Norway's Aftenposten finds success with retention playbook PLUS An excellent communiqué about the "product-thinking journalist"

August 18, 2022

The first item from WAN-IFRA looking at how Aftenposten has grown a subscription business that delivers 80% of their revenue is definitely one to bookmark and keep. It's full of actionable insights on how to onboard and retain subscribers, which is so critical as advertising softens. In addition to this, there is a great piece from INMA about data maturity and how hiring your first data scientist is a pivot point in your journey in using data. This is definitely not a quiet August in terms of media analysis and research, and there is good data about app use in the UK and teen social media use in the US.

2022-08-03. During the past eight to 10 years, Aftenposten has undergone a massive digital transformation of its editorial and business operations to the extent that the portion of revenue coming from subscribers is now around 80 percent – a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

With 80% of its revenue from subscriptions, Aftenposten has to keep its subscribers, and this article from WAN-IFRA goes over their tactics to onboard and retain its subscribers. It's an excellent playbook that publishers can adapt and use to support your own reader revenue strategies.

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.

A useful roundup of the most used apps in the UK. It's useful to break this down between reach and time spent, and for the BBC, it's not as if they don't reach a lot of people.

The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds that TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the share of teens who use Facebook has fallen sharply.

Since 2015, US teens use of Facebook has cratered. Instagram and Snapchat have increased with them, but TikTok now reigns.

The three stages of data organisation at media companies include content analytics, subscriber data, and product/user data. The difference between Stages 1, 2, and 3 involves the questions asked and the person answering.

Data is critical to media business, and it's critical to developing a product-led organisation. In this INMA piece, Ariane Bernard outlines the three stages of data maturity at media organisations and how hiring a data scientist marks a pivot in the data progress at a media organisation.

In January, we comprehensively covered what the Metaverse could mean for publishers. Since then, the fascination surrounding the shift towards future technologies has only increased. As many industries are starting to appreciate the benefits of virtual-world immersion, publishers appear to be taking the lead. Last week, we wrote about web3 potential for publishers, and this week in our series …

I feel a bit like a grumpy oldster, but the crypto/VR bros have forgot that we already had a Web3. It was the semantic web, and I still think it's a powerful set of technologies, especially for publishers. For all of the hype around crypto, AR and VR, I think semantic technologies hold more near-term promise.

Rant off. I think this is a solid and measured piece about the recent history of AR and VR and some of the risks and limitations. At one point in my career, I wanted to focus on immersive storytelling, and I have done quite a bit of work on long-form storytelling that sits outside of the AR-VR world,

July Posts Worst Ad Decline In Two Years, Big Categories Lead Contraction - 08/17/2022

Another week and a another story about the softening ad market.

Being a part of the creator economy requires more journalists to apply product thinking to their work.

Hat tip to my friends at Media Voices on finding this. These lines say so much:

"Product thinking is simply the idea that you first seek to understand your user’s problem, contextualise that problem, and then design products to solve it. To build a successful product, you must first find real-world problems, not invent them. This is where the hard work of user research comes in." Amen.

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There is a fine line between pivoting and flailing. I'm not entirely sure which Substack is doing right now.