Mediahuis Ireland is aiming to double its digital subscriptions to 200,000 in five years, according to its chief executive.
The Irish Independent and Belfast Telegraph launched their paywalls at the start of 2020 and reached the 100,000 mark this month.
However CEO Peter Vandermeersch said a huge change was needed after the Mediahuis takeover of Independent News and Media (INM) in 2019.
“There was an editorial split in print versus online,” Vandermeersch told Press Gazette, noting that there was a reliance on page views and digital ads.
“I said we have to build a quality brand across print and digital – and we have to ask for money.”
Under INM, the publisher had attempted to set up a paywall on three occasions: in 2008, 2015 and 2017.
“I was told it wouldn’t work again,” Vandermeersch said. “But we didn’t get cold feet when we realised page views and advertising income would decrease.
“After launching the paywall in February 2020, our editor predicted we’d reach 125 subscribers in one month. In the first week, we reached 2,000 subscribers.”
By the end of 2021, Mediahuis Ireland had hit 50,000 subscribers and it has been attaining more than 10,000 per year since.
The Irish Independent and Belfast Telegraph both have a “premium” offer with full access to the website and app plus puzzles, and “premium+” which also includes digital replicas of the print editions of multiple titles plus archives.
The Belfast Telegraph premium tier currently costs £3 per month (£7.99 full price) with premium+ at £4 (rising to £9.99), while the Irish Independent’s prices are listed as €0.77 (£0.65) per week and €1.90 (£1.62) at full price, or up to €2.67 (£2.27) to add access to the 13 local e-papers that sit within its brand online and free use of walking app RouteYou Plus.
A close collaboration between editorial and retention teams is key to obtaining subscribers, Vandermeersch said.
“We feed data to journalists on a daily basis, telling them what stories convert into subscriptions,” he said.
He added that through 25 newsletters across both brands – including subscription-only iterations – the retention team is hot on “reminding” audiences what they are paying for.
‘How can you prove you have engaged readers? Because they pay for it’
The main financial advantage to the paywall, powered by Flip-Pay, is being dependent on readers rather than “up to 500 advertisers,” Vandermeersch explained.
“We are seeing advertisers are interested in engaged readers now, not page views,” he said.
“How can you prove to advertisers you have engaged readers? Because they pay for it.”
He added a paywall is “a lifeboat for the future of journalism”, but this doesn’t mean all content must be blocked off. Mediahuis offers 40% of its content for free.
“People need to know your journalism, and then you bring them to the paywall.”
An awareness of what drives subscriptions is also important, with Vandermeersch noting both unique news and local news converts readers into subscribers, and this subscription rate is highest at the weekends.
“It’s because journalists don’t have to follow the breaking news at weekends, but cover unique stories like in-depth crime analysis or an interview. Now our weekly journalists are looking at this strategy.”
Special offers can also drive sign-ups.
“It’s about attracting people with low offers. The best offer we’ve done is a digital package for €1 [£0.85], but we lose 70-80% of subscribers when we raise the price.”
It’s important to “ladder” the price to bring readers in at a low cost, and increase the price every three months, Vandermeersch said.
Next steps: How to increase ARPU
“We’re at 100,000 subscribers, but the average revenue per user [ARPU] should be two times what we have now.”
Mediahuis aims to achieve higher revenue by bundling content under its digital brands, such as adding value through additional app access, “like the New York Times with its games”, Vandermeersch said. “We offer access to RouteYou, a walking app.”
From here, the publisher must work out how to add even more value to a subscription package, so readers pay “up to €22 [£18.79] a month in a couple of years”.
“That will be the challenge for the next five years,” Vandermeersch said.
One future revenue-boosting strategy will be the paywalling of crime content, which is “being consumed to a high level”, Vandermeersch said.
Evidence of crime consumption is also seen in the success of free tabloid Sunday World’s Crime World podcast, which the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report cited as the only Irish newsroom podcast to feature in the Spotify overall top ten charts.
“We want to ask the readers for contribution to this,” Vandermeersch said. “We will likely introduce a paywall for our crime content in the fourth quarter of this year, at the earliest.”
Audio is ‘most important’ new subscription strategy
The audio element is the “most important” subscription strategy being developed at the moment, with its three “main” podcasts – Crime World, The Indo Daily and Indo Sport – yielding a “substantial” revenue.
“I’d say 10-12% of digital income comes from podcasts. This was only about 3% last year,” Vandermeersch said.
“We have a great sponsoring model, so our podcasts are making money,” he added, noting that alongside the trio of podcasts, there are up to seven “specialised” smaller ones.
The publisher recently launched a podcast about personal finance, and in a year’s time Vandermeersch is hoping Mediahuis will offer 30 podcasts.
The team is also leaning into video podcasting, building an additional two studios on top of the two it already has.
Meanwhile Vandermeersch is “happy” if events break even, but said this is not the main focus of the company right now.
The 70:30 revenue flip
MediaHuis aims to generate 70% of its revenue from digital by 2030 – one year ago the split was 70% print and 30% digital.
Half of digital revenue at Mediahuis is currently generated from subscriptions, with the other half from digital advertising.
However, as it stands, print advertising is up to “five times more important than our digital advertising”, Vandermeersch said, raising concerns about the company’s belief that by 2030 “most of the weekly print [circulation] will be gone”.
“One of the big challenges is significantly increasing our digital advertising in the next couple of years,” he added.
“The strategy is to go digital as fast as possible, but managing that whole transition is the real challenge.”
Despite this, Mediahuis remains ambitious, with a goal to double its subscriber count to 200,000 in another five years.
“It would be a failure if we didn’t reach that number in a market of seven million people,” said Vandermeersch.
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