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The latest issue of The Grub Street Journal asks: Why won’t print just lie down and die? Answers from industry insiders were less about zombie print, more about making print work as a valuable part of the modern media mix.
If you’re worried we’re reaching ‘peak subscription’ (again), research from Toolkits should bring you some comfort. A survey of US consumers shows that people who already subscribe to digital publications are adding more subscriptions to their portfolios.
In research conducted in October with NRG, 29% of subscribers said the total number of digital publication subscriptions they own has increased over the past 12 months. Only 7% say it has decreased. The number of people paying for multiple subscriptions has risen to 81%, up from 71% in 2022.
And good news if your target audience is younger rich dudes: men, people earning over $100,000 per year, and 25 to 34-year-olds are the most likely to have more than one subscription. News, entertainment, sports, cooking and lifestyle categories proved the most popular among subscribers for the second year running.
Should publishers be focusing on upselling existing subscribers or are there still lots of new digital subscribers out there? What’s your subscription priority?
Condé is ditching plans to build out an in-house video studio and cutting about 270 jobs. Acknowledging a lack of control over ‘platform algorithms’ or the impact of A.I. on search traffic, CEO Roger Lynch said in a note to staff: “We believe our long-term success will be determined by growing the many areas that we can control, including subscriptions and e-commerce, where we directly own the relationship with our audience.” He’s not wrong.
On the day the UK’s genius PM hosts the genius CEO Elon Musk at a global summit on the future of AI regulation, this is a useful reminder that publishers seeking to cash in on the benefits of AI will need to put some work into bringing their readers with them. In a survey conducted by subscription app Readly, only 10% believed AI should be used in the news business… probably less after they see Rishi and Elon together.
Since launching in 2016, boom saloon has used the profits from its magazine and creative studio to fund a series of community projects. In a move that reminds us that memberships are not only for the biggest newsstand publshers, they’ve introduced a membership scheme that delivers event invites, discounts, archive access and the opportunity to contribute to the future direction of projects.
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