INMA: News digital subscription growth continues despite audience drop off since pandemic peak PLUS BuzzFeed CRO sees opportunities despite prepping for recession

August 25, 2022

INMA's Greg Piechota released some fascinating research that shows that despite several signs of a post-pandemic slump in engagement with news that major publishers around the world are still seeing digital subscription growth. And that's important as there are growing signs of significant dip in advertising in several countries so reader revenue will become even more important than it already is.

During Wednesday’s members-only Webinar, Readers First Initiative Lead Greg Piechota shared new findings on subscriptions and engagement, then sat down with three INMA members to gain insights into what they expect from the future and how they are preparing for it.

INMA has released some really important research showing just how much news website use has come down from its pandemic peak. A lot of key metrics are down such as market penetration, sessions and the proportion of heavy users. But subscriptions were still growing. However, cancellations have started to rise too.

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Now This has become the most viewed US-based news brand on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. And it's the largest news brand overall on Tik Tok with 9m followers. The key has been to identify the topics that appeal to the younger users on these platforms.

Upwards of two million players are playing Wordle, and it has been mentioned in over 32 million tweets since its launch.

This signals how the New York Times is leaning into bundling even before an activist investor worked to push it in that direction.

The media company's CRO and his team presented a recession plan to its senior leadership in June and is seeing indications that consumer electronics and retail ad spending is rebounding.

BuzzFeed is focusing on "efficiency and innovation" as it shits to a recession footing. To support that, they focus on key data points such as dwell time on video. Despite seeing the softening US economy affect its own results, it has seen RFPs from advertisers increase YoY.

Regardless of whether you believe we are in a recession right now, global research outfit WARC doesn’t see good times ahead for the advertising business in 2023.

Social Media Today

Oh, this makes me miss Google Realtime search all over again, but it's an interesting move. It's been a while since Google tried to incorporate social signals into search. I'm now curious about whether Google and Twitter are working together on this.

Podcast and Audio news

iHeartMedia has launched its first virtual world on Fortnite called iHeartLand.

This is an interesting move that looks to leverage existing virtual spaces for their business. It's also an interesting extension for an audio-based business.

"Following the global success of our Tiny Desk Concerts, we are excited for our podcasts to reach new audiences on YouTube," said NPR's Anya Grundmann.

Speaking of an interesting extension of an audio-based business, I spotted Joel Sucherman, NPR's VP of audio platform strategy, talking about this on LinkedIn. He is pushing hard to expand NPR's reach while juggling the needs of a lot of different internal stakeholders.

I analyzed hundreds of thousands of Spotify podcast recommendations and discovered some surprising patterns.

One thing that's really interesting in this analysis - Spotify focuses on episodes rather than shows.