Months After Launching Subscriptions, Reach plc Wants to Launch Bundles

UK publishing giant Reach plc is working on a way to sell bundled subscriptions to its multiple brands, months after launching its first wave of paywalls.

Long un-paywalled across its numerous news sites, Reach began rolling out paid digital subscriptions in November. It hit 50,000 paying digital subscribers last week after hitting 40,000 a little under two months earlier.

The publicly-listed company is currently selling subscriptions on 19 of its sites, a figure set to rise to 25 by October. The whole portfolio spans 120 brands, including national newspapers like the Daily Express and Daily Mirror as well as numerous local and regional papers across the UK.

Reach soon plans to launch experimental local newsletters that will eventually feature a paid tier—a mix of national, regional and local subscription offers that may make a bundle “quite a compelling proposition,” company head of growth David Bartlett told AMO.

Reach is paywalling its titles using a mix of exclusive content and metering: while there’s premium content that only subscribers get to see, there’s also only so many free articles a user can open in a given period before they’re prompted to sign up. The number of free articles varies from site to site and is based on whether the user is on a website or an app.

“We could have pulled up the drawbridge, and obviously we probably would have accelerated subs at a faster rate,” Bartlett said of using a metered approach. “However, that would not have been the right decision for digital revenue from our pages or from a funnel point of view—we want to keep that funnel as wide as possible.”

Launches About Revenue, Not Growing a ‘Vanity Metric’

The company is set to launch subscriber-only newsletters soon, and subscribers already get an “ad-lite” experience, seeing fewer ads than free users. (A common criticism of Reach sites is that they show a large number of display ads.)

Prices for the subscriptions vary, but tend to be around £4.99 for a month (with the first month offered for £1), or £34.99/£39.99 for a year (rising to £49.99 after the first year).

The £1 monthly entry price is an attempt to bring in readers not used to paying for content from a company that has, per Bartlett, been “free-to-air effectively since the dawn of the internet.” But the fairly quick jump up to the normal price represents Reach’s view that “at some point you’re going to be asked to make a commitment.”

“The purpose of this project is to diversify our revenue,” Bartlett said. “It’s not just to grow a vanity metric.”

The Daily Express, a right-wing national paper, is the most expensive of Reach’s subscriptions at £6.99 for a month (with the first month, again, priced at £1) or £52 for the first year, rising to £69.99 thereafter.

Going the other direction, left-wing national tabloid the Daily Mirror presents users who read a certain number of articles in a period an optional seven-day free trial, after which the subscription costs £3.99 monthly or £19.99 for the first year, rising to £39.99 afterwards.

“We’ve got 19 sites to experiment with, so we can try different things in different places,” Bartlett said.

The most successful launches so far have been the Manchester Evening News and Wales Online, which are both on 6,000 paying subscribers. (In terms of total possible audience, MEN had 9.6 million users in June, per Ipsos iris figures provided to Press Gazette, while Wales Online had 7.6 million.)

Roughly a third of subscribers opt for the annual subscription, Bartlett added, but this varies across the portfolio. Despite having the most expensive subscription, Bartlett thought the Daily Express was closer to, albeit not at, a 50-50 monthly-annual split—something he attributed to a “well-defined” Express audience that “already know the brand really well.”

On the national titles, comment and analysis tend to go behind the paywall. At the regional ones, a staple of premium content is courtroom reporting, which Bartlett said was doing “very strongly” for subscriber conversion. Sport and sport commentary has also been doing well, as well as “civic investigation” stories for local communities.

“That type of content people are willing to pay for, and it’s coming through in the conversion numbers.”

Reach’s Chief Executive Officer (and former Chief Revenue Officer) Piers North said at its half-year earnings in June that the company’s “future will be less about volume and more about original content.”

Previously, Reach had generally made it so that its print brands were less visible online: instead, content from any local newspapers in a given area were published under new regional or city brands like Cheshire Live or Edinburgh Live. But the company has begun to unwind this approach, reverting for example the former Stoke-on-Trent Live website to its print name, The Sentinel.

“There is definitely something to be said for sites that have a real local connection, the affinity with well-known brands,” he said.

Developing a Subs ‘Muscle Memory’

Bartlett said Reach was “pretty happy” with retention thus far. “It’s within what we expected, in terms of what we forecast.” (Given the first subscriptions launched in November, the company only has monthly retention data to go off so far.)

Once a user takes out a subscription, they’re contacted at several points throughout the month with invitations to sign up to a newsletter or download that site’s app. App users consume “exponentially more pages” than users on desktop or mobile, Bartlett said, and consumption is a key metric that correlates with retention.

It’s still early days, and Bartlett said Reach was in the midst of growing its “muscle memory” as far as its subscription marketing technology goes. Right now, for example, the company has neither save journeys (which intervene on a cancellation attempt to try and convince the subscriber to stay) nor winback campaigns (which try and get lapsed or cancelled customers to resubscribe). Both are set to launch soon.

“We’ve got lots to learn and lots to do,” he said.

That’s not the only product work going on, either: Bartlett said there was “constant work on the ad-lite experience,” one of the perks promised to subscribers. Last week the company reduced the number of mid-page units displayed to subscribers from a quarter of those seen by free users to an eighth.

Bundles: ‘Quite A Compelling Proposition’

At its half-year earnings, Reach announced the imminent launch of “community subscriptions”: Whereas many Reach digital properties cover entire regions like London or Yorkshire (or, in Wales Online’s case, an entire nation), community subscriptions will be built atop smaller local print titles.

So far the company has announced these subs for the Southport Visiter (serving a suburb of Liverpool), the Ayrshire Post (a county in south-west Scotland) and The Journal, a business-focused paper for Newcastle. None of the three has a standalone website.

The plan is to launch these experimental brands first as free newsletters, in a model Bartlett said was “similar” to that of Axios Local, with whom Reach had spoken. But unlike Axios Local, “Once we’ve established that as a well-read, well-opened newsletter, we’ll add in a paid layer to that as well,” Bartlett said—adding that there’ll still always be a free tier.

For now, those subscriptions are going to be standalone: despite Southport’s proximity to Liverpool, Liverpool Echo subscribers won’t get Southport Visiter content.

But, Bartlett added, “We are actively looking and building the bundling capability in the background… It’s quite a big thing for us that we want to be able to offer. You know, if you get the MEN [Manchester Evening News], why not get the Mirror? Or you might want Coventry Live and Liverpool Echo.”

“We’re going to have 25 sites live by the early/mid-October, so at that point it becomes, we think, quite a compelling proposition.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to make two minor corrections. The monthly price for most of Reach’s digital subscriptions is £4.99, not £3.99, and the pop-up inviting Mirror readers to take on a free trial can be dismissed, so does not present a hard cap on readership.

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