might not see one.)

In addition to guest passes, WSJ.com has publicly tested other ways for non-subscribers to try out its stories. In a feature introduced in August 2016, a Journal reporter who shared a link to a Journal story on social media could unlock that story for readers. The sharing option also used to extend to subscribers who shared a Journal story on social media, though that channel is in flux as the Journal moves completely towards its reader score-driven paywall system.

Wells and the spokesperson didn’t share any specific numbers around conversion rates or how many guest passes had been offered, pointing broadly to the organization’s latest subscriber numbers. The Journal now has 1,389,000 digital subscribers, according to News Corp’s latest earnings report, up from 1.08 million a year ago.

The Journal is hardly the first to use propensity modeling techniques — common in the app world for trying to convert users into paying users — to increase subscriptions. The Financial Times has for years been using reader data to more efficiently target readers with the offers that they are more likely to respond to (Ken Doctor wrote about these efforts for us as far back as 2010, here, here, and here.)

Scandinavian media giant Schibsted developed a prediction model that identifies, based on many signals, readers who are 3× to 5× more likely than average to buy a subscription, and then advertises offers to them differently. (Wells actually presented the Journal’s developments on this front at a paid-content summit hosted this month by Axel Springer in Berlin, at which news organizations like the Journal and Schibsted brands discussed how to improve digital subscription strategies.)

Wall metaphors were once sufficient for news organizations’ paywall strategies. A paywall could be deliberately “leaky” or “porous.” The gates could be fully opened for public emergencies like severe weather events or terrorist attacks. It could be a hard wall you could peek over, but with no gaps in between. That metaphor doesn’t quite work for the Journal anymore.

“If you think about paywalls broadly, there have been metered, freemium, and hard paywalls. Metered considers people who will want to read more than, say, five stories. Freemium assumes, this and not that is the type of content people will pay for. This is what we’ve tried to move on from,” Wells said when I tried to ask about whether certain types of articles were always more likely to get a reader to pay, and what other specific holes there were for WSJ.com. “Our model now is to flip that and start with the reader. The content you see is the output of the paywall, rather than an input.”

A previous version of this article stated that the Journal had done away with a previous exception allowing any Journal subscriber or journalist sharing a Journal story on social media to unlock the stories for non-subscribers who click through. A Journal spokesperson has clarified that because tests are ongoing in this area, the site experience may still vary for people with different propensity scores.

Google gave a preview of some features it’s been working on and thinking about regarding its support for subscription news organizations at its Digital News Initiative Summit on Thursday (on the same day it also rolled out a built-in adblocker in its Chrome browsers).

The search platform and digital advertising giant also announced that it would be opening its fifth round of DNI funding at the end of this month; the theme of the upcoming round will be diversifying revenue models.

Most relevant for the increasing number of news publishers focusing on getting readers to pay for subscriptions is how Google intends to treat publishers with paywalls. It’s already ended the longtime first-click-free loophole and has been working with a couple of major subscription news publishers on potential tools for publishers over the past year. Now we know a bit more about how subscription outlets might be treated within the Google Search environment:

Et voilà: Google presents a Paywall button to publishers, and it includes finding the texts in a special section "subscriptions" on Google Search #dni2018 pic.twitter.com/g2qz5L5twd

— Marcus Schwarze (@MarcusSchwarze) February 15, 2018

Significant: Google are evolving AMP and moving into the subscription management part of the stack (w/Play). Here's how it might work (javascript on clientside, APIs to manage entitlements and paywalls). #dni2018 pic.twitter.com/neVRFVArHD

— Adam Thomas (@datatheism) February 15, 2018

Google is talking about treating users differently when it knows a user is a subscriber to a given media site. I've been hoping for this for a couple of years. It's in essence a data exchange about users between platform and publisher. #dni2018

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 15, 2018

Google has been successful in encouraging publishers to get in line with its totally voluntary Accelerated Mobile Pages project, though, as Lucia Moses at Digiday points out, there’s quite a lot of pressure coming from how these faster, AMP-enabled pages are ranked in search results. Referral traffic from Google Search has been up more than 25 percent since January 2017, according to a recent Chartbeat analysis of its network — a 100 percent year-over-year increase in mobile search traffic from Google on AMP-enabled sites (traffic from search on desktop hasn’t increased at all). This week, Google also announced a new Snapchat Story–like format that it’s been testing with several large partner publishers.

