During WAN-IFRA’s recent Asian Media Leaders eSummit, Chartbeat’s Senior Director of Customer Education, Jill Nicholson, discussed their analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on global and regional media across coverage, traffic and referral sources....

WAN-IFRA, FTI Consulting and Google are announcing the launch of the APAC GNI Subscriptions Lab at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Leaders eSummit. The Lab is an intensive four-month program to help eight different news publishers from the Asia-Pacific region strengthen digital subscriptions...

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for the business side of the news media industry, what has been heartening is the increased attempts of publishers to directly reach out to their audiences through curated editorial formats.

Understanding the needs of their readers has long been important to news publishers who want to grow their audiences and convert casual readers into paying subscribers. As advertising income has largely evaporated in recent years, and even more so over the past few months, publishers are placing...

The third and fourth meetings in the timeline of the Tables Stakes programme are devoted to comparing participants’ progress: teams explain to one another how they are advancing toward their performance challenges, including their first wins along the way. London’s meeting was the third time the...

When news publishers talk about digital subscriptions, they often tend to focus on the volume, or the number, of digital subscribers they have or are trying to get, but for Mitch Pugh, Executive Editor of The Post and Courier in South Carolina, the crucial number around digital subscriptions is...

As part of its European Digital Media Awards competition this year, WAN-IFRA introduced a Members' Choice Award in the category of Best Paid Content Strategy. The three finalists showcased their successful strategies during a webinar last week.

The Hindu Group (THG), a 141-year-old brand, was the first English-language Indian newspaper to go digital in 1995. Armed with a critical mass of online readers and a user-friendly online payment infrastructure, the company implemented a soft paywall in February 2019, and a metered...

At the recent Digital Media India conference, Rohan Tiwary of Google Asia Pacific, offered updates on some of the company's ongoing efforts through their Google News Initiative, including training journalists and AMP, and also highlighted some of their data and subscription...

What do you do when subscriptions and advertising are not enough to sustain your newsroom? After obtaining nonprofit status, The Salt Lake Tribune can now be supported with tax-deductible donations, while an affiliated nonprofit foundation aims to support journalistic projects across the state...

About eight months ago, the German publishing house DuMont began using paid content at their Cologne-based news brands, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and Kölnische Rundschau. In this article, Carsten Groß, Managing Director at DuMont, offers some of their top takeaways to date.
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"Our primary acquisition driver today is our content," says Aftenposten's Sidney Glastad. "Our paywall is where we get about 70 percent of our web sales, and that makes it really important for us to understand what kind of content converts and how long people stay on different types of content....

With more than a million registered lawyers, millions of lawsuits, and thousands of law firms, the Brazilian society is very judicialised. Sensing a market opportunity, a group of journalists who previously worked for national media outlets came together in 2014 to launch JOTA, a news site...

The year 2019 was a period of slowdown around the globe. The impact was felt in the news media industry, which had already been going through a not-so-easy transition period from print to digital. Lower spend from advertisers, along with other factors such as reduced consumer spending and...

Dagens Nyheter in Sweden has undergone huge transformational change – overhauling its newsroom’s structure and culture, and making digital reader revenue a key component of not only its business model but its editorial strategy as well.

Berlingske Media Digital Director, Christian Stavik, describes at the WAN-...

Earlier this year, Belgium's Mediahuis group, which owns a variety of media properties in its home country as well as the Netherlands, acquired Dublin-based Independent News & Media, the leading newspaper and...

As reader habits have changed in Asia and elsewhere, the importance of print media as a source of news has declined in recent years. There is a need for news publishers to adapt to a new business model to sustain the...

UK-based journalism outlet Tortoise is placing its members at the centre of its editorial strategy, regularly inviting them into the newsroom to share their diverse experience and expertise.

A South African spends more money, in a lifetime, on communication than on health or education. The country has a high penetration rate of smart phones, which unfortunately does not translate to cheap data rates.

“The print media industry in India needs to reinvent the way we approach and onboard new readers,” said Pawan Agarwal, Deputy MD & CEO, DB Corp, India.

“We don't do anything without an audience opportunity and a revenue opportunity,” Robertson Barrett, President of Digital Media at Hearst Newspapers, told participants at WAN-IFRA's recent ...

The past 10 to 12 years have been tough for many local news publishers: print revenues have fallen; consumers are...

As The Atlantic ramps up its plans to launch a subscription model, the venerable American magazine has been restructuring its staffing units in order to better align its business model with readers' needs.

With more than 100 daily newspapers and related web sites spread across the United States, Gannett has the enviable luxury to test and tweak its evolving digital subscription strategy across its group.

Wendy Metcalfe is not your average editor-in-chief. For starters, not only does she oversee editorial operations, she’s also in charge of marketing and customer service – "essentially anything that touches the subscriber," she says.

Famed journalist Hu Shuli told attendees at WAN-IFRA's recent Publish Asia 2019 conference in Singapore they should always preserve and protect their core function of high-quality and hard-hitting journalism, no matter what business challenges they face.

As traditional revenue sources continue to decline and a major share of advertising revenue is claimed by tech giants, more publishers in Europe and the United States are turning to the subscription model, according to new research.

“Exclusivity is the single largest driver of subscriptions. If you are offering something that no one else has, it’s easier to convince someone to pay you for it,” says Rohin Dharmakumar, co-founder and CEO of The Ken.

The membership model has "revolutionary" potential for the future of media, says Sebastian Esser, publisher of Krautreporter and co-founder of a membership platform called Steady. The key is passion – the main reason people pay to join membership-based businesses, he says.

India's Ananda Vikatan has a long and rich history in print, but the publication has also been very active online, and launched a digital subscription model fairly early on, which quickly proved itself successful. 

As income from advertising has dwindled, more publishers are increasing their efforts to boost revenues from readers. The past year saw several high-profile publications putting content behind paywalls: Wired, The New Statesman, Vanity Fair, New York magazine...

“We plan to land on the moon in 2020, and be profitable solely with digital income,” says Gard Steiro, editor-in-chief and CEO of VG. “The easy way to achieve this is to lay off reporters, but we plan to have a newsroom of the same size in 2020 as we do today.”

Wijeya Newspapers (WNL) was established in 1979 and is Sri Lanka’s leading newspaper group. With a vision to be the most independent and socially responsible media group in the country, it has the highest annual turnover.

While newspaper paywalls remain relatively rare in Latin America, two papers there have achieved success with paid-content strategies: O Globo in Brazil and Clarín in Argentina.

In 2015, the Guardian had lost around 100 million pounds for the year, and despite having a huge readership, its future was looking bleak. Today, the company is rapidly approaching break-even, has broader reach than ever and has increased its endowment to more than 1 billion...

Reader engagement is a key metric in measuring brand loyalty. At the FT, the newsroom and commercial teams are united in their appreciation of the power of metrics and the data behind them.  

Three trends from the World Editors Forum's recent Study Tour visits to top newsrooms in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City.

Between 2012 and 2017, the Spanish news publisher El País recorded 68 percent growth (EBITDA). Those five years marked a period of sweeping change throughout the organisation, from a new newsroom to expanded global operations as well as a significant increase in video.

Building an escape room, launching a direct public offering (DPO) for direct reader investment, and renting a room on Airbnb: all ways newspapers are thinking outside the box to diversify their revenue stream. In this guest post, Mary-Katharine Phillips of Twipe says those ideas all provide...