Reinventing the newspaper

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Game plan for the media outlet’s audience revenue

BY NINI B. CABAERO
March 2023

Audience revenue is about asking consumers of the news media company to pay or give financial support through subscription membership, donation, sponsorship, or other revenue stream.

RELATED: Reader revenue as business model of the community newspaper.

There are few success stories of news organizations embarking on reader revenue projects on digital.

Reasons include a lack of knowledge of the business opportunities on digital, media workers having inadequate skills, newsrooms being short-staffed, and the technology costing a lot of money.

It is true that it takes money to make money and, for provincial and regional media, this rings painfully accurate as they find out they have to spend to make money on digital – on their websites, social media accounts, and other innovations or platforms – to build alternative revenue streams.

Business model

On digital, aside from advertising, the business model being pushed by industry experts is reader or audience revenue. The different platforms and formats allow for wider reach and distribution of content and, at the same time, for readers or viewers to pay for the information they get. Audience revenue is about asking consumers to pay or give financial support to media companies through subscriptions, memberships, donations or sponsorships, and other revenue streams.

But to get there, one would need a strategy, a game plan. Jumping on the reader revenue bandwagon without deliberation is foolish. It requires study, consultation, collaboration, planning, and experimentation.

The story of reader revenue in the Philippines is mostly one of failure. Actual revenue turned out to be way below expectation, algorithm changes placed news companies at the mercy of platforms, and the audience just was not willing to pay for news.

Digital ABC’s proposal

What to do? The Digital ABC program of the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-Ifra) – Women in News (WIN) proposes a game plan.

Digital ABC is a series of training programs WIN offers to journalists and other media workers in Southeast Asia, the Arab region, and Africa. The A, B, C, and (recently) D series are on the foundations of digital and how to operationalize digital strategy. The lessons suggest a game plan for media:

* Understand the digital economy and monetization opportunities for media
* Know your audience’s wants and needs
* Develop a content strategy based on those wants and needs
* Experiment with a reader or audience revenue project

Advertising is starting to bounce back after the lockdowns. Still, one lesson from the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic is that diversified revenue is required to support the expansion to digital and to survive.

(From https://www.rappler.com/offers/)

Rappler experience

In the Philippines, Rappler was one of those determined to create several “revenue buckets.” Glenda M. Gloria, Rappler co-founder and executive editor, said in a WIN case study on Rappler’s business models: “Philippine media, or the media in general, was in search of a perfect business model and that business model had become elusive to mainstream media, to TV networks and to newspapers, more significantly. So we tried to evolve. From advertising, we diversified the revenue stream. As we speak, we have six.”

Revenue diversification

Its revenue sources are native advertising and branded content, e-commerce, events, business intelligence, grants, and its membership program called Rappler+. Gloria said they dreamed of the membership program in late 2018 at the height of President Rodrigo Duterte’s attacks on Rappler. “That was really the context and that was the motivation of the membership (program) because we also knew that Rappler had a very sticky readership base that stayed with us in our darkest years, and so we set up Plus largely as a community of engaged readers,” she said.

(From https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/membership/)

Another example of revenue diversification is Frontier Myanmar, an English-language magazine in Myanmar that has an online presence at https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/. Frontier Myanmar considered several business models for its digital transformation, then decided on a membership program which it launched in February 2020.

Sonny Swe, founder and chief executive officer of Black Knight Media Co. Ltd that publishes Frontier Myanmar, explained in a WIN case study the preparations before the launch. He said the news organization had to conduct audience research and product design process, with the guidance of consultancy group Splice Media and the mentorship of Southeast Asian media leaders. It received a Google Digital News Innovation grant to implement the membership program.

Tools to know the audience

Swe said Frontier Myanmar focused on building a community around responsible journalism and asked readers to join the membership program. His team started asking readers about the content, what they want to read, how much they want to pay, and others. “We, journalists, always think we know what our readers want to read. Here’s the story, take it. That is the very old style of journalism. But now, you really have to engage with your audience. You have to keep asking your audience what they want,” he said in the WIN case study.

Knowing the audience through data analytics tools and offline methods such as focus group discussions and content audit is critical to designing content that will be relevant to readers or viewers.

Once the newsroom is able to produce fresh and relevant content on a regular basis and at a volume that would support a following, then the news company can begin to study how to encourage the audience to pay, and create experiments.

Three years after the lockdown orders, it’s not anymore about digital transformation as news companies were forced to change and adapt. It’s about survival. The Covid-19 pandemic may be ending but many news companies continue to require intensive care.

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