Google News Initiative Reader Revenue Playbook

A reader revenue model is a business model in which some or all revenue comes from the direct financial support of readers. Over the past few years, a number of terms have emerged in reference to reader revenue models, including subscriptions, contributions, memberships, donations and micro-payments. Given that there are often different definitions across the industry on what each of these terms mean, we’ll begin by providing the definitions we’ll be using in the playbook.

There are a few variations on reader revenue models that we wanted to acknowledge here but will not cover in-depth.

While this is a playbook about how to approach digital reader revenue, this business model is not right for every news organization. Here are some questions to help determine if reader revenue is right for your news organization:

Later in this playbook, we’ll share some tips on strengthening content, selecting value added benefits and effectively marketing and positioning your memberships to make the case for reader revenue to your readership.

If digital reader revenue is right for your news organization, the next step is to choose a model. Here are some factors to consider when choosing between a digital subscription and contribution model.

Publishers we’ve worked with highlight the factors below as critical to building and strengthening a reader revenue model.

At this point, you should have a preliminary understanding of your reader revenue opportunity and some of the key metrics that drive it. The next step in building your foundation is understanding your audience. Later in this playbook, we’ll take a look at additional metrics that provide a more nuanced understanding of reader revenue and provide the opportunity to see how your news organization is currently performing on those metrics against industry benchmarks.

The simplest way to understand your readers’ needs is to ask them. Across our News Consumer Insights engagements, U.S. Subscriptions Lab and our Latin America Contributions Lab, surveys were crucial to helping news organizations refine and hone the value proposition of their reader revenue model.

In News Consumer Insights Engagements with BuzzFeed (US) and The New Yorker (US), both news organizations effectively used surveys to inform their marketing and the reader revenue benefits they offered. Buzzfeed, for instance, launched a survey with readers which indicated that there was an appetite for supporting a memberships model and that a significant portion of respondents didn’t expect value-added benefits for their support.

Across our Contributions Labs, interviews and surveys were critical in informing publishers' decisions on the price readers were willing to contribute at, messaging to employ in positioning the memberships program, and benefits that should be packaged. Later in the playbook, we’ll share some of the memberships programs those insights helped build.

The News Revenue Hub found that surveys can be as important for influencing journalistic and product decisions as they can be for developing membership programs. For the Honolulu Civil Beat (US), survey responses showed that contributors were interested in discussing local public affairs with the newsroom staff, which led to the development of a monthly coffee series. For the Cap Times in Madison, Wisconsin (US), surveys showed that respondents preferred a daily morning newsletter instead of a newspaper on their doorsteps, which led the newsroom to dedicate resources to developing their existing daily newsletter. As a result, readers have become more engaged, the email list has grown, and the newsletter has helped increase contributions.

In the GNI Europe Subscriptions Lab, Dennik N (SK) used surveys to better understand why premium members chose to subscribe. 69% of premium members chose “I want to support Dennik N” as the most frequent answer, which led the news organization to emphasize support for journalism in their marketing materials, in contrast to their previously planned strategy of emphasizing benefits.

Below we provide a set of questions you can ask to get structured feedback that can inform the value proposition of your reader revenue model. In particular, we’ll focus the conversation on the sorts of questions you can ask in surveys or interviews to get a better understanding of readers’ needs across some key dimensions:

Across each category, be sure to tailor these questions to help answer specific questions your news organization might have. In deep dive interviews, you’ll have the opportunity to have conversations with more nuance and depth. You can run Google Surveys for free across your site and properties. We include 19 questions below to provide an exhaustive list of what you could ask your readers. However, we recommend limiting the survey to just the questions that are essential for your news organization to ensure that more readers complete the survey.

Here are some of the questions to grow your understanding of the alignment between your current product and content mix and how readers want to receive news:

Here are two questions to include in your survey:

In the GNI Latin America Contributions Labs, conducted with 24 publishers across the region, participating publishers surveyed readers and asked them to rank the three benefits that would most likely encourage them to contribute or subscribe:

While the list above is exhaustive, we recommend limiting the number of benefits you offer in your survey or interview guide to those your news organization would like to and are able to offer. Limiting the number of choices to nine or fewer can also prevent respondents from being overwhelmed with options. As we’ll discuss later, we recommend including value added benefits in your membership program only if you can provide them without straining existing resources.

