In 2020, their total ad revenue fell 26 percent (to $392.4 million), with print ad revenue bearing the brunt. And that’s been horrible for news companies like the Times. It’s no surprise, then, that customers are doing everything they can to avoid those toxic intrusions. In the 1970s, the average U.S consumer was exposed to about 500 ads a day. (Netflix figured out the same thing early on.) CUSTOMERS HATE ADVERTISING (AND THAT’S OKAY) And just recently, they hired Jonathan Knight (of Words with Friends and FarmVille fame) to create more “original” digital gaming experiences after seeing their Spelling Bee catch fire in 2020.īut for all of this growth in new areas of content, they’ve come to understand that it isn’t just about providing differentiated content, but producing enough volume to capture attention share in an increasingly bloated media landscape. And in 2020, their Games subscription leapfrogged Cooking: it now has 840,000 subscribers, up 40% from the end of 2019. Their Cooking subscription is among the most popular with 726,000 subscribers paying $5 a month (or $40 a year). They also created mini-businesses within the core subscription model based on customer data. They launched their first podcast, The Daily, which now attracts 4 million listeners a day (The Daily’s audience is almost twice as large as the paper was at its peak, and it’s only four years old). So using their valuable customer data, the Times doubled down on investments in growing their content ecosystem. ![]() In the Subscription Economy, it’s all about keeping your loyal fans engaged with newer, better stuff. ![]() ![]() Like any big player, the Times knows they can’t rest on their (admittedly epic) laurels. They knew it was important to take advantage of the moment by focusing on attracting and retaining customers for the long haul, while staying true to their core mission of, as David Gurian-Peck, the Times’ VP of subscription growth & planning, says, “making sure that we’re providing journalism worth paying for.” They used audience and engagement metrics to figure out what subscribers were reading, how often they were coming back, and how healthy their relationship was to the company. And in the years since, the Times has become expert at understanding every stage of the subscriber life cycle.īy the time Donald Trump entered office in January 2017, it was clear that their news-hungry base was only going to grow. So the company made a carefully considered shift to focus on long-term retention and maximizing lifetime customer value (LTV). One of their most successful early offers was 99 cents for three months of access, but the retention on those subscribers was horrendous. ![]() FOCUS ON LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUEįor the first few years of its digital subscription life, the Times relied heavily on irresistible short-term discounts to get people in the digital door. While not many companies can expect to achieve the remarkable growth the “Gray Lady” has, there are lots of good lessons to learn and tactics to copy in looking at their model. And they’re well on their way to achieving their goal of reaching 10 million digital subscribers by 2025. To put this in perspective, the Times has more digital subscribers in Dallas–Fort Worth than the Dallas Morning News, more digital subscribers in Seattle than the Seattle Times, more digital subscribers in California than the LA Times or the San Francisco Chronicle. Tzuo predicted at the time that this was just the beginning of a shift to rely more on digital subscribers than advertisers for revenue, and he was right: The media giant added 2.3 million digital-only subscriptions in 2020 alone, more than in any previous year, bumping them to more than 7.5 million total subscriptions across digital and print. It was early 2011 when the Times introduced their paywall, and despite the grumblings of the “I want my news for free!” crowd, it was an out-of-the-gate success: in the first three weeks after they put up the paywall, they attracted 100,000 digital subscribers. It’s hard to believe it was only 10 years ago when Zuora founder and CEO Tien Tzuo was heralding the New York Times’ seismic shift to a digital subscription model after relying primarily on advertising dollars for over 150 years.
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