Newsletters, Paywalls, and Sustainable Revenue? Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
There's no shortage of media companies jumping into subscriptions — from The Daily Beast to TechCrunch and The Information — but what lessons can be learned from early pioneers of digital subscriptions? In this interview we speak with E&E News, which has provided digital-only subscriptions for two decades, and learn how they acquire subscribers.
Guest
Kate Ling
Director of Content Strategy & Communications
Kate Ling leads E&E News' content and communications strategy. She directs E&E's audience and product development, marketing campaigns, media relations and brand awareness. She previously spent more than six years as a Greenwire and E&E Daily reporter covering Congress, the Energy Department, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, science research and technology commercialization. A Denver, Colo., native, she covered Congress for Colorado's Greeley Tribune and local politics for The Colorado Statesman. She has a bachelor's degree in political science and humanities from Yale University and a master's in journalism from Northwestern University.
Key Takeaways
- 1Encourage people to share content. Word-of-mouth is a key acquisition channel.
- 2Find the people who need your content to do their job; build advocates
- 3Free content trials can help identify good leads for sites with paywalls
- 4It's critical to provide user-friendly subscription trials. Make sign up easy.
- 5Ensure alignment between what your trial offers and what people want
- 6Perceived value comes down to quality of content and user experience
- 7For editorial teams suspicious of analytics — analytics complement experience
- 8Stay true to your brand and your target audience
Listen on Spotify
Full Interview
Patrick: Hi, everyone. I'm here with Kate Ling of the E&E News team. Thanks for joining today, Kate.
Kate: Sure, no problem.
Patrick: To start off, I was wondering if you could share an overview of E&E News ?
Kate: E&E News is a subscriber publication that covers energy and environment issues based here in Washington DC, but we have reporters all over the country, and also look into key international issues. It depends almost exclusively on subscriptions for our revenue. We do have a little bit of ad revenue, but we are very different than most of our colleagues in that sense in the journalism world. It has helped us certainly ride a lot of the ups and downs that the rest of the industry is experiencing, but it has its share of issues in terms of my particular job of getting content out there, and making sure that the right people are seeing it.
Published on February 8, 2019