
Consumer advice brand Which? is focusing on becoming a destination for people seeking solutions and advice on everyday problems as AI summaries begin to hit search referrals.
Which? has a part-paywalled website featuring consumer news, expert advice and product reviews, plus a subscriber app and five magazines.
They are: the main Which? title which is now published 11 times a year with a bumper December/January issue, the bi-monthly money, travel and tech editions, and a gardening magazine which is published ten times a year.
In the brand’s 2024 annual report, chief executive Annabel Hoult said: “We have ambitions to double our impact for UK consumers and secure Which?’s long-term future by 2030. This will require a step change in how our business delivers solutions for consumers and we are ready to make this happen.”
Which? is part of the Consumers’ Association charity, meaning all profits generated by the content part of the business funds the mission to “make everyday life simpler, safer and fairer”.
Nonetheless director of content Jenni Allen told Press Gazette: “Fundamentally, we are still competing in a highly commercial landscape, and there’s no escaping that.”
Which? sees AI Overviews for 25% of top search keywords
According to Allen, AI summaries are appearing in Google search results for about 25% of the brand’s top keyword search terms.
She said this means they have seen an increase in zero-click searches in which they or their keywords appear, but users don’t click through to the website because they got enough information from Google.
[Read more: How Google AI Overviews is fuelling zero-click searches for top publishers]
Which had a UK audience of 4.1 million in June according to Ipsos iris – roughly steady year on year. Its peaks in the past year were in November (5.5 million) and January (5.8 million).
The most affected areas for Which? are informational areas providing unpaywalled help and advice on consumer rights: “what to do if something goes wrong or you want to claim compensation,” as Allen put it.
“Those sorts of search terms, the AI Overviews are there and people are looking at them and not clicking elsewhere,” she said.
But Which? has a “degree of resilience” in its “higher value areas,” Allen added.
“So sectors that we really cover with our product reviews, like technology, home and garden, we see AI Overviews far less, and so you’re not seeing quite the same impact… And at the moment, our more commercially valuable areas are holding relatively steady, but we know that this is only the start, really, so it’s very much part of our strategy to be looking at what more it is we need to do to fundamentally become the destination.”
That work includes a “general investment in brand” via press coverage in other outlets about Which? testing and advice, and new potential partnerships with other membership brands. Campaigning storytelling, for example about what big tech platforms should be doing to stop scam ads or unsafe products from being sold on their platforms, is also “an important part” of its brand positioning.
Allen has not seen the Which? paywall being breached by Google’s AI Overviews – but said she has seen hallucinations that appear to suggest Which? has recommended a product that it has not.
Which? focusing on adding ‘real value’ to subscribers and other consumers
Currently a lot of work is going on at Which? in areas where it can add “real value” and fill coverage gaps as it builds up its offering to keep people engaged for longer. Allen said a lot of this is around providing solutions, not just content.
She said this is “something which sets us apart from some other publishers in that it’s not the kind of journalism for journalism’s sake. It really is journalism with a purpose and an outcome”.
Which? has 218,032 full access subscribers, plus 139,828 digital-only subscribers.
They skew older and a bit better off than average – subscribers who have been with Which? between one and five years are between 35 to 64, and longer-established subscribers are older than that – since the brand generally helps people “make decisions about products and services they need when generally speaking they’re more established in life, like they own their own home”.
But it is reaching 18 to 34-year-olds through its social accounts, Allen added, which is useful both for brand building but also to fulfil the Which? purpose of helping consumers as broadly as possible.
The Which? 2024 annual report noted that “the decline in paying subscribers has started to slow from its long-term – and market-led – trend, reflecting the efforts to improve the value of the subscription”.
Subscriptions (although they often call them memberships) make up around 80% of Which?’s income despite diversification into areas like affiliate links and the licensing of its recommendation logos.
This means, Allen said, that “having the content that makes people want to subscribe and then that keeps them paying on a regular basis is really at the heart of a lot of what we have to look at when we are deciding what to cover, how to cover it, what portfolio of products we should have”.
Allen said Which? has been trying to add value to subscribers in a variety of ways, including via extra perks and discount deals.
“You’ve got to continue to increase the value that you give people over time and that actually is a real challenge,” she said. “It’s one of the main challenges that my team deals with.
“People only want to buy a washing machine every so often, or a new television, et cetera. So what is it we can give them of real value that is well worth paying for as content 365 days a year? And so that’s been quite a shift for us in terms of really looking at what everyday items and everyday situations people want help with that we can uniquely help them with.”
