The Boston Globe Hasn’t Been Afraid to Experiment. It’s Paid Off
The Boston Globe has been growing in fits and starts over the past decade. What it hasn’t done is backslid, even after doubling subscriptions during the first year of the pandemic.
The consumer revenue team credits owners John and Linda Henry, a billionaire couple who also own the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club and bought the Globe in 2013, with pushing them for a shift from an advertising-based model to one leaning on reader revenue, and then letting them experiment and take chances on possibly ruinous tactics.
The first big move happened in 2015, when the Globe raised the weekly price of the paper to $7 from $4 to maximize subscription revenue. It was a very risky move, and the paper calculated it could lose up to 40% of subscribers because of the increase and they’d still make enough money from a revenue perspective to make it worthwhile—that would still be a major hit, though. People did cancel. But only 3% of them.
“It was really a game changing move for us,” Tom Brown, Boston Globe Media’s senior vice president of consumer revenue leading the subscriptions and analytics teams in pursuit of subscriber growth, told AMO. “Ad revenue is still a big part of the mix, and we still have great ad partners that offer a lot of great advertising solutions to brands, but it’s no secret that it’s become a smaller share of revenue overall. It’s really maximizing the reader revenue in our region is what we believe will make the Globe sustainable for decades and for a future that’s where it needs to come from.
400,000 Subscribers, Please
The Boston Globe has 335,000 paid subscribers between digital and print editions. Digital-only sits at about 259,000 direct sold (not including those who access it via e-readers or apps), and print home delivery comprises 75,000 subscribers.
The goal now is to hit 400,000 digital subscribers across the company, minus Stat, by the end of 2027. That number currently stands at more than 268,000.
“We believe it’s possible due to a lot of investments that we’re making throughout the organization, not just on the data side of things,” Brown said. “We’ve expanded into Rhode Island and New Hampshire in a more overt way. In some we’re expanding our different content areas, whether that is from weather or high school sports.”
Subscriptions represent ⅔ of revenue, with ads representing the remainder. Still, print remains a larger share than digital, though that is changing and within three years it is likely that digital will surpass print, Brown said.
“It’s already a much greater share of just volume of subscribers, but it’ll be a little while longer before it’s a greater share of revenue,” Brown said.
Another big step the Globe took was a few years ago when it reset the number of free articles available to readers within a given amount of time. Many publishers reset the number of free articles, be in two or 10, at the beginning of every month. The Globe instead did a rolling 30 days unique to each reader and then started extending the days to 45, meaning users would have to wait longer to get their free articles. That prompted a significant increase in the number of paywalls served to that group, with more subscription signups reported overall.
In 2018, subscribers were stuck at around 70,000. While the core belief that revenue should be largely anchored on subscribers remained, they decided to try to go for scale. They had only done short-term introductory offers of max four weeks before moving subscribers to higher rates. They decided to go further.
“The one that we settled on was a pretty extreme offer for us, which was just $1 for your first six months of access. Our logic was that it’s essentially a free trial, but it’s a free trial that comes with someone putting their credit card down, and so when that free trial is over, we’ll be able to attempt to graduate them to a regular paying subscriber,” Brown said. “That would also give us a long runway to try to onboard them and get them using the product without putting the thought in their mind that, ‘I need to cancel this subscription right away.’”
They promoted it in a one-day sale as a test. Usually, at the time, the Globe had been signing up an average of 150 people each day.
“We saw over 1700 sign-ups in one day. We were blown away by that result, because we’d never really seen anything like that,” Brown said. It was a swell result but also not necessarily one that guaranteed the future.
When the six months came up, they saw a larger drop than compared to the standard four-week plan. The difference between the plans was that they’d get dropouts quickly after the four-week plan signups, whereas with the six-month plans, no one stopped before the 180 days were up.
“We continue to look at that as the months and years go on… the real major discovery there is that you can get the same long-term retention, but juice acquisition by a degree, initially of 10x in a sense, settled more like 4x as the years have gone on. But initially that was so game changing for us, as the conversion rate was 10x the retention rate.”
By 2020, digital subscribers had hit 100,000, then doubling because of the demand for news during the pandemic.
Brown said:
That was just really game-changing again for us, but also crystallized that our strategy was the right strategy at a time like that: we’re so vital of a source for the community. Advertising was severely disrupted for everyone, and fell through the floor overnight, but because our revenue was really primarily funded by readers, we were able to stay strong and really get through the pandemic more in a position of strength as an organization. And since that point, we’ve continued to grow, although at a much lower single digit rate.
The Globe had expected subscriptions to drop after the Covid boost, but they didn’t as the company refined its acquisition and retention strategies. While some suggested they do away with the paywall during the pandemic, they declined to. They argued that they provided enough free content via boston.com and statnews.com, and the ability to provide valuable and comprehensive coverage was due to subscription revenue. Subscriptions didn’t fall thanks to the paper positioning itself as a critical community resource and continuing to invest in quality journalism, Brown said.
“One thing we look at is total growth, and we have continued to grow our total number of subscribers, so our digital growth is enough to continue outpacing our current decline,” Brown said.
The publisher will continue experimenting as aggressively as they can, looking to reduce friction in the checkout flow, for example, or focusing on winning back former subscribers, including those who were once print-only, Ryan McVeigh, senior director of consumer revenue at Boston Globe Media, told AMO.
“We’re really trying to dial in and ease the experience of resubscribing for those folks, trying to meet them at their willingness to pay, trying to make sure that we can improve our recovery rates… there’s a lot of opportunity there,” McVeigh said. “And we’re always studying, not just our peers in the big newspaper industry, like this media industry, but also across streaming services and others where we see higher win back rates, more like hop on, hop off type behavior, because their technology is more conducive to that.”
Given their owner’s history of allowing for audacious experimentation, they may just find a diamond in there.
“We really had the backing of new ownership that said, ‘We want you to take risks. We want you to experiment,’” Brown said. “This is what we’re basing our future on. And we had some early wins by making some larger adjustments in our model, and that really put the wind at our backs to keep going with that approach.”
