How El País Used Registration to Support Its Digital Subscriber Launch PLUS Using the Confidence Meter to Prioritise Products

July 13, 2021

Moving audiences from unknown to known is an important first step in serving them better and also building new revenue streams. Spain's El País used registration to get to know its audience better before launching a paid content strategy, and it has paid incredible dividends even though the strategy was launched just as the pandemic began.

I've started work on my independent research for my master's degree, and I will be looking at strategies that product managers use to cross internal boundaries and work cross-functionally to deliver new products. I've stared my research by talking to product managers, and even though I've just started, it's already been fascinating. My former BBC colleague Lucie McLean, who now works for a major European e-commerce platform, turned me onto a framework that helps communicate confidence or risk to stakeholders. It's brilliant, and I plan to use it in my work.

PLUS what makes a good newsletter from Adam Tinworth, the future of revenue and podcasts and how Facebook is facing a tough sell with creators.

Switching to a subscription model in the middle of a pandemic was not an easy decision for the publisher. But El País made it work.

Before going to a subscription model, El País put up a registration wall.

"El País started a registration model in 2019, more than a year before it launched the subscription model, increasing the number of articles that went behind a registration wall. This helped the team to collect audience data, and understand a lot about the readers and their habits."

So maybe you'll get over-excited readers, like the ones above.

Some kind words from my friend Adam Tinworth about my newsletter, which is just the latest way that I share what I'm paying attention to. Adam has a number of other good tips for newsletter writers.

Most product ideas deliver no benefits. In this article I show a real-world prioritization example using ICE and the Confidence Meter

If you're working in product management, one of the key things that you do is help set priorities. This is a good framework for how to gauge confidence in your idea and reduce risk.

Podcast revenue growth is lagging growth in time spent with the medium, but now is the time to stake your claim to your community’s listening time. Audience numbers are increasing steadily and it won’t be long until your audio investments pay off. Context The podcast market in America, the world’s biggest, will be worth over …

And it's important to remember that podcasts have also been used by publishers as part of their subscriber acquisition funnel.

“We don’t write for white subscribers, but it ends up being white people who read us," a Midwestern news executive told an audience earlier this year.

This points to an issue of the need to diversify audiences. It is an issue that if your audience is predominantly white, you'll write for them. It is a challenge of diversity but also a product and business challenge. Diverse audiences might use different channels, apps or social media spaces than white audiences, and that doesn't touch the issue of the content that interests these diverse audiences.

The social network is aiming to be a destination for creators and their viral memes. But TikTok and YouTube got there first.

Some of this might also be down to the fickleness of Facebook when it comes to their commitment to formats. Facebook has long tried to challenge YouTube by paying for video content and offering up video tools to tempt these creators, but their strategy hasn't paid off. And if some of these creators were with outlets that got burned by Facebook in the past, they will be wary of Zuck.

The federal government should follow Australia’s lead in forcing arbitration between platforms and publishers when needed.

An interesting piece by David Skok who is been involved some of the most interesting digital media projects in Canada. He also worked with Clay Christensen of The Innovator's Dilemma fame on a special report about lessons that media could learn about disruptive innovation. Give this a read.