Those everyday situations include anything to do with cleaning and whether branded products are worth the extra money, or the kitchen – for example kitchen knives and tin openers.
“It may be that you’re not buying them every day, but they’re the sort of thing you interact with every day, so if it’s not right it’s really annoying,” Allen said.
Food and taste tests has also been an area of growth.
Allen also cited “some of those more complicated, complex areas of consumer choice where we think there’s still a gap in terms of really trusted advice and help”, specifically health and wellbeing and retirement.
On the latter, Allen said: “As much as we are known for our product reviews, the way in which we assess services is a really significant part of what we do and the help we can give our members… there’s a big advice gap, if you like, in the market at the moment where people with sizeable pension pots but not ultra high wealth are really finding that there’s just not a source of advice there for them.”
Most of the “uniquely original insight from us that translates into a recommendation” is all placed behind the website paywall, Allen said, saying these are the areas seeing investment.
These are the things that “will drive people to subscribe and retain so we can see it’s sufficiently valued by our membership to be something that if we made it freely available, it would undermine our membership proposition,” she added.
“There are some areas where we will have done original unique research and recommendations, but it is freely available because actually it doesn’t hold that same kind of value for our paying members. So an example of that might be in areas of our money advice and help and recommendations.”
In those areas, the commercial route is through partnerships, for example showing people a comparison service to take out a recommended policy after reading insurance reviews.
Which? tries to avoid ‘high churn’ subscriber model and people cancelling after purchase decision
A digital subscription costs £79 per year or £8.99 monthly, while full access to digital plus the main Which? magazine posted 11 times a year costs £99 annually or £11.99 a month.
Which? has taken steps to move away from a “high churn model” that it was “particularly susceptible to” when offering a £1 trial subscription period.
“It was just such an easy revolving door for people,” Allen said, with people able to sign up to get the short-term information they needed about a washing machine purchase, for example, and then cancel before the price went up.
Which? is instead now offering a monthly price that works out higher than the annual and Allen said this meant around 60% of people are signing up for the yearly option.
“Your ARPU [average revenue per user] comes down in the near term, but the lifetime value goes up considerably because obviously you’ve got somebody for that 12 month period, you’ve got a longer period of time to demonstrate the value of that membership,” she said.
An effort has also been made to ensure people can easily cancel their paid subscription but stay as a free member so that they might be more likely to resubscribe in the future.
“There will always be a degree of members who move in and out of membership and that isn’t necessarily wrong,” Allen said, “but what we want to do is allow people to do that more easily and keep them in the ecosystem.
“So to date, it’s been cancel, off you go, rejoin. So we’re probably paying to acquire them again, it’s really inefficient, whereas actually [now] it’s like, actually, no downgrade, but keep a level of free membership so that when you want to come back in, you can do so really easily – we haven’t got any acquisition costs and we can continue to communicate with you.”
Which? is now looking at experimenting with more flexible approaches to the paywall, whether by topic or time, “really acknowledging that we’ve got to meet people on their terms,” Allen said. To date it has been a one-size-fits-all approach.
Which? has also built up its newsletter offering (a mix of both paid and free) and now has more than 1.4 million subscribers.
Which? print magazines: Less frequent but more utility
The changes can also apply to the print products. Allen cited the money magazine which went from being monthly to going out every two months with a “weightier, more substantial” edition last August.
In the months without a magazine, Which? sends out an in-depth email newsletter from its money experts instead and has also bolstered its regular money expert live events where people can get their questions answered.
“We’re reflecting ont he fact that what people don’t like about a magazine experience: when they come through, they don’t have time to read them, and they mount up, and you get this terrible sense of pressure. ‘Oh my goodness, I’m paying for this, they’ve arrived, and I’m not reading them’,” Allen said.
“Actually, based on the feedback, offering up something less frequently, but with even more utility to it, is very much what people are looking for from that kind of financial coverage that our money magazine covers.”
But overall print remains “really important” for Which?, Allen said, because “it’s the ongoing, tangible manifestation of the brand… I think particularly as a subscription/member organisation/publisher, that regular sense of unsolicited value, that not everything is just because I’m looking for something – ‘actually, this is Which? helping me when I’m in discovery mode and I just want to lean back and find out something I didn’t know’. That’s what our magazines do for us.”
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