Publishers in German-speaking countries have shared their insights into building paywalled news businesses for a new Press Gazette special report.
Press Gazette’s Ultimate Guide to Reader Revenue Strategies in DACH countries [Germany, Austria and Switzerland] is produced in association with Chargebee and features new insights from leading executives in the region.
German daily tabloid Bild is still growing its digital subscriber base every month and now has more than 800,000 paying online readers.
Like Mail Online in the UK, Bild runs a premium content (or freemium) model with 15% of articles available to subscribers for €7.99 per month. Crucially, Bild bundles Amazon Prime membership with its slightly more expensive €8.99 per subscription.
Die Zeit is one of the few publishers in the region paywalling all its content. It also charges a premium price of €5.85 per week. With 250,000 digital-only subscribers, it has built a sizeable business since first putting its content behind a paywall in 2017.
The title’s managing director Christian Roepke said 2020 was a transformative year for the title as readers sought quality information about the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said: “We had, on that first day of the pandemic, about seven times the reach that we have on a normal day; and it stayed high.
“People were looking for quality information that they could trust – and that’s really what we stand for – and also the amount of trial subscriptions every day increased by a factor of eight compared to before the pandemic.”
He added: “Information on the pandemic was always free, but if you wanted really deep analysis, or a leader column or something, we locked that down. That was really a time where we learned a lot and where we also invested in our newsroom.”
He describes the business as now “subscription first” with reader payments comprising 70% of total digital revenue.
Zeit Online now comprises a 400-strong team, funded mainly by online subscriptions.
He said the title is investing heavily in Tiktok as a way to reach a new audience who may be converted into subscribers in the future.
Payment methods are crucial to reducing churn
When it comes to reducing subscriber churn, he said: “It starts with what choice of payment method you give to people.”
“Direct debit is better than credit card, which is better than Paypal, which is better than invoicing,” he said. “And even if you offer all choices, how do you present the different choices to them so that they would hopefully pick the direct debit option?
“Invoicing is really bad because every invoice is just a reminder to cancel. So it already starts with those things. Then it’s about, do they use our app? Can we get them to subscribe to our newsletters? Because that’s a constant reminder of the great content that we offer.
“And of course we look at what our customers like, and what they do. And we look at different cohorts and see how we can get people from being a once-a-week visitor to a two- or three-times-a-week visitor, or maybe even a daily user of our offerings.
“We call it a ‘daily active user model’, where we look at these different cohorts [within our subscriber base] and then we develop different methods of activating them.”
The Press Gazette Ultimate Guide report also features an interview with head of digital reader revenue at Blick in Switzerland, Adrian Gottwald. Blick charges €9.90 for access to around 300 premium articles per month.
He said: “When we started with Blick Plus we stopped the registration wall because we didn’t want to confuse the users [by having both]. Now we’re working on more personalised cases, for example showing users with a low likelihood to subscribe a registration wall instead of a paywall, or having a metered paywall for them.”
The guide also includes advice on how publishers can reduce subscriber churn from Chargebee‘s Sven Muller and ten key tactics for publishers looking to increase conversion and subscriptions.
This includes advice to cater to diverse reader needs by offering multiple pricing tiers – daily, weekly, monthly and annual plans – as well as metered paywalls, bundles (e.g. digital and print) and free trials to attract different audiences.
Download the Press Gazette Ultimate Guide to Reader Revenue Strategy in DACH Countries
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