case study

Surrendering to Subscription

The largest independent news and media group in Ireland with a combined reach of 2.4 million weekly readers.

challenge

The Problem

All stay, but no pay

Despite being a household name in Ireland, this media group was facing an uphill battle in trying to effectively monetise their readership. With a business model hinging on converting their readers of free articles into paying subscribers, they already knew that keeping track of engagement was vital to their success. But the data said customers were already engaging with the content…

So why weren’t they forking over their Euros?

In order to persuade people to buy-in, they would need to identify who their readers were, what content was engaging them and how exactly their existing subscribers came to pay. The only way to do this? Get their data in order and start monitoring actual customer behaviour instead of relying on vanity metrics.

success

The Solution

Reading into customer behaviour…

To help this group observe readers in their natural habitat, we needed to first free up their analytics team from the many hours they were spending on cleaning and manipulating the data into shape each week.

So we stepped in and took care of the data ingestion, transformation and organisation within The Conjura Platform, liberating the analysts to focus on their actual analysis!

By viewing their information within our digestible dashboards, this team started to spot behavioural trends of high-value readers and uncover critical insights about what made them tick – such as the decision to subscribe being directly driven by certain types of articles and that there was actually a magic number of times a reader encountered a paywall before becoming a customer!

results achieved

Revolutionised stock forecasting

The paywall push

With this newfound insight into their audience’s taste across all sections, editorial teams were better able to deliver the content most suited to their needs and collect increasingly informative data to support those decisions. After identifying that articles about sport were particularly engaging to their readers, the group began to install paywalls on this content and drive uptake of paid subscription!

These tweaks were so effective that they exceeded their new subscriptions targets by 4x, successfully converting readers today, into subscribers tomorrow!