The American business site Forbes is planning a “massive” launch of paid newsletters, according to Axios. This means that Forbes will recruit 20-30 well-known journalists and share the income from the subscriptions with them 50/50.
“The idea is to create a platform that offers writers all of the marketing, editorial and salary benefits of being a part of Forbes’ newsroom, but gives them enough editorial independence to ensure that their audiences follow them over to Forbes.”
The willingness to pay for media is high in Norway, according to a survey from Medietall in collaboration with Kantar. The largest growth opportunities are found among the younger Norwegians, and they prefer digital subscriptions. According to the survey, only 4 percent of Norwegians under the age of 45 prefer a paper newspaper to a digital subscription. In the age group 60+, the figure is 19%.
“The proportion who have a newspaper subscription increases with age, but the growth is seen especially among the younger ones. Half of those between the ages of 18 and 30 now state that they have access to at least one newspaper subscription, and the plus subscriptions appeal to a large extent to this group. ”
British The Daily Telegraph has increased their number of digital subscribers since June 30 by 21.8 per cent, which means that 18,166 net readers chose to subscribe.
“We’re here to serve our readers and keep them informed and help them navigate what is a challenging and complex time.”
UK-based Together Price, a digital identity platform that helps manage group subscription plans, to tackle growing subscription fatigue, recently exceeded the crowdfunding goal of €200K in 48 hours after the launch of equity crowdfunding on Crowdcube.
“In March 2020, Together Price recorded a 90% increase in the new sign-ups compared to the previous month. This growth was further reinforced in November when the number of subscribers reached 1 million.”
The newspaper ended the third quarter with about 600,000 subscriptions to NYT Cooking, while total digital-only subscriptions stood at 6.06 million. Now, amidst a surge in traffic due to lockdowns on restaurants, he New York Times has launched a multichannel campaign to promote NYT Cooking, in order to further increase subscriptions.
“NYT Cooking’s web traffic surged 40% to 113 million unique users last year, including 31 million who visited in December, according to its metrics.”
The Nordic media market is driven by subscriptions, Mediavision states, and subscriptions are now the dominant business model, in terms of customer expenses, in all categories, ie audio, video and text.
“Mediavision can conclude that the Nordic media industry is highly subscription driven. In all categories, this is the dominating business model and accounts for most of the households’ monthly media spend.”
Swedish ‘All-you-can-read’ digital magazine app Readly has released its 2020 trend report. Over the course of 2020, 99 million digital magazine issues were accessed on the platform, with the average subscriber reading 13 magazines a month. One finding is that foreign titles account for 20 percent of all read magazines among subscribers globally.
“Overall, perhaps the most telling statistics are that back issues and foreign magazines amount to 40 percent of all titles read. This should give confidence to publishers that their back issue catalog is becoming increasingly valuable […]”
According to a new survey by Northwestern University of nearly 1,400 members of the U.S. news media, 81.2% said they were “very concerned” about the future sustainability of local news. The same respondents see reader revenue as one of the business models holding the most promising path forward for local news.
“Asked which new business model holds the most promising path forward, 26.8% chose conversion from commercial to nonprofit status while 24.8% cited a shift to reliance on reader revenue such as subscriptions, and just 7.1% picked growing advertising revenue. The option that drew the most support was “all of the above,” with 36.4%.”
