El Mundo Premium What we did and what we learned in 10 months of paywall business
Gabi Bolognese, Chief Digital Officer, El Mundo Germán Frassa, Digital Product & Audience Development offer, Unidad Editorial
August 18th, 2020 Who we are El Mundo in a nutshell
● Founded in 1989 ● Second largest printed daily newspaper in Spain (80k copies, 650k daily readers). ● Digital top news property in Spain with El País and La Vanguardia (+20m monthly uniques) ● E-replica launched in October 2010 ● Launched its freemium paywall in October 2019 ● Newsroom size: 180
As per Wikipedia: ● The country's 'newspaper of record', along with El País ● Centre-right, with independent and liberal overtones (vs. centre-left El País). ● Played a key role in uncovering a number of corruption and political scandals through the years.
3 Unidad Editorial in a nutshell
● Created in 2007 from the merger of Grupo Recoletos and Unedisa
● Fully owned by Italian media conglomerate RCS MediaGroup, publisher of Corriere della Sera and Gazzetta dello Sport, and organizer of classic Giro di Italia cycling event
● Besides El Mundo, UE is the publisher of the leading Spanish newspapers in sports (Marca) and business (Expansión)
● 2019 Financials: Revenue: 295m € 2019 EBITDA: 48,3m € 2019 EBIT: 37,2m €
4 Paywalls in Spain: A History of Failures
A market leader in content piracy, marred by several false starts:
2002 2010 2014 2019
El País failed Market split over El Mundo's shy A logical scenario hard paywall e-replica kiosks attempt at A digital newspaper Opened the path to El El Mundo’s Orbyt vs. El metered paywalls community fearsome of Mundo as top #1 digital País & ABC’s Kiosco y paid content ...That no one publisher for years más remembers
5 What we did The plan for 2019
Renew the website: Launch a freemium paywall
New front-end framework In coincidence with El Mundo 30th anniversary
February October
March
New look & feel
Art department from print overlooked the new design El Mundo Premium (October 2019)
● Freemium model: approx 15% of articles behind paywall (now 20%, plans to gradually grow) ● Paywalled content: all opinion pieces + top content (exclusive pieces, reports, analysis, etc.) ● Price: 1€ trial, then 7.99€/month ● Payment methods: debit/credit cards, Paypal A (small but) inspirational campaign
A message strongly based on journalistic principles:
“The truth opens up your eyes.”
“The truth doesn’t make friends.”
“You can’t choose the truth. You can only choose where to find it”
“El Mundo. The truth, no matter how uncomfortable it is.”
9 Paywall Project: Key areas and Core Team
Data & Digital analytics Editor Newsroom Head Technology
Product CDO Director
Ad Subs Strategy Strategy Director Director Ad Sales Subs Sales
10 The 'inside story' at El Mundo: Key points
Take your … but do And keep time to get not wait it SIMPLE! ready… forever! 1 2 3
11 Key Points: Take your time
We asked our Executive Committee (and got) 18 months to launch
In the meantime, we gain time to have the newsroom aligned:
● Deep reorganization ● Change in daily workflows & content production dynamics
12 Key Points: Take your time
Content production becomes the center
13 Key Points: Take your time
Most of the workforce is moved to content factory
14 Key Points: Take your time
Before... Daily workflows are adapted to new reality
After...
15 Key Points: do not wait forever!
Lots of tempting reasons to delay the launch:
- Strong ad revenue in 2019 - Weak newsletter strategy (under 5 products, 50k subs overall) - Few registered users (<1%) - Departure of the whole Data Science team 2 months before launch!
However, we decided to keep our deadline and be the first in the market because:
- The best possible platform is one that is designed and built upon experience, not abstract thoughts - The longer we had waited to launch until having the perfect tool, the more customer acquisition opportunities have been lost
16 Key Points: Keep it simple
We launched upon a 100% static paywall, based on the same tech stack used by RCS since 2016, so:
● No dynamic pricing ● No dynamic paywall ● No AI or Big Data ● No paper/digital bundles out of the box ● No market distractions (signwall craze)
17 What we learned Covid-19: to close or not to close? PREMIUM
March 2019: Global media debate over coronavirus coverage: PREMIUM paywalls were lifted, softened or even postponed to free covid-19 coverage
We decided to open only coronavirus content that could be strictly categorized as “public service” PREMIUM
This was critical to success: we tripled our subscriber portfolio in the first two months of the pandemic.
PREMIUM The few complaints were managed through call center, plus a letter from the editor explaining the decision.
PREMIUM PREMIUM
PREMIUM 19 The “Covid-19 effect”
Change in Elmundo.es paywall subscriber additions by week vs Jan-Feb Being early allowed us to catch the pandemic-related wave of subscriptions.
You can only benefit from business opportunities as long as you are out in the wild, actually doing business
20 Source: UE Data (El Mundo) and Piano (US and Europe) Adapt as you go - ‘On the spot’ focus switch from monthly to annual customers
Aggressive annual pricing Type of billing of premium subscribers (from €79.99 to €47 to €59) (Feb vs. April 2020, % of portfolio) Tie-in promotions 9% (1 year of free legal support) 25% 35% A/B testing Modify preview article page to show annual offer along the monthly one 91% 75% 65%
Feb 2020 Apr 2020 Jul 2020
21 The challenges ahead
Upcoming improvements:
On course Sept Oct Dec
Deployment of a Full redesign Signwall launch Dynamic paywall of user registration implementation (Piano) newsletter strategy workflow
22 The challenges ahead
And some longstanding issues:
- Beware of self-fulfilled prophecies (i.e. assuming that opinion pieces are better because they convert more at the beginning) - The native app dilemma: 2% of users is providing 10% of customers - Is freemium the optimal conversion model? - Scale A/B testing (while getting it right)
23 Who we are
Gabi Bolognese Germán Frassa El Mundo Unidad Editorial Chief Digital Officer Digital Product Director
[email protected] [email protected] @gbologne @germanfrassa 24