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Publishers are finding innovative new ways to drive registration

By enhancing the value exchange through offering access to new tools and services, publishers are attempting to encourage increasing number of users to sign up

20th June 2024

Publishers are expanding the appeal of their registration proposition by offering access to more tools and services

A couple of weeks ago we were reading an article on Media Makers Meet which discussed some interesting finding from the Media World 2024 Report. The report, which was launched at the FIPP Congress, covered the use of AI in newsrooms, discussed the role of freemium paywalls and stressed the importance of a first-party data strategy.

And it’s that last point about data strategy that we’d like to explore in today’s media bulletin. As we were looking through the report, a prompt in the bottom-right corner of the screen caught our eye. It asked “what’s the summary?” and upon clicking on it, we were presented with a handy overview and a series of follow up questions, such as “what are the quotes?”. A further click brought up a signup prompt, encouraging us to enter our email address. This tool, developed by Bridged.Media, mixes two recent topics of this bulletin: The growing role of AI in supporting content curation and the importance of gathering first-part data through registration.

Registration is essential for many publishers’ business models

Registration is an important step on the journey from unknown user to subscriber. When Pugpig went to the Audiencers’ Festival last year we heard from Emmanuel Alix, CDO of L’Equipe, a French sports newspaper. Alix pointed out the importance of getting a user to register, telling the festival that “free members are 13 times more likely to subscribe than anonymous users”.

For almost every digital publisher with a subscription model, registration is used to encourage users to subscribe. But there are many different and varied approaches. For Bloomberg, registration enables the “essential first step” in their email onboarding series. Once a user has signed up on the site they are sent a series of emails over a 30 day period, with each communication either aimed at encouraging the user to engage with content or to purchase a subscription.

In a recent article, The Audiencers’ looked at Reworld’s Beauté Test, a community of 350k beauty enthusiasts. Beauté asks users to signup, but not to sell subscriptions. As a community site having users logged in is a vital component of their business model, which relies on their community testing products and leaving reviews. By getting users to register, they have been able to use 1st-party digital behaviour and interest to develop 50 different user cohorts and match these to their CRM targeting.

The strategy adopted by Beauté Test mitigated the impact that the looming removal of 3rd party cookies by Chrome will have. The latest news from Google is that the cookie apocalypse is delayed to 2025, but publishers have already faced more immediate concerns that are necessitating the creation or evolution of a first-party data strategy. The challenges created by a decline in traffic to publishers’ sites from social platforms and the decrease in yields from digital advertising are both combated by better capturing and leveraging known user data. Ultimately, encouraging users to sign up will allow publishers to build personalised experiences that drive engagement and reach users who are off platform.

The approach to getting users to sign up is evolving

First-party data and registration have been a component of news sites since the early 2000s. And, as we wrote about recently, first-party data strategy now plays an essential role for many publishers in their paywall and subscription conversion strategy.

However, despite the strides made by media companies in the optimisation of the paywall experience, all too often these learnings are not leveraged in the registration flow. Many registration prompts still rely on gating content as the only exchange of value for an email address.

But that is starting to change. Recently, The Toronto Star adopted a new strategy which gated functionality, and not just content, to gather email addresses. The Star knew that registration worked and had analysis which suggested that users that registered were 15 times more likely to subscribe than unknowns. Therefore, they made the decision to adopt a strategy to build registration volumes by offering access to functionality in exchange for an email address. In practice, this meant unlocking commenting for unsubscribed, but registered, users through their Viafora commenting platform. The theory was that by allowing registered users to “join the conversation” below the paywall it created a sense that they were missing out on the value of the article and would therefore subscribe.

For the Toronto Star this strategy delivered lots of good results and increased overall registration by 72%. This gave the team at the Star the confidence to develop the approach further by offering registered users additional functionality and they now have moved on to develop other features, such as notification bells.

New features need to work hand in glove with the registration wall

The team at Bloomberg are reasonably new to registration, they only introduced the feature in 2022. And since then, they’ve been looking for ways to more closely integrate their registration and subscription experiences. When a user on Bloomberg’s site reaches their article limit they are now presented with a prompt that offers them both the option to subscribe or the opportunity to register. They found that this was a very simple way to deliver the user a choice whilst also highlighting the benefits of a paid subscription over a free registration.

Moreover, the experience was targeted based on the source of the traffic. Users from Reddit, for example, were shown the registration wall only after viewing 5 articles, whereas other sources had a stricter journey. They also adapted the approach to gate content differently based on consumer value and, as we mentioned a few weeks ago, they have sometimes allowed content of higher social value to be made available for free to registered users.

In summary, by taking a data-led approach, publishers are able to re-think how they present the value proposition of a registration. For some, this means integrating registration more closely into the subscription journey, and using the same techniques as subscription walls to convert audiences. For others, they are identifying tools and features that a semi-engaged audience will most want to access.

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