You can also use surveys to get a deeper understanding of the sorts of messages and marketing that might resonate most with your readers. In the GNI Contributions Labs, news organizations included the following question and answers in their surveys:

Understanding which messages most resonate with your respondents can provide a deeper understanding of what your readers value about your news organization. That understanding can help inform your marketing and messaging strategy, including the copy and language you use in promotional material and calls to action.

You can also use the survey to get a better understanding of whether your readers have a good experience on your website. Here are a few potential questions:

Below you’ll find additional materials from some of our partners, which will provide other helpful tips to keep in mind as you develop your surveys and interview guides:

Understanding your current readers’ behaviors on your website can also provide important information to refine your value proposition.

If you have Google Analytics, you can use News Consumer Insights to get a deeper understanding of reader behavior in the following ways:

• Your readers are categorized into three audience segments:
  • Casual readers that visit your site one to two times per month.
  • Loyal readers that visit three to 14 times per month.
  • Brand lovers that visit 15 or more times per month.
• For each audience segment, you’ll see the average page views per user, average session duration, sessions per user and page views per session.
• Based on this data, the tool provides a user value score for each segment and benchmarks for how publishers are performing against similar-sized news organizations.

News Consumer Insights contains critical information on the sources of your traffic online, your page speed performance and the effectiveness of your videos in driving reader engagement. The tool also includes tips and best practices around user experience, design and page speed. In the section on optimizing the user funnel, we’ll call out tips and best practices from News Consumer Insights that can help improve your performance across a number of core reader revenue metrics.

Across the GNI Subscriptions and Contributions Labs, news organizations interested in understanding the differences between readers at different levels of engagement included an additional survey or interview question that enabled them to map survey respondents to News Consumer Insights segments:

By adding this question, publishers were able to develop profiles of the average casual reader, loyal reader and brand lover in a reader revenue context. Some used that data to inform the development of different tranches of membership, mapped onto the needs of each of the audience segments or to focus on providing benefits designed for loyal readers and brand lovers. Others eliminated survey responses from casual readers altogether when sizing their reader revenue opportunity, given that it would be unlikely that readers with such low levels of engagement would become subscribers or contributors.

With information your news organization has collected through surveys, interviews and analytics, you should be able to begin identifying opportunities to strengthen your value proposition below. Be as specific as possible when describing what your readers want, what you currently offer and identifying the gap. This will enable you to meaningfully address that gap through specific tactics and measures.

The core of a successful reader revenue strategy is providing an experience that readers are willing to either pay for or financially support. That begins with providing quality journalism and an experience aligned with your readers’ needs and expectations.

Selecting the right value-added benefits for your memberships program can be an important component of a successful reader revenue model.

For instance, Frontier Myanmar (MM), a news organization Google supported through the Asia-Pacific Innovation Challenge was able to launch a successful membership program launch, in part due to the membership benefits they selected in response to reader feedback (i.e., a 50% discount on the print edition, access to a daily briefing, a Myanmar-language media monitor email and invitations to monthly events).

It is important to stress here that the most important priority for news organizations should be on deepening relationships with readers. We encourage news organizations to think of benefits as another tool in their arsenal to deepen relationships with readers they serve, but it shouldn’t happen at the expense of compromising the quality of the journalism they produce.

In their experience working with publishers, both Membership Puzzle Project and News Revenue Hub stress that benefits should never be seen as a substitute for developing strong relationships with readers. Newsrooms must provide high-quality journalism that readers value. Benefits work best when they reinforce the core value proposition of news organizations (i.e., ability to comment on articles or other content, talk to journalists and participate in events on key topics).

Research from the last few years consistently indicates that readers are willing to contribute when publishers provide the right calls to action.

