Lars K. Jensen from Willmore does an excellent newsletter on innovation within digital media called ‘Products in Publishing’.
If you haven’t signed up for it yet, I suggest that you go and do it – even if you’re not in media. Because the way that he uses data and analysis to inform his thinking is inspirational.
His latest take is on digital news subscriptions, and why it’s probably not the news that are driving conversions from freeloaders to subscribers. You can argue that it’s quite obvious, since very few if any have had real success with digital news subscriptions. But that’s not the point.
The point is how he uses data. Because analyzing different use cases for content, how much content is published in each of them and how they convert, he’s able to do a pretty spot on analysis of what it is that drives value for digital news media subscribers.
And here’s the kicker:
Even though Lars is good, he hasn’t done anything that any media company with a decent analytics department – and yes, they all have one – couldn’t and shouldn’t have done a long, long time ago.
The data has been there for everybody who cared to see it and get to the same conclusions.
Why haven’t they made this analysis years ago? There’s obviously subscription gold in the data.
(Photo: Pixabay.com)