This article was originally published on Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative website and is republished here with permission.
News organizations seeking to measure their websites’ success typically have focused on two metrics: pageviews and time spent on the site. But data collected and analyzed from the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index indicates that such an approach is misguided.
The data, collected from 106 outlets in various-sized markets, shows that the most important factor in trying to get people to pay for news is reader regularity. What’s more, increases in pageviews and time spent may actually have a negative impact on subscribers and revenues.
“This was a stunning finding for us, and first I didn’t believe it,” said Edward Malthouse, research director of the Medill IMC Spiegel Research Center. “But then we started to unpack it.”
The reason is rooted in a shifting revenue model. As advertising dollars have dried up, news organizations have become more reliant upon subscriptions to fund their journalism. To maximize that revenue, publications aim to add more subscribers and to retain the ones they have. What they want to avoid is losing readers through churn—the soft churn of subscribers who stop engaging with the site and the hard churn of those who cut off their payments altogether.
“We need to focus on subscriptions, and then we need to understand what drives retention: what gets people subscribed and keeps them there,” said Larry DeGaris, executive director of the Spiegel Research Center. “Not only is the finding that it’s regularity that drives retention and reduces churn, but the pageviews and time spent can have a negative influence when you control for regularity.”
What this means is that it’s preferable for subscribers to be in the habit of visiting your news source regularly as opposed to reading long articles occasionally and staying away for significant periods in between. “Binging is bad for subscriber health,” states a summary of the Subscriber Engagement Index data.
One factor in this equation may be ad blockers. The longer you are in a story, the more likely you are to be bombarded with pop-up ads, videos and other elements that may get in the way of your reading. “You see more and more pages, and that drives you away,” Malthouse said. “If you’re using an ad blocker, you don’t see that effect.”
Another factor is whether someone is reading differentiated content — that is, stories produced locally that are specific to the outlet and market — or commoditized content, which are pieces widely available elsewhere. An outlet boosting coverage of high-school sports, restaurant openings or local controversies is investing in differentiated coverage. One that prominently features wire stories about presidential politics, the United Kingdom coronation or celebrity news is leaning into commoditized content.
As stated in a chart accompanying the Index analysis: “Reading differentiated stories drives regularity and retention. Reading commoditized stories does not.”
“If you’re just reading the commoditized content, the more you read it, you say, ‘Well, why am I paying for this?’” Malthouse said. But, he added, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, as readers in small markets–particularly in areas lacking broadband access–may rely upon their local paper for national and international news. In such cases the commoditized content can have a positive effect on retention in a way that it might not for a big-city outlet. Another Local News Initiative study found that wire stories can also be used to develop light readers in larger markets.
An outlet’s churn rate also is affected by how readers consume its content. If you’re reading on a phone, for instance, it makes a difference whether you are using an internet browser or have downloaded the outlet’s application. “We found that people who were using the mobile browser were more likely to churn,” Malthouse said. “If you’re using the mobile app, you were much less likely to churn, or if you were using another device like a tablet or a PC.”
Malthouse recalled speaking with one newspaper chain representative who said its mobile experience had not been optimized for the phone except on the app. “So the obvious strategies are to get people to download your app and/or to be mobile-first in your web design,” Malthouse said.
Another driver in boosting regularity and reducing churn is “the social experience,” DeGaris said. “Sharing and talking about stories has a direct influence on reading habit, where information curation doesn’t.” In other words it’s not enough for an outlet to direct readers to stories it considers important. These stories also should be relevant enough to inspire conversation in the community, regardless of whether they might go viral.
The data offers reasons for optimism, such as 20% growth of subscribers in 2022 across the 60 or so small-market publications in the Index. “That in itself is great news,” DeGaris said, calling it a tonic for “all the doom-and-gloom” in the industry. He noted that the post-pandemic paradigm shows “a decline in total readership, but an increase in total subscribers. If you looked at the total readership, you’d say we’re in a decline, but by shifting the paradigm, we’re saying, ‘Look, this is not the metric we need to pay attention to.’”
As often is the case, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges of attracting and engaging paying readers. A small-town newspaper has a different relationship with its readers and a different focus than a big-city paper does. The Index shows that the readers in small and medium-sized markets visit their local news outlets more than twice as often as those in large markets.
The drivers for regularity also vary depending on the market size, though in each case, local & state news towers over all other categories in relative importance. Food and dining is a major driver in large markets but not in medium or small, while obituaries are seen as a positive draw in small and medium markets but a negative in large ones. The key, as always, is calibrating content to community.
“A publication needs to be best at what it does, and if that’s covering local events, that’s what it needs to do,” Malthouse said. “It needs not to try to do everything.”
The Medill Subscriber Engagement Index is a partnership of Spiegel, the Medill Local News Initiative and Mather Economics. It is being supported by the Google News Initiative.
