A premium newsletter that created an extra audience for India's The Wire attracted plenty of interest as Digital Media India continued yesterday.

The afternoon session saw Siddharth Varadarajan - one of three founding editors - explain that it also provided the website with an opportunity to charge subscribers.

India Cable from TheWire.com complements a site which was always free, with an uncompromising service. "To justify charging, there has to be something special, value-added," Varadarajan says.

After "toying with the idea" for two or three years, the TheWire partners teamed with four other writers to present a digest of the country's daily news last October. Issues are presented at 4pm on weekdays.

"There's too much content for the average reader to cover in reasonable time, so the object was to present 'everything that someone seriously interested in India needs to know' in the newsletter."

It is based on Substack, which offers a "clean and elegant CMS, with not too many bells and whistles" with the platform taking care of the back end, including signing and management of subscriptions.

Now they're watching the routes taken by others before setting a pricepoint - probably between $4-20 a month - and making the decision to transition.

"I gather from Substack that between 10-20 per cent of people who sign up for a free newsletter get sufficiently hooked to pay for it, and we'd be happy with 2000-3000 paid subscriptions, so need 15,000 free ones," he says. "We're not there yet."

From Germany, Daniel Mussinghoff, premium product management head at Axel Springer's BILDplus, had lessons of scale, having just turned 500,000 paid digital subscribers.

Delegates heard that while sex didn't work, gambling did, with subscribers responding to strategies to keep digital paying readers loyal.

A daily sex and love horoscope newsletter was an early but unsuccessful gambit to bring in more female users, and was stopped after eight weeks. More successful was a timed 'slot machine' - with iPhones and cash among prizes - to encourage users between 10am or 2pm, a 'sweepstake', and an even bigger 'mega Monday' promotions, which delivered retention rates of up to 3.3 per cent.

Bild also combined newsletters, experimenting with curated and combined content instead of auto-generated formats.

Mussinghoff also discussed the issue of 'sleepers' who pay their subscription but don't come to website. "Stopping mailing them about sweepstakes slowed the cancellations, but is it better to stop emailing them if they're not noticing they still have a subscription," he asked.

In a panel session, four speakers discussed the 'holy grail' of digital subscriptions, and whether Indian news media companies were ready for it. Moderator Pradyuman Maheshwari of MxMIndia was joined by HT Digital News chief executive Puneet Jain, News Minute special projects editor Ragamalika Karthikeyan, and Priya Bubna, co-founder and chief executive of premium newsletter The Morning Context.

Jain reported news consumption "continuing to grow" and subscription models "significantly strengthened".

"It's a great opportunity for us," he said. While digital is still smaller, as a proportion of revenue, "it has the potential to become double-digit in the coming years."

Ragamalika Karthikeyan said The News Minute was planning beyond revenue to building a community of readers. "It is going to be the future, and we realise being dependent on advertising won't work.

"There needs to be a balance where we prioritise whether we do good journalism or work as a business."

Priya Bubna reported that newest platform, The Morning Context newsletter has "paid from day one".

"COVID struck after two months, but it's been great," she says.

• Digital Media India continues on Wednesday and Thursday.

Pictured: Daniel Mussinghoff of BildPlus and Siddharth Varadarajan from TheWire.com