Every morning, I scroll through Substack, LinkedIn, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Apple News, sometimes X, and of course, my email inboxes, which mostly lead me to these and other sources.
This way, I generally get the information I need for work, while also keeping up on more general things occurring in the country and the world.
I’m certain my media consumption pattern is similar to millions of other people.
But I will say that it can be frustrating sometimes because so much really good stuff is locked behind paywalls. I don’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. Or the Financial Times, or the Los Angeles Times, Flashes & Flames, A Media Operator, and a dozen or more Substack authors.
And consequently, there are times where my understanding of daily news is incomplete. As a journalist, I understand and support the need for media organizations to charge consumers for the content they create. As a news consumer, my budget doesn’t come close to covering all of the news sources to which I’d like to subscribe.
And in that dynamic lies a business opportunity for media operators that has never been figured out.
So it was interesting to me when I read a report earlier this month by Greg Piechota in the Readers First Initiative Blog on the International News Media Association website.
The headline, “Research: Some consumers are willing to pay, unwilling to commit,” is in itself intriguing enough for this student of the media business. The research’s main upshot is that a willingness to pay is not the same as the willingness to commit.
I’ve experienced that many times, as have most of us. You navigate to the subscription page and find out that the annual commitment is $120, or whatever. Then you close out the tab and move on.
But according to Piechota’s report, the delta between paying and committing remains an untapped opportunity, in spite of many attempts with paywalls, metered access, premium content, auto-renewal, and various bundles.
“The subscription model is not wrong; it’s incomplete,” according to Anjali Iyer, the global head of subscriptions at The Washington Post, whom Piechota quoted in his report. ”There’s a growing gap between willingness to pay and willingness to commit.”
The crucial distinction: Willingness to pay is a judgment about whether a story is worth the money. But a willingness to commit is a judgment by the reader about whether their future demand for this journalism will be sustained. Big difference.
Two approaches are worth exploring, Piechota’s report suggests. One is auto renewal, which increases revenue short term but is a drag on revenue in the long run. “Inertia under auto-renewal can roughly double revenue, with cancellations spiking only when a lapsed payment card forces an active choice,” according to Piechota. “People stay because leaving takes an action they never quite get to.” In Europe, a major daily newspaper served some readers an auto-renewing trial and other readers a trial that expired unless renewed by the subscriber. The auto-renewing version was intended to maximize retention. It did that, and it generated increased revenue. But it also reduced the initial conversion and produced 23% fewer subscribers over the next couple of years.
Meanwhile, a different approach in the U.S. produced a different result. For the last two years, the Washington Post has experimented with an array of passes: Per week, per day, and per article. It turned out that the less commitment asked for, the more readers paid: The week pass lifted paid conversion by 19%, the day pass by 35%, and pay-per-article by 83%—all measured against the baseline auto-renewing subscription offer.
The million-dollar question: Do flexible payment options cannibalize subscriptions? “I asked this question every day, morning and night while I was doing this,” The Post’s Iyer said. “The answer is no, because flexible access is really not a replacement for subscriptions. It’s attracting that middle funnel.”
Piechota’s takeaway: Priced correctly, the flexible option rarely wins; it anchors.