Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris. We were off for the UK Easter weekend — and missed a tonne of news. So here’s a quick catch-up in addition to our latest episode!
We’ve already had some brilliant entries in for the second year of our Publisher Newsletter Awards. See the categories and enter (for free) before the 3rd May deadline.
On this week’s episode of the podcast we hear from The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters Maire Bonheim and David Alexander, its deputy head of newsletters. They tell us why The Telegraph and others are prioritising their newsletter portfolio, how newsletters can be used at different stages of the subscriber funnel, and what they’ve learned from a community-focused approach to their Politics newsletter.
Bonheim explains: “If people become a subscriber to The Telegraph after clicking on a link in a newsletter, they’re 50% more likely to still be a subscriber a year later. So we definitely do see that being engaged with newsletters, and subscribing on the basis of a newsletter… really creates a high quality reader who is likely to remain engaged with the telegraph long term.”
In the news roundup we had a good chat about The Atlantic’s announcement that it is profitable and has hit the 1m subscriber milestone. We discuss the extent to which investing in high-quality content (longreads, mostly) creates a virtuous circle when it comes to growing subscriptions.
We went deep into the potential synergy between the Independent’s ecommerce strategy and BuzzFeed’s spin-offs’ potential when this first got mooted, and I’ve only become more interested in the overall opportunity since then. In short, it’s a scale play designed to allow advertisers to buy across the combined network — but one that seems more predicated on complementary audiences than most scale plays.
We spoke about how The Atlantic is seeing success on Apple News+ on this week’s podcast — but now Apple appears to be making its move (err, again) for the paid podcast ecosystem. Given all the moves by publishers to begin monetising their podcasts more effectively over the past few months, it seems like a smart time to do it.
I feel like the standfirst in this article is pure Peter Houston-bait: “The media face so many challenges that it is hard to focus on just one problem, Kritasha Gupta, head of business development at the Financial Times, tells Ashley Norris. But, she emphasises, we need to go always go back to what the audiences want.” Audience first!
More from Media Voices