After news ads, Google is moving into news subscriptions, Snapchat-type story building tools (AMP Stories), UCG tools, news butlers and voice news (Bulletin). Genuine concerns raised by publishers about who 'owns' the customer, and who gets the data. #dni2018 https://t.co/g2nw2nsPrM

— Danielle Batist (@daniellebatist) February 15, 2018

It also wants to work with local news outlets on its hyperlocal news-sharing app, Bulletin, which it’s testing Nashville and Oakland:

Google is experimenting Bulletin in the US. The pilot project allows anyone to publish local news stories and events. Google wants to work with local news organizations to help them find and publish some of the stories posted to Bulletin #DNI2018 https://t.co/oIGvQREpPF pic.twitter.com/XIXjdmvsdf

— Vincent Peyregne (@vincentpeyregne) February 15, 2018

Publishers were also asking for a lot more:

Partial list of problems/issues I've heard people at #dni2018 suggest Google should solve/make disappear

-lack of diversity in newsrooms
-polarized political debate (include fact there is a demand for sites like Breitbart)
-low trust in news
1/3

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) February 15, 2018

-ePrivacy regulation that'll challenge online advertising as we know it
-incremental pace of growth in people paying for news
-fact many people don't like sh*t ads that slow & bloat websites, and sometimes block them
-"fake news" regulation potentially restricting free speech
2/3

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) February 15, 2018

-slow pace of innovation in many European news orgs
-limited investment available to journalism start-ups in many European countries.

I'm sure I've missed some.

Google can do much. But news industry, journalistic profession, & Europe also needs to own some of these problems 3/3

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) February 15, 2018

By all means, demand away! But always be wary before jumping into experiments with platforms like Google and Facebook. Campbell Brown’s candid response during this week’s Code Media conference was instructive on that front:

I think we have not done a great job in the past and we need to think about this differently going forward around setting expectations when we launch a test with a set of partners. It’s really thrash-y and really unsettling for people who are trying to have some stability so they can build a business…we have to be way more transparent and candid with publishers going in that this may not work out. And jump in with us if you’re ready for a big experiment that might not work!

Schibsted’s subscription-purchase prediction model, developed by the company’s data science team, has been in use at four of the group’s Norwegian sites since last year: national newspaper Aftenposten and regional titles Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenbladet and Fædrelandsvennen. The model, tested first at Aftenposten, predicts how likely readers who are already registered and logged into one of these sites are to buy a subscription, based on their browsing behavior and other activities.

“If we look back a bit, Schibsted has been in the print publishing business for more than 150 years, and we have operated free online news sites since 1995,” Eivind Fiskerud, Schibsted’s head of data and analytics for its Norwegian group, said. “It’s only the last four or five years that we have had user payments on our site. So this was a part of an effort to ramp up investment in digital growth.”

In addition to recording more reader behaviors, the prediction model gives the sites’ sales and marketing teams information they can use to target different groups of registered users with different digital subscription packages.

So far, the efforts seem to have paid off. Across the sites where it’s in use, the model has identified groups of readers 3× to 5× times more likely than average to buy a subscription. Sales staff at these news sites are then able to, for instance, target these specific registered users on Facebook with special subscription deals.

Data from Facebook campaigns showed that these targeted users were 22 percent more likely to subscribe when shown an ad linking to a paywalled article. Additionally, Schibsted’s marketing team spent an average of 35 percent less on Facebook advertising in trying to get each of these users to subscribe, compared to users that the model had pinpointed as less likely to subscribe.

Schibsted has always had a telemarketing strategy, calling registered news site users directly to offer subscription packages. In the dark about which users would be more likely to pay, the success rate for selling subscriptions over the phone was around 1 percent of all users contacted. When Schibsted’s marketers targeted the groups identified by its prediction model, that number rose to 6 percent.

Schibsted has the staff resources to devote to developing tools like its prediction purchase model. The company is one of Europe’s largest media groups, with leading news titles in Norway and Sweden, as well as extensive classified-ad interests in 22 countries and 7,000 employees around the world. The company has developed other tools focused on tailoring experiences to readers, such as one for automating the homepage story placement process, where user behavior such as clicks, conversion rates, and length of reading time factor into how stories are arranged on the site for the individual reader (a tool it has tested at one of its Swedish news outlets, Svenska Dagbladet, and at Aftenposten).

