9 ways to maximise your reader revenue.
When publishers get started with Axate, they often ask how to optimise their reader revenue strategy. Here’s what we’ve learned so far:
Make it easy for people to support your publication, on terms that suit them. Your readership is not a monolith; you have a range of readers with different reading habits, and your payment options should reflect that. You can offer a range of options such as one-off contributions, pay-as-you-go access with a day pass or per-article price, all the way up to monthly or annual subscriptions. Axate supports them all.
You can test different price points to understand what works best for your product. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. For some publishers offering a day pass works best; for others, a per-article price with a daily or weekly cap, after which people can read for free, is more appealing. Use Axate’s analytics dashboard to track your traffic and adapt your approach accordingly.
Experiment with blend of paid and free articles. Analyse your traffic and see what works best for your site. If you want paid articles to be the default for your site, build up to it over time, using analytics to guide your strategy as you evolve.
Find out what your readers really value and do more of it. For many local news sites that we work with, using Axate on their site has shown that their readers want sport, football, court reporting, and crime coverage.
Let people choose how to pay and offer a wide range of options in their local currency. In the UK and USA we have found that people expect Credit and Debit card, Apple Pay and PayPal.
Make it easy to cancel a subscription. With Axate, users who cancel subscriptions can stay as paying readers. Offer casual payment options alongside your subscription offer and promote it to those cancelling.
Test different messages for your marketing, in-article blockers, or page notices. We’ve seen 50% growth in some cases where only wording was changed. Keep messaging simple and clear.
Think about ‘product’ rather than ‘content’. Readers come back to your site and build a habit with your brand and product because they know what you stand for. Hardly anyone reads the same article twice.
Ensure your pricing make sense to your readers. Offer per-article or day pass options that are good value for casual readers but are relative to your subscription offering and print price so that it’s still better value for frequent readers to subscribe.