Responses from INMA members show “virtually straight line growth” for news media reader revenue.

Presenting the Benchmarks research to last week’s World Congress, the study of 175 global news brands, researcher-in-residence Greg Piechota said digital subscription business had not reached a peak, as some feared, “but rather just paused for a quarter”.

“The digital subscription growth index for the last four years is mostly a straight line upwards, apart from a blip in the last quarter of 2022,” he said.

In the first quarter of 2023, a median news brand saw digital subscription volume and revenue up 3.8 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively versus previous quarter, and 13.6 per cent and 16.1 per cent respectively against the same quarter last year.

Median reflects the halfway point in the sample, or “normal performance.”

INMA revealed the results of this and other studies at the World Congress of News Media in New York.

Piechota said publishers’ performance seems to contradict anecdotal evidence of so-called subscription fatigue. The impact on news subscriptions sold by INMA members seems to be insignificant.

“Actually, the sales in 1Q 2023 was only slightly lower than at the COVID pandemic peak in 2Q 2020, suggesting publishers learned how to sell subscriptions despite declining engagement with news sites,” he said. “They squeeze the same juice from a drier lemon.”

News websites’ reach and penetration, sessions, and pageviews have declined in recent years as the news cycle cooled down, but it’s not an attention recession. “Instead, we’re seeing a return to pre-pandemic engagement levels, indicating a fresh kind of normalcy. Online sessions, a measure of frequency, are still a bit or four per cent higher than in 2019.

“Consumer surveys may suggest a 18 per cent spike in news avoidance globally, between 2019 and 2022, but actual engagement stats for INMA members disagree.”

Piechota said another INMA study had found an impressive 25 per cent uptick since 2018 in the proportion of top sites charging for online news. Some 41 per cent of 473 top news sites in 33 major global markets had paywalls or membership programmes in 2022.

As the digital subscriber base grew however, so did the number of cancellations. The monthly churn rates, hovering between three and four per cent were eating into growth. However, publishers’ churn rates were still lower than observed in other sectors – the video streamers’ average churn rate of six per cent for example – with news media “likely still acquiring heavy readers rather than the casual ones”.

Rising sales and revenues, early adopter conversions, and increased competition are all textbook characteristics of a product category at the growth stage rather than the mature one.

Piechota said on a growing market, textbooks recommended maximising share – adding features to attract new segments, pricing for penetration, intensifying distribution beyond the owned channels, promoting the brand and trial.

The world’s top-50 news brands by the size of the digital subscription base –clearly fighting for market share – are enriching their bundles, adding features and content to main products (96 per cent of top brands do it), and largely selling these as one package (79 per cent).

“Additionally, there’s a growing trend of offering trials, which are becoming increasingly longer, typically more than three months,” he said. “The proportion of the top brands with trials increased by 26 per cent in the past year, to 86 per cent.

While maintaining low entry prices, publishers were increasing end prices ­– 53 per cent increased the post-trial prices in the past year – and the average increase was 59 per cent

Piechota said to ease conversions and retention, publishers were progressively personalising prices. In the US, an estimated 80 per cent of circulation was sold based on personalised prices, with Europe lagging behind at below 50 per cent, according to Mather Economics.

Another significant trend was the addition of non-news products to news bundles. This tactic, according to publishers’ financial reports, was helping boost the number of digital subscriptions and revenue per subscriber.

The latest development in bundling included large, cable-style bundles operated by groups publishing multiple titles. Although they are primarily being used as a revenue retention strategy at present, they also offer the opportunity for customer acquisition beyond core channels.

Greg Piechota is INMA’s researcher-in-residence and Readers First Initiative lead.

–with thanks to INMA