Norway’s Aftenposten has approximately 100,000 digital subscribers as of January. Digital subscriptions to the regional news titles Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad, and Fædrelandsvennen bring Schibsted’s total count in Norway to 160,000. The company is aiming for 200,000 subscriptions across all these sites in 2018. (Norway’s population is just 5.2 million — making that scale all the more impressive.)

“What we didn’t really know before this project was how user behavior on the site relates to purchasing subscriptions. So that was unknown territory for us: What they are doing on the site, and what are the characteristics and patterns of those users who end up wanting to buy a subscription,” Fiskerud said. “Trying to crack that, and predict behavior, was the main business problem we had wanted to solve for.”

The prediction model is based on an algorithm that has been trained to identify the browsing behaviors of registered site users that go on to subscribe. It now takes between ten and 15 variables into account when determining a reader’s likelihood of subscribing, according to Ciarán Cody-Kenny, who worked on the model as part of Schibsted’s data science team.

Signals include straightforward factors such as a reader’s frequency of visits and the number of articles they clicked on, and other broader behaviors such as the number of devices used to access the site, past subscription history, and the proportion of weekend visits (which correlate with a higher likelihood to subscribe).

The data science team set the observational period, during which the model they were building analyzed registered users’ behaviors, at 14 days, after some experimentation. The data is stored as a shared list of user IDs and individual scores based on a user’s calculated propensity to take out a subscription, which the sales and marketing teams can then access and use in their own workflows.

“We started off with four weeks of data, but reduced to two weeks following a per-week analysis of some of the variables which showed that the fourth week — the last week — in the period had the strongest signal,” Cody-Kenny said. “Which makes sense, I think: Your most recent behavior is most predictive of your propensity to purchase next week.”

Ability to apply the prediction model across all Schibsted sites was an important aspect of the project right from the start, Cody-Kenny said. (So far, the company hasn’t implemented the prediction model at any of its other major news sites in Norway and Sweden, including Verdens Gang and Aftonbladet, one of the biggest news brands in Sweden, both of which combine free and premium access journalism.)

“Being able to replicate the process across these publishers was quite important for us. We approached this with a ‘nail it, then scale it’ attitude,” he said. “It’s somewhat inefficient if each of our publishers builds their own process from scratch. If we can build it once and prove the value for one site initially, then easily roll it out to others, we are saving on effort.”

The success of the prediction model so far has drawn some attention in the industry, and other media groups have asked about licensing the tool. For now though, selling tech built in-house commercially, à la The Washington Post with its Arc Publishing system, is not on the immediate horizon for Schibsted, according to Fiskerud.

“We’re focused on learning and using it to drive our own subscriptions and growth,” he told me.

The company still needs to collect more data on its overall effectiveness. But Fiskerud said that in-house technologies, built by and for news organizations, can help newsrooms gain more useful insight into audience behavior at a time when any owned data can be critical for publishers — even if this may be a level of marketing-data sophistication that other sectors, such as e-commerce, arrived at earlier.

“The importance of having control over our own data, and knowing who the user is, and building a deeper relationship with our subscribers is really key to surviving in journalism,” he said.

Block Club Chicago’s Kickstarter launched at 7 a.m. CT on Tuesday and within 24 hours had already blown past its $25,000 goal. As of Thursday morning, it had raised $116,047 from nearly 2,000 backers. That money will help jumpstart the organization, which officially launches in April, but the cash and cryptocurrency coming from the journalism-focused marketplace Civil is giving Block Club (the name is no relation to the blockchain, but rather to a Chicago community tradition) its legs — no billionaire benefactors required this time.

“We wanted to focus on neighborhoods and we wanted to have a membership model,” said Jen Sabella, Block Club’s director of strategy and the former deputy editor and social media director of DNAinfo Chicago. “We didn’t get to do it our way at DNA, at least on the business side. So we said, ‘Let’s just do it our way now.'”

“Our strategy since day one toward our goal of building a marketplace for sustainable journalism is to introduce a guiding methodology…focused on local, investigative, and policy” reporting, said Matt Coolidge, co-founder of Civil. “To tap into arguably the most respected network of local journalists in America’s third largest city feels like a no-brainer in that sense.”

