How The Daily Beast is making money from potential subscribers before the point of conversion

By Kayleigh Barber

After nearly four years of launching and honing a subscription strategy, The Daily Beast is ready to take a more nuanced approach to subscriber acquisition that the publisher believes will monetize the readers earlier and more efficiently.

It will be the next iteration for its subscription/membership product after first asking readers to pay in June 2018, said CRO Mia Libby. Back then, the total number of subscribers was the key indicator of success to show that people were willing to spend money specifically on their content and “to make sure that we could make it a business.”

It was a fruitful bet: the subscriptions business now accounts for 20% of the company’s total annual revenue, according to Libby, who added that total revenue grew by 30% year over year from 2020 to 2021. She declined to share hard revenue figures for these growth indicators, as well as the total number of subscribers that the Beast currently has. But she did say that the average monthly unique visitors to the site, citing internal figures, sits at about 29 million. (Comscore reported that the average from 2021 was 18.6 million monthly unique visitors, with December 2021 coming in at 25 million.) Two years ago, The Beast’s membership product — at the time called the Beast Inside — was the second-largest revenue stream for the company, has benefited significantly from the pandemic. Subscriptions remain the second-highest-ranking revenue stream for the brand.

Now that Libby and her team feel like subscription has proven itself as a standalone business, she wants to broaden their approach and start collecting revenue throughout the reader-to-subscriber funnel instead of only monetizing that business at the point of conversion.

Ultimately this plan hinges on turning passive readers of the site, such as those who have stumbled upon it through search or followed a link from social media, into “true loyalists that are willing to pay,” according to Libby.

Those who are considered loyalists, aka “known users,” are those who are regularly reading articles, but also have signed up for another product that The Daily Beast offers outside of its main owned-&-operated website. These products, aka “known products,” include one of seven (soon to be eight) newsletters, its Daily Beast app or its desktop push notifications. The “known” descriptor indicates that additional first-party data is collected (email, name, special interests, etc.) about the readers who have signed up for these products.

“The strategy is now to decipher which of those [known] products any given user is most likely to convert on,” and then market that product to the readers once they’re within the Beast ecosystem, Libby said.

But the team has a plan for readers who are unlikely to ever pay for a subscription, too, Libby said. Using a registration wall model, the Beast is calling the Access Pass, readers will be given access to an article in exchange for personal information, like an email address. Not all readers will be presented with this option, however; the exact formula for …read more

Source:: Digiday