Last month PageSuite’s Business Development Director, Ben Edwards, teamed up with MPP Global’s Ana Lobb, VP, Media & Publishing, to showcase a live webinar – Around the World in 80 Paid…Content Strategies.
In the webinar, Ben and Ana discussed a selection of paid content strategies from various publishing markets across the world. During the webinar, they ran a live poll asking attendees to give feedback and their thoughts regarding the best strategies implemented in their markets to convert visitors to subscribers. The options included: Free trials, personalised content, third-party collaboration, percentage discount and anything else.
Attendees overwhelmingly voted that offering a free trial to prospective readers was the most successful strategy when attempting to convert visitors to subscribers. Almost half of the attendees, 40%, agreed this is the best way to convert visitors.
20% of the viewers said personalised content was best, 14% looked to third-party collaborations, 13% felt discounts were the best strategy to adopt and the remaining 13% offered other approaches.

Various examples of publishers implementing these strategies were discussed during the webinar. Subscription powerhouse, The New York Times, has a varied strategy when it comes to converting readers into digital subscribers. Firstly, the US publisher offers limited free subscription trials to brand new readers, which is followed by discounted subscription rates to both encourage new readers and combat churn. The NYT also allows new digital subscribers access to Spotify premium for free when they sign up for long one-year+ all access subscription packages to The Times.
This strategy has helped the publisher reach 2.9 million digital-only subscribers, out of 3.8 million total subscribers.
UK newspaper and magazine publisher, Archant, is a great example of how to gain subscribers via an incentive-led strategy. The publisher offers Amazon’s Alexa to potential subscribers when readers sign up to long 18-month subscription terms.

If you missed the webinar you can watch the full recording here.