Block Club’s roots come from the ashes of DNAinfo, a news organization comprised of reporters based in the neighborhoods of Chicago and New York founded in 2009 by Joe Ricketts, who made his fortune through TD Ameritrade. DNAinfo’s bread and butter was embedding reporters in specific neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods, building trust and telling hyperlocal stories that larger news outlets in the city might overlook — but ones that matter to the neighborhood readers. Sabella said she pitched a membership-driven model to Ricketts in 2014 to no avail; DNAinfo relied on online advertising. When Ricketts unceremoniously shut down the operation in November, he cited a tough-to-crack business model as the cause (some noted that it was also a week after the New York side had voted to unionize). “DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure,” he wrote in the message that initially replaced the two websites.

But DNAInfo had never tried asking readers to pay.

“At DNA, people would call us and say, ‘We don’t want you to go away, what can we do to give you money?’ And we were like, ‘Um, buy an ad?’ That’s the only option people had,” Sabella said. She, former DNAinfo managing editor Shamus Toomey, and former DNAinfo senior editor Stephanie Lulay — now Block Club’s editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively — brainstormed other options to bring DNAinfo’s local news mission back to life and were approached by advocates from venture capitalists to nonprofits to Civil.

“We did some math after one of these venture capitalist guys came to us and said if you had three percent of your audience subscribe, you guys would have been completely profitable. We looked at that number and we were just like, ‘Holy shit,'” Sabella explained. “We were angry because we never tried it at DNA, but also we knew we could do this.”

Block Club Chicago is structured as a nonprofit newsroom drawing on reader subscriptions for sustainability (they’re eyeing $5 a month — “less than that last cocktail you really didn’t need at happy hour,” their Kickstarter notes) and Civil’s blockchain for posterity. They’re also considering philanthropic funding for special projects and events for subscriber engagement and community building. The blockchain not only allows for subscribers to contribute in whichever cryptocurrency they desire, but also gives the newsroom a speculative stake in the currency that has a chance of increasing in value, as my colleague Ricardo Bilton explained in our previous coverage:

Built on top of blockchain (the same technology that underpins bitcoin), Civil promises to use the technology to build decentralized marketplaces for readers and journalists to work together to fund coverage of topics that interest them, or for those in the public interest. Readers will support reporters using “CVL” tokens, Civil’s cryptocurrency, giving them a speculative stake in the currency that will — hopefully — increase in value as more people buy in over time. This, Civil hopes, will encourage more people to invest in the marketplaces, creating a self-sustaining system that will help fund more reporting.

Bonus points for the battle-wounded DNAinfo reporters who “started sobbing” when Ricketts took down the website and their work, Sabella said: Civil helps the news organizations store their work in the blockchain technology, making it impenetrable to deletion.

“It’s basically a Wayback Machine, but just for [our publication],” Maria Bustillos, one of the journalists who partnered with Civil last year, told Ricardo. “That thing is not able to be shut off unless someone shuts off the Internet itself. That alone makes this worth it for me.”

Bustillos leads one of what Coolidge and Civil CEO Matthew Iles hope will be 15 newsrooms, which now includes Block Club Chicago, on their platform at the token’s launch in April, supporting as many as 100 to 150 journalists. Civil has a total pool of $1 million issued in combined grants of U.S. dollars and commitments to CVL tokens, and each newsroom receives a portion. (They’re still accepting applications for partner newsrooms.) “We’re going to be as good as the quality of journalists we can attract and sustain,” Coolidge said.

With the initial funding from Civil, Block Club Chicago has hired five reporters — four from DNAinfo Chicago and one other local reporter with a strong following in Chicago’s South Side. Four will be assigned to specific neighborhood groupings like DNAinfo’s model, with one special projects and multimedia reporter. When they were informed of the blockchain protection of their work, “their faces lit up,” Sabella said. All the past work from the DNAinfo reporters they hire will be shared on Block Club’s website as well, since the reporters got the rights to their own content as part of the union agreement before its demise. Plus, Civil head of newsroom strategy Nicole Bode worked at DNAinfo as an editor until July 2017, which helped to assuage concerns from the still-smarting reporters.

Explaining blockchain to your reporters is one thing, though. Explaining it to your not-necessarily-tech-savvy readers of local news is another.

“At first [when hearing Civil’s pitch], I was like ‘Whaaat, crypto? I don’t know about this,'” Sabella said. “I remember when we launched DNA in Chicago [in 2012] and people were like, ‘You don’t have a print product?’ We’re not San Francisco or New York and I don’t know how many people are up on the blockchain stuff. But it’s actually a surprising amount of people who have been excited about it.”

