News publishers broaden target audiences in search of subscriber growth

News publishers including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are broadening their target markets as they attempt to establish new paying relationships with people outside of their core audiences and subscriber bases.

Some publishers are moving beyond straight news offerings and establishing products that serve consumer needs and interests in different areas. Others are expanding their purviews to focus on the attitudes and characteristics their audiences share, rather than just the topics and issues their publications cover — and significantly increasing their “total addressable markets” as a result.

The New York Times has served as the poster child for news subscription success in recent years, attracting over 10 million digital subscribers with the help of non-news products such as Games, Cooking, and The Athletic. However, as it hunts for continued subscriber growth, reaching beyond hardcore news consumers is becoming increasingly essential.

NYT is now evolving its marketing and product positioning approaches in an attempt to appeal to a broader market, according to its head of marketing, Amy Weisenbach. The company’s strategy is oriented around two key objectives: Altering people’s understanding of the value of independent journalism, and dramatically altering people’s understanding of what NYT does outside of the news.

“We need to be intentional in expanding what the brand stands for in the minds of consumers… Because our ambitions are so big we’ve got to attract the next 5-10 million subscribers, and they’re probably not coming to us right now,” Weisenbach said during INMA’s Media Subscriptions Summit in New York City last week.

That means reaching and educating new portions of consumers about the importance and relevance of journalism, explaining its relationship with their everyday lives and interests, and ultimately finding more ways to connect them with NYT’s content “universe”.

“Many people just don’t understand what goes into producing high-quality news and journalism, and this translates to a low willingness to pay,” Weisenbach said.

Those comments echoed the sentiments expressed by NYT publisher A. G. Sulzberger last month when he urged publishers to “think bigger” with their subscription ambitions. He argued that at the height of print media, 150-200 million news subscriptions were held in the U.S., which implies significant room for growth. The Times maintains a goal of reaching 15 million digital subscribers by 2025.

Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, holds similar views as it looks to grow beyond its current digital subscription base of 4.86 million people.

During INMA’s Media Subscriptions Summit, its chief marketing officer, Sherry Weiss, stressed that the strategies and approaches that have helped news publishers attract their current subscriber bases would not be sufficient to fuel future growth.

The Wall Street Journal’s core audience and brand are closely tied to the worlds of business and finance, for example, but it believes its editorial offering is relevant to a much broader audience. It’s now attempting to position its paid products around consumers’ attitudes, behaviors, and ambitions, rather than the industries they work in.

“When you base your audience on industry interest alone, you limit your reach and potential for growth,” Weiss said. “Addressable market is limited by the limits you put on it. The goal is not to chase a market that your offering doesn’t apply to… but people don’t define themselves based on the industry in which they work.”

Dow Jones believes its future reader pool could be up to 10 times larger than it previously assumed when viewed through that broader lens.

Pitching a broader audience is one thing, but Dow Jones is also thinking about how it can drill down to serve more specific needs within its existing audience, Weiss added. In a similar vein to NYT, many publishers are now enabling subscribers to purchase access to more specific portions of their content to “right-size” their own packages.

“We have to recognize we can no longer think of our audiences as monolithic. It’s critical we’re building strategies to meet the needs of multiple readers and reader types,” she said.

Efforts to super-serve audience segments with more granular paid products will help publishers extract additional revenue from their existing audiences. But, to Weiss’s point, publishers will eventually have no choice but to reach new audiences to drive growth.

As previous Toolkits research has revealed, a relatively small group of consumers accounts for an outsized portion of subscriptions to digital publications in the U.S. These “power subscribers” may have proved relatively easy to convert to date, but it’s reasonable to assume they could be approaching saturation point in terms of the number of digital subscriptions they’ll maintain on a long-term basis.Attracting, educating, and converting portions of the 63 percent of consumers who have never held a digital publication subscription will be a growing focus for publishers hunting for subscriber growth in 2024 and beyond.