Four ways to supercharge your audience growth and the gold in archives from @WNIP PLUS How the rising cost of living is causing audiences to rethink subscriptions

July 25, 2022

Pugpig is working with Rolling Stone, so it was great to see their digital director, Charlotte Cijffers, talk about how to 'supercharge' audience growth. As someone who has worked on digital media products for most of my career, I agree with her point about the need for audience research. When I was with the BBC, I was able to sit in on a user research session to see how people who had never used our news website found their way through it. It was a revelation. When you work on a site, you know your way around it because you built it, but new users are coming to it cold without the mental road map that you have as the one who built the roads. It made me rethink a lot of my assumptions, and that's just one piece of advice from this piece on building your audience.

If it wasn't obvious before, it is now, that subscriptions and membership have emerged as one of the main revenue pillars of the media business. Charlotte talks about archives as a way to increase audiences, but publishers, such as the Atlantic, also are seeing archives as a source of revenue. Pugpig recently made our first acquisition, a digital archive company called Bondi, because so many companies are leaning into this opportunity.

However, as inflation starts to really bite into the pot of money that people have for discretionary spending, we're also seeing people decide to slim down their subscriptions. The Guardian is reporting that this is hitting streaming services, but it would make perfect sense that this will have an impact on all subscription services including magazine and newspaper publishers. What are your strategies to keep subscribers who are trying to trim their spending? How will you be communicating value to keep that subscriber or member base that you built over the last couple of years?

PLUS:

  • Left-leaning Novara Media in the UK hits 10,000 donors and is bullish about the future - Press Gazette

  • Acast revolutionised podcast advertising and has its sights set on subscriptions next - Digital Content Next

  • How teens have turned to social media for their news - The Guardian

  • TikTok isn't the enemy of journalism but rather a new way to reach them - The Guardian

  • Twitter gained 9m users but saw revenue decline due to Elon-sanity - Social Media Today

  • The hardest part about transitioning to being a product-led company - Mixpanel.com

Publisher insights from Rolling Stone UK’s Digital Director As the fight for attention online intensifies, attracting and retaining audiences has become something that publishers are finding increasingly challenging. For Charlotte Cijffers, audience growth has become an area of expertise from her work with publications like Dazed, Attitude Magazine and more recently, the launch of Rolling …

Press Gazette has been reporting on British journalism without fear or favour since 1965. Our mission is to provide a news and information service which helps the UK journalism.

American news and culture weekly The Atlantic has just launched 165 years of historic archive content Fresh content is crucial to keeping your most engaged audience members happy. But, as The Atlantic’s recent archive launch underlines, there is real value in archive content. Clever curation can resurface the very best from your publication’s past and readers will …

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Four people tell how rising living costs have pushed them to cut back on luxuries like streaming services

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Social Media Today

Partho Ghosh calls himself "customer-obsessed." It only takes a few minutes of talking with him about what he's up to at Hootsuite to see how that spills into his work. In our chat, Ghosh talked to us about his go-to product-led growth tactics, how product analytics and cultivating a data-informed culture play important roles, and what the biggest challenges can be when transitioning teams and companies into PLG-heavy motions.