News Revenue Hub found that 65% of survey respondents were willing to contribute as long as they were either asked to contribute or educated on the value of contributing. During the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic, clients of News Revenue Hub raised U.S.$4 million from their readers.

In the 2018 Reuters Digital Report, 22% of those surveyed say that they would be prepared to donate to a news organization if they felt that organization could not cover its costs in other ways. Additionally, they said they might be more willing to give if they were educated about publishers’ needs. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center study funded by Google, 71% of respondents believe that local media news organizations are doing well financially, suggesting a significant disconnect between perception and reality. Fourteen percent of respondents said they had paid for local news in the past year.

Both studies indicate that an important component of marketing and positioning your reader revenue model is clearly educating your consumers on the value you provide and why your news organization is worthy of your support. We’ve seen publishers use in-house banner ads to convey their purpose and relevance, use paragraphs at the end of every article to remind readers of their mission or voice their values by focusing editorial topics on specific campaigns. The News Revenue Hub has seen success by putting a conditional call-to-action at the top of every newsletter: one version displays a thank-you message to current donors, and the other uses mission-driven language to ask everyone else for a monthly donation. Other news organizations like The New York Times (US) in their “The Truth is...” campaign and The Washington Post (US) in their “Democracy Dies in Darkness” campaign used brand campaigns to clearly articulate their values as a news organization and why it was important for readers to support them.

The last factor — differentiation — is particularly significant in the context of an industry where information can quickly become commoditized. Here are a few examples from news organizations that participated in the Latin America Contributions Lab:

In a News Consumer Insights engagement conducted with BuzzFeed News (US), survey results were used to shape message tone and content. As a result of their data-driven approach, BuzzFeed News was able to launch a new revenue stream with an average U.S.$20 contribution in only a few months.

At this point, we’ve discussed some of the key decisions you will need to make about your product and content, value-added benefits for your membership program, and marketing and positioning for your reader revenue model. Now, it’s time to think about ways you can make it easier for your readers to become subscribers or contributors by optimizing your user funnel.

When the average news organization needs to convert between 3% and 5% of their reader base to be successful, every optimization a news organization can make to simplify or smooth the user journey to subscriptions or contributions can be crucial to long-term success. To put it differently, being able to convert one additional reader out of every 100 that visits your website can be the difference between a successful reader revenue strategy and an unsuccessful one.

Getting that right means focusing on four areas:

• Growing your readers
• Engaging your readers
• Converting your readers into subscribers or contributors
• Retaining your subscribers or contributors

In this section, we’ll provide:

• A view of the key metrics you should focus on across each part of the funnel
• Relevant target benchmarks for those metrics (where available)
• Tactics you can use to improve your performance across those metrics
• Case studies of news organizations across the world who’ve had success

Growing your reader base (or top of the funnel) is an important part of creating a meaningful reader revenue business. Increasing the size of your reader base provides your news organization the flexibility to convert readers at a lower percentage and still yield meaningful reader revenue.

Across our GNI Subscriptions and Contributions Labs, investing in improving engagement with readers has routinely been identified as one of the most significant enablers of a successful reader revenue model.

Beyond the metrics listed above, many news organizations have developed their own composite engagement metrics. In the GNI Europe Subscriptions Lab, FT Strategies has worked closely with publishers to develop an RFV metric (Recency/Frequency/Volume), similar to the one that the Financial Times uses. The Independent (UK) developed an “APV” metric, which combined active days, consumption of premium content and volume, as an indicator of a propensity to subscribe; the larger the score, the higher the likelihood of a reader subscribing. For the FT Strategies, the creation of composite metric enables a singular focus for a news organization and a common language across product, editorial and marketing teams.

While all news organizations need to focus on growing and engaging readers, the conversion and monetization metrics described above are of specific concern to news organizations with reader revenue models. Given the complexity of each metric, we’ll walk through each in detail in this section.

As we’ve discussed before, it is often more costly to acquire a new paying user than it is to retain an existing one. Your relationship with a subscriber or contributor doesn’t end with conversion. It’s crucial to remind your subscribers and contributors why they have a paying relationship with your journalism — effectively, why you’re essential. Like any relationship, keeping it strong and healthy requires care and attention over time.

