Ways to increase digital subscribers: Insights from dpa’s DRIVE initiative

While at an annual innovation award ceremony for newspapers, Meinolf Ellers realised his frustration with the print industry. As a jury member, he kept awarding these initiatives for three years but in reality, he never saw any real result. “We kept honouring great innovation projects, especially ones about digital transformation. But I didn’t see any progress in its transformation,” he recalls.

The numbers reflected his concern. Print subscriptions kept plummeting and the revenue generated from digital advertisements was not enough to sustain newsrooms. “Subsidising print distribution or bringing VAT to zero for a dying product is also not useful. Daily printed newspapers will go out of the market with my generation, the boomers.” 

He recognised the need for transformation, to turn these digital readers into subscribers.

If we don’t manage to accelerate the speed in building our digital revenue then our industry will fail

Meinolf Ellers

This spark led to the creation of the Digital Revenue Initiative, or DRIVE, in 2020. 

Ellers was the Chief Digital Officer at the Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH or dpa. They are Germany’s largest news agency and every German news media, public and private, are members. With the DRIVE initiative, regional publishers pool their data together to find joint solutions with AI and analytics to gain more subscribers. 

dpa decided to get Schickler (Highberg since February 2024) on board. Schickler was a known and trusted consultancy brand that had worked on projects with almost all the publishing companies in Germany. Together they started their initiative with three regional media houses, of which only Mittelbayerische Verlag is no longer part, after its acquisition by Passauer Neue Presse.

The initiative works by pooling together the data from all the participating publishers. Their algorithm then has a better performance rate by (a) putting all content into topic models, (b) personalising content to the reader and (c) constructing individualised pricing and newsletters to better their chances at converting readers into subscribers. 

So far they are offering their service to 30 publishers out of an estimated 90 publishers in the market. Their partners are small and medium-sized regional media players from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. These regional publications don’t have the capacity or the financial backing to compete alone with bigger players to implement large changes. 

Process

With DRIVE, the news organisation pays €4500 a month to get data analytics. “[The price] is equivalent to a data analyst’s monthly salary. With this money, you either hire one data analyst who is more or less isolated in your organisation or become a member of DRIVE where you get different insights tailored to your organisation but also learn from other members.” From the initial start with three publishers to the current 30, the DRIVE initiative was able to rely on trust and on results.

All publishers trusted dpa and by extension DRIVE. This helped the DRIVE initiative face less resistance from publishers. Trust also helped the publishers to share their data with a third-party member. Ellers says that they were able to bring different publishers to a common ground that helped neutralise any conflict and lessen the competition between participating members. 

But apart from the publishers’ trust in sharing their data with dpa and Schickler, they also looked for something in return. Industry executives knew that digital transformation was possible by using AI and data analytics. Yet implementing this in large corporations was not an easy endeavour for them to do alone. And this prompted them to join the DRIVE initiative. 

Results

1. Quality media time

The first challenge that the DRIVE initiative rectified was making the editors understand what needed to be changed. “The key problem of digital transformation in newspapers is culture. Many people still have print DNA, which they use to write and fill pages.”

In German, the word for newspapers is Zeitung, which has the word time in it. DRIVE wanted to make the editors realise their job wasn’t to fill their website with many articles. It was to make the reader spend more time reading their article.

By tracking the time spent, DRIVE was able to provide insights on two levels. On the organisational level, they were able to show with their data that readers who spent more time were more likely to purchase subscriptions. On a micro level, they could track the performance of certain stories and see what their readers like more.

This strategy has worked for major outlets. Despite cutting the weekly stories, around one-third by the Guardian and one-fourth by Le Monde, both outlets saw an increase in their subscribers. NYT achieved its goal of 10 million subscribers a year before their set deadline of 2025, in major part by focusing on the content the readers want and delivering them.

2. Implementing user needs 

Ellers says that after launching the DRIVE initiative he got in touch with Dmitry Shishkin, a media manager who came up with User Needs while working for the BBC. Shishkin came up with six categories that correspond to the audience’s needs. By implementing the user needs model, newsrooms can deliver more value. “All DRIVE newsrooms use the concept of User Needs and we have introduced algorithms to help editors identify them.”

Ellers notes that just introducing these concepts within any organisation is not enough. Efforts are taken to implement it. “For the last two years, we have been in a big process to re-educate editors and train them to apply user needs. [They need to] analyse the data with the concept of user needs to see if they are on the right path.”

These efforts help the DRIVE analytics to target and eradicate ghost articles – pieces that have been produced with a lot of effort and cost, yet they generate none or negligible outcomes in terms of reader’s media time or converting them into paying subscribers. 

(Again, this strategy has successfully been used by others. The main daily newspaper of South Carolina, the Post and Courier, decided to eliminate 20-30% of the articles they deemed uninteresting. They went from a daily output of 50/65 articles to 30 in-depth articles. This focused approach helped them gain 250% more digital subscribers).

All the efforts of the DRIVE initiative, combining publishers’ data and providing analytics, are targeted to amplify digital subscriptions and revenue for regional media houses. “Our only chance to survive is to bring to local journalism a user experience that is as cool and convenient as the user experience of Spotify and TikTok.”

Source of the cover photo: Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash