What’s important, at the moment, is not to simply go for a wider audience, but knowing how to segment that group according to the interests and tastes within the members, in order to carry out an efficient subscription or donation model for digital content.
Before, the desire was to get more “clicks” on the websites, presuming that a larger audience would guarantee the attraction of paying advertisers, whom migrated from the printed and other platforms to the digital one, looking to reach more customers.
This business approach has changed since it’s been discovered that loyalty levels vary depending on many circumstances. One of the secrets to retain the audiences and, more than anything, to attract users willing to pay, lies in the supply of quality content and in the exercise of a journalism that’s said to be independent and objective.
Incredibly, the models of total gratuity aren’t so predominant nowadays because readers are inclined to subscribe to media that guarantee more news and less ads, or the privilege of receiving tomorrow’s news in advance, or the benefits of discounts on purchases, tickets for shows or other services.
The effort for segmenting the audiences, to offer them the contents that interest the different groups or individuals in particular, say the news of technologies, economics and access to databases for specific topics, has become an attractive business challenge.
These experiments are already being done at the level of streaming and paid television platforms, but the newspaper El Confidencial, from Spain, has launched the so-called “EC Previum”, a payment service for companies and managers interested in key contents for their businesses.
Segmenting audiences has become easier now that technological applications are able to measure and identify all types of readers, according to the topics they browse. Based on these records, the media offers the appropriate content through paid subscriptions.
The success of donations and paid subscriptions, based on different pricing models and volumes of content and according to the latest annual report of the World Association of Newspapers, has doubled in just the last five years.
This same association expects digital subscriptions to grow a 13 percent more before 2020 sets in. The harvest of payments for printed and digital media subscriptions has reached a rate of $640 million USD per day, confirming that the integration of both platforms, aiming for a journalism of quality, has turned into a very firm base for the sustainability of journalistic companies.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 