The core metric to focus on for retention is churn rate: the percent of subscribers or contributors who end their paying relationship each month. We’ve included target benchmarks for retention from the GNI Subscriptions Labs -- which vary from 3% to 5%. For contributions, we do not provide a monthly churn rate target in part because a significant percentage of contributors provide one-time or annual donations. On average, News Revenue Hub observed that a little more than half of one-time contributors were retained for their client base from the prior year.

Some news organizations have developed their own customized metrics to measure churn. VLT (SE), a participant of the GNI Europe Subscriptions Lab, has developed a score specifically focused on predicting churn. The development of the metric allowed the news organization to identify pain points (i.e., subscribers receiving too many notifications), editorial priorities (i.e., women churning more frequently), and which reader segments to focus on.

Across both reader revenue models, there are a few tactics news organizations can use to retain their subscribers or contributors.

Now that we’ve taken a look at key metrics and tactics to improve performance across the funnel, you can use the User Funnel Diagnostic below to track your news organization’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Feel free to fill out the following columns where you have data available to track your current performance against benchmarks.

(Note: none of the data you input in the dashboard will be collected or stored.)

Improving your performance across these target metrics often requires investments in technology. Building software and processes that meet your business needs is a complex topic, and the solutions can vary drastically across regions and countries. To help news organizations understand what is available, we’ve asked participants in the GNI Reader Revenue Labs to compile a list of technology solutions that address their needs. It’s important to note here that the list below isn’t a complete set of solutions for each area, merely the ones that were used by publishers across GNI programs. In the catalog, we identify the systems publishers purchased, the role they play, and off-the-shelf solutions that are available.

If you’re a smaller organization looking to build out a reader revenue model, we recommend this piece from the Membership Puzzle Project, which discusses tech stack options, how to make decisions on investing in technology and what’s necessary to have as opposed to nice to have. As the article mentions, there are a few items you should be sure to explore good solutions for: a CRM (customer relationship management system), CMS (content management system), payment solution and an email newsletter management solution.

Across either contributions or subscriptions, consider whether software is:

• Open-source.
• Free.
• Off-the-shelf.

Investing in technology is critical for news organizations. However, making technology work for the specific needs of your news organizations can be even more important. If you don’t have a dedicated technology team (frontend, backend and full-stack developers), you might need to hire developers to perform specific functions. This could include, for instance, writing code for a third-party API to create a bridge between two systems or customizing an off-the-shelf solution to fit specific needs. For example, the News Revenue Hub built integrations that connect CRM, newsletter management and payment systems to optimize contributions, create more targeted messaging and automate common tasks.

The activities have so far helped you to:

• Size your reader revenue opportunity.
• Deeply understand your readers’ needs.
• Evaluate your product and content strategy in a reader revenue context.
• Select value added benefits for your membership program.
• Understand how to market and position your reader revenue model.
• Identify user funnel metrics where you’d like to improve and tactics to do so.

These activities are important steps for setting a strong foundation to launch a reader revenue model. For many publishers though, the turning point on their reader revenue journey was when the organization’s leadership set an ambitious long-term reader revenue goal, a vision it could use to energize and inspire the entire organization. In this section, we’ll discuss how to set that reader revenue goal and how to build a plan that can help your news organization orient toward it.

Specifically, we will discuss how to:

• Establish a long-term goal.
• Confirm the target metrics that enable you to achieve your reader revenue goal.
• Catalog tactics for achieving your target metrics.
• Identify experiments and create a project plan.

The full exercise enables news organizations to develop a framework that anchors operational activities in a strategic context and focuses the entire organization on achieving certain outcomes key to long-term success.

