We began our partnership with EL PAÍS in late 2021 when they had around 120,000 subscribers. In the 6 months following our work with them, we were delighted to see that they had grown their subscriptions by 50% - achieving 180,000 subscribers in June of 2022. Now EL PAÍS is the top-ranking Spanish-language media outlet, with more than 350,000 digital subscribers.

How did they achieve such rapid growth and how did FT Strategies help?

Situation

Three years ago we started our partnership with EL PAÍS, a leading Spanish news publisher belonging to the larger media group Prisa. The publication launched its subscription offering in May of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic seeing great success and was looking to further grow digital subscribers. They had set an ambitious North Star Goal that:

“By 2026 EL PAÍS will be the most influential and trusted global voice for the Spanish-speaking world, serving 500,000 digital subscribers through journalism and innovative products, and will be financially sustainable through diverse revenue streams”

To achieve this, EL PAÍS was looking into changing its paywall and access model from metered to freemium and they wanted to understand which of their existing content could be considered premium: i.e. what different reader segments value and are willing to pay for. The challenge was to identify content that would optimise conversion while minimising the impact on advertising revenue.

Our work together

To help improve conversion, we worked with EL PAÍS to transition from a metered to a freemium paywall. This involved a comprehensive data analysis exercise to assess which EL PAÍS’ content should appear in front of or behind the paywall. This was also informed by a reader survey that we launched on their homepage to identify content readers value and might subscribe to, and conducted interviews and focus groups to explore why they value it. 

In addition to this project, we also worked with EL PAÍS to grow their subscriber lifetime value through promotional marketing to highly engaged users – stepping them up to higher ARPU subscription types.

More recently, our work with EL PAÍS has focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to improve workflows and audience engagement. This has included co-developing an experiment to automate podcast creation with an off-the-shelf AI vendor; this workstream aims to increase the volume of high-quality podcasts and reduce the time investment from editorial.

Results

As previously mentioned, our work with EL PAÍS has helped them to deliver rapid growth in digital subscribers and total reader revenue. In addition, it has provided EL PAÍS with several less obvious benefits:

  • A deeper understanding of their reader base including a persona study to identify unmet needs and untapped segments of readers
  • A clear view on what content, formats, categories, brands and authors are driving value for the publication (in terms of engagement, conversion and retention)
  • A North Star goal that has helped to build momentum within the organisation
  • A clear AI roadmap that is underpinned by low-cost experimentation

We are also delighted that the EL PAÍS team has enjoyed the process and sees the value of our partnership:

This has been a powerful piece of work in what has been a turbulent time. I can’t believe how much you did in five weeks. We all appreciate the hard work, sacrifice and flexibility.

 

Chief Marketing Officer

FT Strategies has worked with EL PAÍS and many other publishers to navigate growth in this digital era. To find out more about how we can help you contact us here.