Audience revenue strategy: Pay attention to retention

Audience revenue strategy: Pay attention to retention

While finding new customers and achieve in audience acquisition can be rather exciting for the commercial and marketing teams, it’s also crucial for the media companies to pay attention to audience retention, said participants at the 8th Data & AI for Media Conference in London 1 to 2 November 2018.

Tor Jacobsen, SVP Consumer Marketing & Revenue at Schibsted Media, says the Sweden and Norway-based media group has made amazing results at digital revenues in the recent years and they are aiming to achieve 1 billion NOK (Norwegian Kroner) in purely digital revenues in 2020. However, he added while it’s culturally more exciting to talk about conversions, it’s also very important to keep an eye on retention. He believes the quality of the products is at the heart of the issue and the marketing team should work hand-in-hand with the product team.

Rouven Leuener, Group Head of Digital Product at Neue Zürcher Zeitung, says the Switzerland-based media group mainly facing the German-speaking market has yielded impressive results in the optimized approach to their paygate and better engagement though content recommendation. Admitting the main focus of his group has been placed on conversion rather than retention recently, Leuener sees the importance of it. He adds that Spotify and Netflix has offered good lessons in audience revenue strategies and the media companies now need to do their homework and take action.

Gadi Lahav, Head of Product at Financial Times, says the FT has been working hard in keeping its readers and its strategies have been working well. He says in terms of retention, it’s important to take action even before the readers have the idea of cancelling or not-renewing their membership because once the idea is there, it would already be too late. possible actions include newsletter, in-product communication, even a simple reminder of “your payment method is about to expire.” All these can be achieved by machine learning their readers behavioral patterns from the data set.

These speakers are participating at a panel discussion at the 8th Data & AI for Media Conference. The conference is for media and data practitioners who are seeking to earn revenue and expand audiences by leveraging data and artificial intelligence. The 2-day event features a powerful format of general sessions with top-notch speakers, plus interactive, small-group breakout sessions called “huddles.”