How a Polish publisher has made belonging a subscription selling point PLUS Avoiding the fashionable format trap

February 16, 2022

Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza has always been ahead of the curve strategically, and they not only leveraged the loyalty of their readers but leaned into it to increase readers sense of connection through a club. Why I think that this is important is that not only does this strategy attract subscribers but the loyalty-building involved in this strategy also helps with retention, meaning that you don't have to spend money trying to re-engage lapsed subscribers. It's great brand building, great business building and it's tightly connected to audiences who appreciate quality journalism.

What's the fashionable format trap? Over the years, I've seen so many digital formats come and go: Blogging, live-tweeting, podcasts, long-form, video, podcasts again and now short-form video. Whenever something becomes fashionable, there is a rush to grab a bit of the attention without thinking about what makes the format successful. Short-form video has been tried a number of times before with varying degrees of success but nothing like TikTok. That begs the question of what makes TikTok standout in ways that previous attempts to crack the format haven't. Most of the time people talk about how the algorithm connects people with content that they like. ByteDance's mastery of content algorithms is what makes its stable of products successful not necessarily the formats of that content.

Likewise, content creators are excited about podcasts because the best ones are really good and really popular and hey who doesn't want fame and riches. However, podcasts, like a lot of content in the digital age, suffer from a discovery problem so the fame and riches head of the long tail is a vertiginous peak to scale.

That brings me back to ByteDance, Google and social media. All of these platforms are about discovering things you are interested in and worth your time in an overwhelming ocean of things you could potentially be interested in. Search is for seeking out information and social acts as a filter by showing you things your friends are interested in. ByteDance adds some AI, which is really just a fine tuning of the algorithms that have gone before. One would hope that the ML algorithms get smarter over time. I personally don't use TikTok much and therefore its ML algorithms don't know much about me and don't know what to show me. It's not terribly valuable to me, and I actually use the older social networks to filter TikTok for me because I'm not super keen about some aspects of the app. Which is to say that TikTok content I'm interested in finds me through other social apps that I use, and that's the kind of relationship I have time for and want.

This is a long way of saying that traditional media thinks in formats, but with digital media, the format may not be the secret sauce. In digital media, content discovery and recommendation are very powerful. Yes, you need good content, but content that is interesting to me doesn't always have the highest product values. In my master's degree, there were a couple of papers that were completely dedicated to what makes research interesting, which were generally fascinating - particularly the right mix of novelty but also references to existing research. I digress.

This is all to say that the Pew Center has found that less than a quarter of Americans get any news from podcasts. And the Reuters digital news report found that 63% of publisher plan to increase their investment in video. Pivot to video 2.0? But what video? Where? Why? And for whom? Beware of the fashionable format. It can be a money pit. (Facebook's 360 live video anyone? What a monumental waste of time and money.)

PLUS The FT approaches 1 m digital subs. Disney names an executive solely focused on the meta verse. (See above commentary about fashionable formats.) A reflection on an 11-year solutions journalism project at the New York Times. And Google plans to roll out a new privacy sandbox for Android that it says will be less disruptive than Apple's.

For any newspaper, 280,000 digital subscribers is a hefty achievement. It propels a title into the rarified ‘100K Club‘ and for Gazeta Wyborcza – one of Poland’s leading daily newspapers – it puts them ahead of Canada’s Globe and Mail (200k), Boston Globe (225k) as well as snapping at the heels of Bloomberg (350k). Most …

The share of Americans who say they often get news from a podcast is quite small, at just 7%; 16% of adults say they sometimes do.b

Only 7% of Americans say they "often" get news from a podcast. Another 16% say they "sometimes" do. And more than half of Americans (56%) say they "never" get news from podcasts.

These numbers are from a new report from Pew Research Center out on Tuesday. The resear…

As the trailblazing column closes down, its co-creator David Bornstein shares what he learned from a decade of telling solutions-focused stories

63% of publishers told Reuters that they plan to push more resources into their video strategies. But, in a world where publishers are focusing on subscriber revenue, do videos drive subscriptions? Do they create valuable revenue for publishers? Or are they just areas publishers believe they have to be involved with to feel relevant? 🎧 Listen to this article …

The company has seen subscriptions surge in recent months amid efforts to expand globally outside of the U.K.

The Walt Disney Co has appointed an executive to oversee its metaverse strategy, according to an email Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek sent to staff Tuesday and seen by Reuters.

It says it will give other companies plenty of time to adapt to changes to its Android software. Similar changes made by Apple affected big internet companies.