Establishing the foundations of revenue diversification

Situation

A renowned Filipino broadcaster participated in both the Data & Insights Launchpad and Digital Revenue Launchpad programmes. Seeking to diversify their sources of income and generate new revenue streams, the broadcaster first wanted to understand how to best use data within their organisation in order to deepen their audience understanding. Later, they wanted to explore new options for direct reader-revenue with a particular focus on donations and memberships. Facing a significant change to their business model, the broadcaster sought understand how they could develop new business streams through clearer messaging on its digital assets.

Engagement

  • In the Data & Insights Launchpad, the broadcaster was shown various examples of proper use of data in the newsroom such as analytics platforms and socialising metrics amongst editorial teams.
  • During the Digital Revenue Launchpad, the broadcaster ran two experiments on their website: one to test whether push notifications could be used as a call-to-action; and one to measure the impact of bespoke video playlists as a driver of on-site engagement.

Results

  • Using push notifications led to over 1600 sign-ups to a future newsletter within three days
  • Adding video playlists had a clear positive impact on audience engagement: +71% time spent on articles; +26% longer session durations if the user encountered a treated article at any point; over twice as many articles viewed per session
  • The publisher implemented live views of their analytics platform in the newsroom

“To overcome the stigma of transitioning to a digital reader-revenue model, we felt we had to change our approach. It's a long and arduous journey, and it's not easy, but we believe that by adopting experimentation we can make big steps towards building a truly successful model going forward.”

Head of Digital Strategy