Who’s Got the Subscribers?
Who’s Got the Subscribers?
Good morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Are You Engaged? It is now Week 8 of quarantine, and it’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this newsletter for two months. Thanks to everyone for reading and subscribing so far—it really means a lot to know people are at the other end of this thing each week. And if you have any feedback or would like to see anything new or different here, please send me a note!
A quick roundup of media-related news.
First, the bad. Layoffs continued across media organizations over the past week. On April 28th, The Daily Beast reported that the New York Post had laid off more than a dozen staff members, with even more furloughed. Then, on April 30th, the New York Post itself ran a story reporting that ViacomCBS laid off potentially more than 100 employees as part of their merger. The Post had reported at the end of 2019 on an initial round of layoff immediately following the merger between the companies, so this latest round can either be seen as an extension of that process or an acceleration due to COVID-19. And on May 1st, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that TheSkimm let go 20% of its 130-person staff, noting that the company was planning to make only one round of layoffs during the pandemic, paying laid off employees at least a month of severance as well as covering health insurance costs through July, and that executives would be taking pay cuts to further save of costs.
OK, I’m going to take a deep breath.
Now, for a positive story on the local news level. Last week, Sara Fischer, Axios’s amazing media reporter (seriously, you should follow her on Twitter and subscribe to her Media Trends newsletter—it’s way better than mine), rounded up a few examples of local news organizations across the country banding together to cover COVID-19. Local outlets in Oregon, New Hampshire, and Colorado are all working together to either share resources and coverage plans or promotion plans related to COVID-19 stories. The outlets in Colorado are getting help from the Associated Press and their StoryShare tool, a resource that “allows publishers to republish stories and photos with proper credit.”
As I covered last week, local news continues to be a fascinating space as existing papers fight for survival or innovative, new outlets form either through the help of major tech companies, donations, or through sheer innovation.
Since I went a little long last week (maybe I need an editor?), I’m going to try to really keep it brief here this week. For this newsletter, I’m going to take a look at the state of digital subscriptions.
Much has been made of the rise of digital subscription revenue for publishers over the past three years. Subscriber revenue represents something of a Platonic ideal for a media company: consumers pay money for quality content, thus ensuring that quality content can continue to be made (relatively) free of the whims of advertisers.
The leaders in the race to gain subscribers and create a more sustainable revenue model have been the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. As NiemanLab reported earlier this year, the New York Times passed 5 million digital subscribers across all its offerings, while the Wall Street Journal passed 3.5 million. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is tighter with their numbers but, as NiemanLab speculates, their subscribers may be around the 2 million mark. There are potential issues with the rise of subscription revenue (e.g. profiting on the Trump era, a potential divide between those that can pay for news and those that can’t, the consolidation of media into major players) but overall this is a good, top-level trend for the industry.
In the wake of COVID-19, a lot of coverage has been focused on the success The Atlantic has had in turning its coronavirus coverage into paying subscribers. The Atlantic added 36,000 subscribers in March alone, which is a staggering number. The site has managed to do so while also making some of its essential coverage completely free. (Again, here is where the issue with paywalls comes up: in an emergency, there is an argument to be made that all coverage should be free—but publishers also need to balance revenue to avoid layoffs.)
Bloomberg, too, has also seen success during COVID-19. As Sara Fischer of Axios reported last week, Bloomberg’s subscriptions were up 178% in March, though that figure doesn’t come with any context as to over what period. But that increase makes sense: As the economy and job market struggle, Bloomberg has become essential reading. And Condé Nast, who may have more existential problems in the COVID-19 world, have also seen a marked increase in subscribers across their portfolio of brands (though I assume much of that is weighted by The New Yorker and Wired).
A site who’s subscription business may be in trouble is The Athletic. The sports site was built on a paywall model, going all-in on the fact that consumers would want to pay for coverage of their local teams and markets delivered by the best and most trusted sports journalists. But sports coverage is reliant on the day-to-day attention most fans pay to their teams throughout the season, following the storylines going into and coming out of each game. And right now, there are no games. However, ESPN reported record ratings for its NFL Draft coverage in April and maybe those numbers will prove that a major sports industry like that, during a time when there are not a lot of ways to traditionally cover sports, can still have an impact on driving new subscribers to The Athletic.
I certainly hope so. I’ve long been a fan of The Athletic and have admired their forward-thinking approach to building a media organization. An excellent Bloomberg article from last August detailed how the company measures the success of individual articles, looking primarily at new subscribers per article as well as engagement by existing subscribers. That kind of measurement can mean a lot more to a writer or editor than pure pageviews, sessions, or unique visitors—it lets you see what actual people pay for coverage based on your article (though actual attribution of what specific articles actually lead a reader to sign-up is a whole different story). Knowing that people are paying for your work because they enjoy it so much or find it essential is in many ways the ultimate motivator for a reporter, editor, writer, or really a creative of any kind.
In fact, The Athletic’s model is one I’ve looked to in my job at Artsy. As we’ve moved away from pure traffic and reach stats to measure our value, it’s become more helpful to look at success in terms of what stories are getting people to subscribe to the platform and then looking at groupings of subscribers to see what kinds of stories are keeping them engaged. We’re a totally different business and publication, but it's a helpful and refreshing way of talking about your readers.
All this is to say that, like most of the media world right now, the future of subscriptions is very much up in the air. The major players appear poised to stay ahead of the pack, while a few smaller but still big news organizations make gains of their own; meanwhile, innovative publishers focused on content areas that are hardest hit by COVID-19 may struggle in the months ahead.
Now I’ve gone on too long once again, and I haven’t even touched on the very recent news that YouTube is developing a tool to help publishers sell subscriptions through the online video giant’s platform.
A Little Bit of Culture:
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This week: David Halberstam’s 1979 book The Powers That Be
OK, so this is going to be a little bit of a cheat since I haven’t actually finished this book yet, but good Lord I love David Halberstam’s book The Powers That Be. Halberstam is a giant of 20th century journalism and died in a tragic car accident in 2007. At the time of his death, I’d never read a book of his or even heard of him. I was a pretty ignorant kid. But in my mid-20s, I read The Breaks of the Game—potentially the best sports book written and most likely the best book ever written about basketball—and was immediately in awe of his writing.
Bear with me here, but Halberstam covers his subjects as if he were Tolstoy: everything is told with an all-knowing, but deeply lived perspective, as if he were inhabiting every real life character that passes through the pages of his books. The Powers That Be is about the rise of media in the 20th century and covers print, radio, and television. Quite frankly, it's a book I should have read a long time ago to better understand the history of the business I’ve somehow found my way into over the past 10 years. After starting this book, I truly can’t believe I didn’t know who Henry Luce (the founder of TIME magazine) was—but now I know about him and his monomaniacal love of America and his sentimental attachment to China and how those forces drove what TIME was a publication during its rise to prominence. And, sure, I’d seen videos of talks given at the Paley Center, but did I know who William Paley was? Did I know about his genius in anticipating an audience's needs and desires and his understanding of how to program both high-brow and low-brow content alongside each other? No.
But I do now, and I may need to go longer on this topic in another issue because there is far too much in this book to unpack and analyze—in this moment, when the publishing industry is in peril and there is still so much work to do to rewrite so many of the rules and standards created by the men who inhabit the pages of this book.
I’m bad at this, but here it goes: If you liked what you read today, please share this edition or tell your friends to subscribe.
Also, if you want to read any of my non-newsletter work, you can find the majority of my writing here.