Earlier in the playbook, we discussed a market sizing exercise that your news organization can use to estimate reader revenue opportunity. That exercise was meant to help tether your news organization’s reader revenue objectives to what’s achievable over the next year. However, for many of the world’s most successful news organizations, setting long-term goals for their reader revenue models means setting an aspirational goal. Often, this has meant setting ambitious stretch goals that pushed the news organization beyond what it thought was possible. For The New York Times, achieving 10 million subscribers by 2025 has become a galvanizing goal for the entire company. For the Financial Times, the organization set a target of 1 million subscribers, which it was able to achieve one year ahead of schedule.

Set your news organizations’ reader revenue goal by assessing what your news organization needs the reader revenue business to be for long-term sustainability. You can quantify this goal as either the number of subscribers / contributors or the overall subscriptions or contributions revenue you drive. All other metrics you pursue should feed into this main goal.

How do you answer the following questions three years from now?

• How much revenue do you want to drive through reader revenue?
  • Some news organizations answer this by projecting their current revenue streams (e.g. advertising, reader revenue, events) over the next 3 years. Based on that outlook, they anchor a reader revenue goal to offset losses in other revenue streams. Other news organizations build the goal from evaluating their current market potential and the historical outlook of their business. News organizations interested in this approach can use our Opportunity Sizing tool.
• How many subscribers or contributors will you need to acquire to reach that goal?
• What percentage of your overall revenue will come from reader revenue?

In the GNI Europe Subscriptions Lab, FT Strategies used a similar framework referred to as a “North Star exercise” to create an holistic plan for growing a news organization’s reader revenue:

Given the tradeoffs news organizations often have to make in pursuing reader revenue goals, the articulation of a single north star metric was crucial for building full alignment across functions. In the GNI Europe Subscriptions Lab, FT Strategies worked closely with cross-functional project teams representing the business and newsroom sides of the organization to set an ambitious North Star Goal the entire organization -- with the support of senior leadership -- could galvanize around, and develop a framework linking the long term vision with a short-term experimental roadmap.

In this section, we’ll discuss how to identify the target metrics that can help your news organization reach its reader revenue goal. We’ll return to the opportunity sizing exercise that we used earlier in the playbook to size your reader revenue opportunity. This time, however, we’ll encourage you to use your news organization’s own data in the scenario tool to identify target metrics where you’re currently underperforming and target metrics with a significant impact on your reader revenue.

For those who haven’t launched a subscriptions or contributions model, we invite you to still fill out the model below with numbers that could make sense for your business to help refine your target metrics.

Let’s take a step back and take a look at the output of prior exercises from this playbook.

The exercises should have provided an emerging understanding of the set of tactics you’ll need to implement improved product and content, value added benefits for your membership program, marketing and positioning, user experience and your user funnel in a reader revenue context.

It’s time to map those tactics onto the target metrics your news organization will focus on.

Now that you’ve identified your tactics, you will need experiments to prove a hypothesis or substantiate a large investment.

Below, we share the approach used by FTI Consulting to structure experiments with news organizations in the GNI U.S. & Canada Subscriptions Lab.

The success of experiments hinge on developing clear objectives and clear ways to measure success. Those who take a data-driven approach, running experiments against a test group and a control group, can use experiments to strengthen their business case for recommending a particular change or making a long-term investment.

In the GNI US & Canada Subscriptions Lab, the Charleston Post & Courier implemented an experiment to test the impact of unlocking an article with email in an effort to increase their low percentage of registered or known users. The experiment allowed Post & Courier to capture hundreds of new emails with no discernible impact to site traffic.

In the GNI Latin America Subscriptions Lab, Mather Economics facilitated 20 tests to grow conversions, reduce churn, and identify content relevant for subscriptions. Some highlights from the tactical testing included launching a registration wall with Reforma and Nexo Jornal with minimal impact on traffic and recommending dynamic meter models and lower meter settings with five publishers, leading to millions of dollars in LTV.

Once you’ve confirmed the experiments you are interested in running, your next step is categorizing projects. Short-term projects require minimal investments and can be quick, easy wins you can use to galvanize your organization to deliver in the next three to six months. Long-term projects are more capital intensive and require additional investment before executing. Experiments to test unproven tactics will fall into the short-term projects category.