“There will be several ways for people to support us, including credit card payments and old-fashioned donations to back our cause…. We’ll work with Civil to best explain how people can engage with us in that marketplace,” Toomey, the editor-in-chief, wrote in an email. “But the bottom line is, for our readers, the site will function much like existing platforms people are already familiar with. We’ll reach them via email newsletters, social media and our website.”

The blockchain aspect doesn’t appear to be scaring off too many former DNAinfo fans. The extra fundraising is “absolutely at the discretion of the newsroom,” Iles said. “It won’t be necessary to do something through Kickstarter or an external funding apparatus. We think Civil will be the hub for all that kind of activity” once the platform launches this spring.

But the crowdfunding support definitely doesn’t hurt.

“The support from our audience has been incredible and we are very grateful to them. But in order to keep us operational for more than a year while we rebuild our audience and subscription base, Civil’s support is invaluable,” Sabella said.

“The fact that [the Kickstarter supporters] probably have no idea what blockchain is, is such a great thing for us,” Coolidge said. “We’ve built our product in a very deliberate manner where you absolutely don’t have to have any working knowledge of blockchain if you just want to go in there to access good journalism…but it’s also a great way to begin that conversation” about blockchain.

“The success that we’re seeing with Block Club Chicago, just in its first few hours, has made us very confident about where the model can go beyond just that city,” Iles said.

A new report from from Elizabeth Hansen at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Emily Goligoski at the Membership Puzzle Project offers more clarity. A product of hundreds of conversations with newsroom managers, reporters, and even members themselves, the 121-page report offers a lot of insight into what makes an effective reader revenue model work, and a framework for how news organizations can implement their own.

The report was written to give news organizations a clearer picture of “the limitations and sheer amount of effort that goes into developing reader revenue models,” said Goligoski. “We obviously want to shine a light for people new to the space, but we also want to give them a realistic picture of what the whole process takes.”

Here are a few of the takeaways from the report, which you can find in full here.

— Members don’t really care about tote bags or other swag. Talking to dozens of members of news sites’ membership programs, Hansen and Goligoski found that few people said that they were enticed to sign up by physical perks like tote bags or t-shirts. Instead, many said that they were mostly interested in supporting the cause of the organization itself. This is an appeal that many news organizations have leaned into. The Guardian, for example, said that its shift to an “emotional, service-based request” helped boost its membership efforts to 800,000 supporters in the 18 months after launch.

— There’s still no perfect community management system designed for news organizations. Running a membership- or donation-based business involves a lot of complexities when it comes to customer data. Not only must sites collect basic data about their users (email addresses, payment information, etc), but they also have to match that data with specific messaging campaigns and even specific stories to determine what is most effective at driving subscriptions.

While the lackluster state of news-focused customer resource management products is what helped birth the News Revenue Hub (which we covered last year), there are still some gaps in the market, said Goligoski. “I was surprised and disappointed to see how ill-served people are with the current set of CRM, which to me suggest a major market need. The amount of hacked-together solutions that we’ve seen people come up with has been a little shocking.”

— Membership programs without content-engagement strategies aren’t really memberships. One of the core arguments made in the report is that membership models require some degree of back-and-forth engagement with members. Some of these models can be “light touch” or “thin,” with features such as reader forms and member-only newsletters, while others are more “high touch,” with more pronounced interactions. Some publications’ membership programs, on the other hand, “are membership in name only and operate much more like subscription strategies, with little or no audience engagement,” Hansen and Goligoski write.

The report also stresses repeatedly that deep engagement with readers needs be a core part of membership products if they’re going to be successful. In concrete terms: “Sites such as De Correspondent in the Netherlands anticipate that its reporting staff will spend approximately one third to half of its working time in communication with readers.”

— Embracing membership models often requires a real culture shift. Despite the Internet’s ability to facilitate direct communication with readers, many reporters still cling to the pre-web ethos of speaking to readers rather than hearing from them. That’s slowly changing, especially at places like ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, but there’s still often an overall discomfort among reporters newly encouraged to break down the wall between them and their readers.

But one of the most challenging cultural shifts on this front isn’t how reporters talk to readers but how news organizations talk about themselves. “For most publications, this is a new muscle they have to build,” said Hansen. “They have to excel at telling their own story as a publication and as an organization. That’s been one of the things we’ve heard most that people have been wrestling with.”