Why news publishers are using non-news content to hook readers and turn them into subscribers

By Kayleigh Barber

Call it the post-Trump slump or the bubble bursting on subscription mania: News publishers are starting to see and feel the decline of traffic and the subsequent slowdown of subscription sign-ups as of late.

But as traffic diverts from breaking news coverage, other non-news verticals are seeing an uptick in interest from readers who are now willing to dedicate more time to hobbies and special interests.

“If you were to look at the stories that drove the most subscriptions in 2020 versus the stories that drove the most subscriptions in 2021, you’d see more stories that are lifestyle and general interest in 2021, whereas 2020 was more politics and COVID,” said Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic.

Some publishers, like Gannett, Salon and The Atlantic, have not only noted these changes, but have begun acting on those reader impulses to hopefully drive traffic back to other areas of their sites in order to build loyalty and convince those readers to become paid subscribers. Among the actions they’ve taken are creating content specific landing pages and investing in producing more stories for those subjects, as well as closely tracking which portion of readers are returning to those categories.

“At the very beginning of the quarantine days, people were absolutely coming to Salon to find out information about COVID-19. [But] we noticed that after those articles were consumed, people seemed to be more likely than not to click on something comforting,” said Justin Wohl, chief revenue officer at Salon.

In early 2021, Wohl’s team decided to take the early stages of its food content vertical, which primarily featured licensed content, and turn it into a more established part of the site. Since then, Ashlie Danielle Stevens was promoted in May to deputy food editor from food and culture writer to focus entirely on food coverage. And Salon’s managing editor Joseph Neese has been tasked with growing this vertical and managing and the output of about four articles per week for the vertical, Wohl said. Specific widgets were also created for the CMS to format recipe instructions.

“Seeing an increase in the percentage of return readership that we have in any given month is a success metric for us that we’re looking at with our editors each month,” said Wohl.

On average, 11% of Salon’s return readership navigated directly from food content in 2021 and 20% of all pageviews came from food content, Wohl said. From a revenue standpoint, the RPMs (revenue generated per thousand pageviews) of food content is 15% higher than the site average and 30% higher than news and politics coverage, Wohl added.

Those return readers become particularly attractive candidates to sell subscriptions to, which is a secondary goal for Wohl’s team. The revenue per user from a subscriber far exceeds the revenue per user from ads, he said, but declined to share exactly how much RPU increases. Currently, Salon relies on programmatic advertising for nearly 100% of its total revenue. While Wohl said he doesn’t expect subscriptions to …read more

Source:: Digiday