CNBC will likely begin its subscription price testing in the first quarter of 2023, after the first renewal period for the Investing Club, said Margaret de Luna, gm and svp of CNBC’s direct-to-consumer business. Existing subscribers will be grandfathered in at their current prices, but new subscribers to CNBC Pro could see a yet-to-be-determined price hike.

The new rate will be determined with varying site offers. A price increase on Investing Club would be based on those results, de Luna said.

It’s the first time CNBC would raise the price on a CNBC Pro membership.

“It’s starting to move us out of the infancy stage [and] towards being a sophisticated digital consumer subscription business,” de Luna said.

Given that it’s been available for a decade and publishers have faced increasing costs due to factors like inflation and higher labor costs, it makes sense to experiment with subscription price increases, said Matt Lindsay, president of subscription management and customer data analytics firm Mather Economics which works with publishers. A potential recession on the horizon could also push publishers to diversify, he said.

A number of publishers are testing subscription prices, Lindsay said, declining to share which ones he was privy to. The New York Times’ president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in the company’s Q3 2022 earnings call that the publisher is considering upping the price of its individual products in the coming months to “drive more people to take our bundle.”

“If everything is going up in price, and subscriptions aren’t, then subscriptions are becoming less expensive than everything else,” he said. And increasing subscription prices does not necessarily lead to additional churn, he said, citing Mather Economics studies from previous recessions and inflationary periods.

CNBC’s direct-to-consumer team has grown from a team of five to 70 since de Luna joined in July 2021. Its dedicated subscription marketing team now has six people, up from just one person last year. The expanded marketing team focuses on acquiring new subscribers, price testing and finding the right tech for its subscription business, allowing the company to run acquisition pricing tests, de Luna said.

Right now, the CNBC team is in the “modeling phase” to determine what the new subscription prices should be and if they will offer additional subscription terms, such as a quarterly or a six-month subscription, she said. Previously, its model was based solely on the number of “marketing exposures” (article and video paywalls, …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron