On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we speak to John Shields, Director of Podcasts at The Economist. They made the bold move last year to put almost all their podcasts behind a paywall, creating a separate Economist Podcasts+ subscription option.
A year on from the launch of Economist Podcasts+, John discusses what drove the decision, some of the risks and opportunities of charging for audio, and the lessons they’ve learned over the past 12 months.
Here are some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
Setting goals for paywalled podcasts
We had a target for the [paying] listeners we wanted in the first six months, and we hit that – that was 30,000 that we hit. But we’re also very conscious that this is a bet on the longer term. Audio is a bit like print used to be in that publishers like us made a huge mistake in giving away our journalism for free… so it’s a bet that audio is the same.
We also know that we quite likely haven’t nailed the strategy in the first iteration. So we did have those KPIs, but we weren’t straightjacketed by them. Now we’re a year on, we’re already thinking about different things we could do. We’re pleased that we’re out there ahead of the others, and that hopefully gives us a bit of an edge.
There was a worry about how many people are we going to lose in terms of listeners – as producers, that really is a source of anxiety. But in the end, we’ve held onto 80% of our audience in terms of numbers, so that’s really reassuring.
Thinking back to a year ago, how this all felt like such a leap. Now it’s completely normalised, and we’re all getting on with our jobs and enjoying having this much more engaged audience.
Overcoming the challenges of off-platform listening
One of the huge challenges for my colleagues on the product side has been bringing together all the different ways that people will come across us. Most podcast listening is off-platform, and that’s really odd when you think that we’re used to charging money for our journalism in print and online, and that’s in our own ecosystem. Whereas [with podcasts] it’s mostly via Apple and Spotify that people are coming, so you have to devise different user journeys for each of those platforms.
Interestingly, Apple improved that journey this time last year, which was one of the reasons why we felt like it was a good time to start. But on Spotify, the journey is also actually very smooth and intuitive now.
One of the interesting knock-on effects of introducing the paywall though has been that we are seeing more listening on our own platform, our own app. We upgraded the listening experience and added a podcast tab on our app to coincide with this, and we’re constantly trying to improve the listener experience on our own platform.
We’re very ambitious for what we could do in the future, and I’m confident that one of the long-term benefits of having this strategy is, bit by bit, we can get to a point where we have more people in our own ecosystem, and then we’ll know more about them.
Focusing on retention as the year mark approaches
It’s useful to think of your content in two strands, and I certainly intend to be more deliberate about this in the future. You have ambassadorial content as people call it – things that you’re sending out in the world to reel new people in. And also, what can you commission that is there to rub the tummies of your core subscribers? Often, there’ll be a big overlap between the two.
One of the things that we’ve done is started sending out a newsletter to our subscribers reminding them, or pointing out episodes that were particularly strong that they may have missed. Actually that was a brilliant idea, which wasn’t mine, but it’s already been very effective. It’s really increased that engagement aspect.
The best thing about this job is reading the inbox, and I think the hosts and producers all feel the same way, and just opening up that channel a bit more. We always encourage people to email in on the shows, but actually doing it in an email and asking people, pointing out episodes they might like, and suddenly the traffic in the inbox has jumped and we’re getting lovely messages from people. I assume these are going to turn into repeat subscriptions!

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