Amedia publishes 130 newspapers located throughout the country of 5.5 million people. About 40 percent of the population, some 2 million people, are daily readers of Amedia’s products.
The publisher has about 829,000 subscribers. Around 580,000 of these are digital-only subscribers, and the rest have bundled subscriptions which includes print, Janne Rygh, an Editorial Content Developer at Amedia, told our Newsroom Summit participants in Zurich last week.
As of 22 October, Amedia has more than 2.5 million registered aID accounts (Amedia’s single sign-on accounts used across their publications). Even better, 87 percent of all their pageviews come from logged in users visiting the publisher’s sites, “which means we know a lot about our users,” Rygh said.
Despite these impressive numbers, Amedia, like news publishers everywhere, faces a rapidly ageing subscriber base.
Nearly 100,000 subscribers are older than 80
“We have 829,000 subscribers across all our local newspapers, and nearly half of them – 405,000 – are over the age of 60. That’s a big problem,” Rygh said.
Even more alarming, of those 405,000, nearly 100,000 (97,000) are older than 80, she said. In total, they have more subscribers who are over 80 than they have who are younger than 40.
“This a problem we really need to address if we are to have a future,” Rygh said.
As with many other publishers, this is not a new issue, and she noted Amedia has made many attempts to increase their younger subscribers in recent years.
They have done this through extensive research, analysis and making various editorial efforts that target younger readers, Rygh said. Meanwhile, they have tried to maintain high traffic numbers by creating content they know through their metrics appeals to their largest base – older readers.
‘You become what you measure’
“We have focused on these young subscribers for years. So why don’t we succeed? That’s a headache. I believe one of the reasons is that you become what you measure,” Rygh said.
And what Amedia was measuring were metrics that skewed in favour of their older readers. When metrics dipped, journalists tended to default to producing content they knew older readers would respond to.
For example, one business editor routinely wrote stories about successful local business people who were often middle aged. These articles were popular with older readers, but not younger ones.
Amedia’s north star metric is how many subscribers read at least one story every day for at least 10 seconds, Rygh said.
“It’s a formula. We know that the more you read, the less likely you are to churn,” she said. “Our north star is subscribers who read. But this is a problem, because we have more subscribers over the age of 80 than we have under the age of 40. We also have more than half who are over the age of 60. So it is they who get to decide what content is good content and what content is not.”
Forget older readers, focus only on the younger ones
Earlier this year, Rygh thought of a radically new approach: What if they were to ignore the metrics that are tied to their older readers (and for this, “older” means over the age of 40) and focus only on creating content that would appeal to younger readers, those younger than 40?
Selling this idea to her bosses and editors wasn’t easy, but Rygh eventually got the go-ahead to test her theory at two papers of different sizes. One was Romerikes Blad, among Amedia’s largest papers in the south of Norway, which has 30,000 subscribers and 30 reporters. The other was the much smaller Halden Arbeiderblad, also in southern Norway, which has 8,000 subscribers and 10 reporters.
The front-page editor of the Halden Arbeiderblad agreed to participate on the condition that everything be tracked in real time through the metric database they use, Kilkaya (which was also the sponsor of both this session, and the conference).
Amedia then had Kilkaya make some adjustments to their normal tracking data so as to focus only on younger readers, and excluding older ones.
The early results proved a bit terrifying to the editors. Metrics for what young people were reading were far lower than when older readers were included.
However, the journalists soon realised that to attract younger readers, they needed to write about younger people. So, instead of a successful, middle-aged store owner, the business editor began writing about people like a young woman named Kine who has worked her way up and now runs a store.
The topics that resonate with young readers
“We have been at this for six months, so we don’t think we have all the answers yet, but we do see some things,” Rygh said.
For example, the entire editorial team is now focused on young subscribers.
“When we remove all the metrics and traffic data from the older users, the team ends up focusing more on the young subscribers,” she said.
Seeing the data and the early results, the editorial teams knew that making minor adjustments would not be enough to deliver meaningful results. They needed to completely change the way they work.
The next step was deciding on the kinds of topics they needed to write about every day to actually reach this target group. These include:
- Kindergarten
- Family life
- Health, lifestyle
- Relationships
- Local businesses
- Housing and real estate from young person’s perspective. What’s reachable for them?
- Wallet stories, i.e. “What does this mean for my wallet?”
The aforementioned business editor for example, recently told Rygh that “it’s a lot easier to write articles that target younger audiences and have old people read it than the opposite way around. So that’s what I need to do. I need to leave some old habits behind. I need to say ‘no’ to some stories I would usually do. And I need to target young people.”
Rygh said she also talked with the news editor of Romerikes Blad who told her he understands that this is not only for the reporters. “It is also for me, I have to be more direct in asking ‘Who cares?’ Who am I writing this story for? Am I writing it to please someone? Or am I writing it to actually target the audience we are interested in reaching?”
A win-win situation
Interestingly, the stories aimed at younger readers not only appealed to that group but also the older ones as well. That loyal audience has remained loyal resulting in a win-win situation so far, Rygh said.
“We have more readers in total, and we also manage to reach younger audiences,” she said.
As a bonus, Rygh noted these stories are also helping drive subscriptions. For example, the one above about the middle aged store owner did not result in any new subscriptions. Whereas the one about the young woman who now runs a store, did convert 10 readers into subscribers.
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