The Revenue Edition: The FT’s 99p subscription mobile edition is a fascinating subscriber experiment PLUS that’s just one of 50 ways to make media pay from @WNIP

March 29, 2022

Hello, the spotty service is because I’m in the middle of a move right now, well, the first part of a trans-Atlantic move so bear with me. More news about that soon, very soon.

Today, I spot a solid theme: How to make money from media? I have often said in the last 10 that in an era where things to inform, entertain and distract us that content isn’t in short supply but attention is. Thinking around the attention economy still provide some of the most thought-provoking ideas about media business models and content strategies.

Today, we have 50 ways to make money from media with Damian Radcliffe looking at paywalls. The major shift in paywalls is how sophisticated they have become. A decade ago, we have hard paywalls and then the FT and NYTimes metered paywalls, but now we have so many other ways to convert readers and viewers into paying customers. We have registration walls that try to get people to sign-up, turn over some of their personal information and establish another state of user to track as very successful models for publishers like The Independent. More than that, we’ve now got AI-driven systems such as sophi.io that dynamically adjust to a user’s behaviour.

And with product thinking solidly driving the most successful media brands in the world, publishers and broadcasters now have much richer portfolios of products to sell, some based on advertising and some probing different price points. As exhibit A today, we have the FT rolling out a 99p smartphone edition targeting social media users but looking to onboard them at a much lower price point than their full-fat subscription. (And for an even broader view, look no further than the New York Times which is expanding its offering of paid services through acquisitions such as The Athletic.)

PLUS how much money is media losing to Facebook’s inaccurate targeting? Morning Brew blows past 4m subs and is looking for targets to acquire. Product managers! What is the difference between a hypothesis and an assumption? Commercial managers: how you can fix ad measurement.

This is an excerpt from our free-to-download report, 50 Ways To Make Media Pay Online paywalls are a primary means for publishers to encourage audiences to take out digital subscriptions. Upon hitting the paywall, readers will find themselves unable to access further content unless either they become subscribers, or wait for an extended period of time …

It’s no secret that ad-tech vendors take a lot of money out of the digital advertising ecosystem. In 2018, a report by global accounting firm PWC found that half of the money spent by advertisers ended up with publishers. A new study from ad metrics firm Adalytics has confirmed the problem, reporting that in the worst instances …

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Its new app, FT Edit, will feature "a curated selection" of eight "deep-dive articles" each weekday morning at a price almost all of its readers can afford. But the ghost of NYT Now looms ominously nearby.

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Morning Brew has more than 4 million newsletter subscribers as it hunts for acquisitions to grow the company.

What is a good hypothesis? Assumptions and hypotheses are not the same. Assumptions should be challenged with research. Hypotheses should be tested.

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