Principles of paid content

The surest catalyst for change in a news organisation is a crisis. When things are going well – or at least not too badly – there is always the temptation to defend what you have, rather than risk something new. At the World Cup, England showed how limiting a strategy that can be.

But when your back is against the wall, you don’t have a choice – you have to do something different. It doesn’t make it easy though. Sometimes you have to admit you were wrong in the past

Credit then is due to Piers North, the ceo of Reach, for saying in the UK publisher’s latest stock market release, published last month: “… We are building a stronger business by investing in digital subscriptions and video, securing greater independence from referral traffic. Our future will be less about volume and more about original content, distinctive brands and securing better returns.”

For a company whose very name, and previous strategy, embodied the traffic era of publishing this is quite a shift. But, boy, did they need to make it. Their release said that its digital revenues, which were down 11% overall, “continued to be impacted by lower referral volumes, mainly from Google. This meant that on-platform page views declined 40% year-on-year and indirect revenues, which are volume sensitive, declined 16.2%.”

If your digital revenues, realistically the only driver of future growth, are down so significantly you have to do something. However, to pivot from an advertising-based model to a subscription one is not something easily accomplished. The whole ethos of the company needs to change, from its editorial strategy to what it is selling and the way it does it.

This will be difficult to accomplish but Reach has made a decent start. Already it has 40,000 subscribers to its brands, which have quietly been introducing paywalls since last year. To really make the shift though, it needs substantially to change its offer to readers. As North said in an interview with Press Gazette, putting up a paywall is very different from building a subscription business. From an easy-come-easy-go experience, it must make its titles indispensable.

How do you do that?

Here’s a quick bit of free consulting advice on what kind of content people will pay for. We are just talking about the journalism here. There is a lot more around it of course, from marketing and pricing strategies to events and community-based products.

I make no apologies that the content approach I’m going to espouse is very much from an internal, publisher-output perspective. Meeting user needs is crucial and I am a great admirer of that approach, but if you’re in a hurry, as Reach is, you need to do something right now. These dictums are also not just conjured out of nowhere – they are the result of studying successful content at many different publishers around the world.

At the highest level, the content that people will pay for must be one of the three Es: it has to be one or more of exclusive, expert or emotive.

It’s pretty obvious what exclusive means. Survey after survey have reported that people will pay for content they can’t get elsewhere. This does not just mean scoops. They are great – more of them, please – but it’s difficult to build a newsroom operation around them. As an editor, or as a business, you simply can’t guarantee that they will land frequently or regularly. But you can build your content strategy around exclusive opinions, distinctive formats, and scoops of interpretation. The maxim should be to be different in everything you do.

Michael Gove, the former British minister who is now editor of The Spectator magazine, could not have been more wrong when he said a decade ago that “people have had enough of experts”. Every bit of performance data and content analysis I’ve seen has suggested the opposite: readers really value expertise, both of outside experts and of journalists themselves. Unsurprisingly the public are drawn to people who know what they are talking about. Seek them out and let them talk or write, and promote the ones you have in the newsroom.

Finally, emotive – people want to feel something. This doesn’t mean playing with their emotions but is primarily about producing content that builds a human connection. Stories should always have a people element, whether they are about some government policy change or a diplomatic storyline. What does this development mean for real people? If your reporters file a story without a case study, send it right back to them.

Of course, these principles serve as a starter. There is a lot more detail to be worked through in the implementation and every publication has its unique areas of advantage (at least, they should!). But as general rules go, these are a good starting point. Then it’s a matter of talking to subscribers and crunching the data to see if your hunches were right.

One last pointer for Reach: subscription is a long game. Be prepared to wait for months, maybe even years for decisions you make now to pay off.

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