Can publishers increase revenue with bundle subscription offerings?
Structuring the business strategy is like arranging puzzle pieces to complete the picture. You may have to brainstorm repeatedly to reach the final image. Implementing subscription business models is similar.
The subscription model involves more than integrating paywall solutions into your business. It involves trying different strategies to boost your average revenue, enhance relationships, and form a basis for customer retention.
Bundle subscription is now the talk of town for increasing subscription revenue and skyrocketing customer loyalty. But does it help retain customers and invite new customers to read your content without sacrificing recurring revenue? Let's unwind the industry trends and demands of bundle subscriptions for online news.
The Trends in Subscription Business
You must have considered extending the revenue models and satisfying your reader with quality content. What is your new plan, other than the existing subscription models?
Consumer behavior is undergoing dramatic changes. News is available everywhere, and most brands—small, medium, or large—hide their content behind a paywall. While digital subscriptions have continued to grow, the churn rate has increased from 3% in mid-2021 to about 5.5% by the end of 2023. This rise is particularly notable among midsized to smaller publications.
To combat churn and boost growth, publishers are exploring product and pricing innovations. These include bundle subscriptions, "lite" versions for younger audiences, and more flexible pricing strategies based on user engagement.
Bundle subscription
Even if paywall management becomes more popular, the number of people paying for the content will remain comparatively low. People pay to get exclusive access to quality content or must be long-time readers of the same newspaper. Another reason is the ad-free reading experience.
Combining one or more newspapers and providing them together for a specific price that is preferably lower than the individual subscription rate of one of the newspapers is a new tactic in the industry to attract readers and create a diverse reading community.
The bundle provides appealing content that customers can read from two or more news outlets. The success behind the bundle strategy is the convenience, the choice for more than one quality content, and the psychological instinct to purchase increased value at a lower rate. This increases the number of readers while retaining the existing customer relationships.
Bundle Subscription in Accesstype
Bundling, when combined with the right pricing strategy, is a powerful way to enhance customer satisfaction. It's akin to a well-balanced diet, offering access to multiple pieces of content without subscribing to each item individually. This approach effectively encourages customers to subscribe to enjoy a premium experience that spans offerings from various providers.
Accesstype—Quintype's paywall management solutions provide bundle subscription options to Accesstype clients. Bundle subscription at Quintypes works as follows.
Using Accesstype as your paywall solution, you can collaborate with another news outlet for your subscription offering. The media outlet must choose one or more subscription partners interested in collaboration and agree on the pricing strategy for the combined offer based on the interests of both parties.
For instance, if you are a local language media outlet, you can combine it with a national daily so your customers can read stories from both websites. Readers can get comprehensive and in-depth coverage on various topics, giving them more insightful and well-rounded information. The reader experience is enhanced as they can easily access diverse content across websites with a single subscription payment.
The reader has to just subscribe to one website and can enjoy benefits offered by all bundle subscription partners.
Accesstype made bundle subscriptions easy for its clients. Once the news outlet finds the subscription partner and decides the final terms of its offering, the Access type team will take care of the rest of the technicalities.
Bundle Subscription is Your Best Bet To Grow Readers
The New York Times has 9.4 million subscribers, and the site is leading in subscriber growth globally. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, with 3.5 million and 2.5 million online news subscribers, were in second and third place, respectively.
However, this is not the scene for everyone in the industry. Navigating the industry competition is like charting a course through stormy seas. Most e-papers are worried about decreased subscriptions, regularity, churn rate, and revenue generation from the subscription business.
Bundle subscriptions help bring new subscribers to the business. If you are a national daily and pair with an international newspaper, you will attract international daily readers who will visit your website and read content, which is otherwise impossible.
Secondly, both news outlets must have loyal readers, so they help their loyal readers gain more value. So, even if you provide the subscription at a discounted rate compared to the average rate, you can balance it with the number of subscribers. End of the day, the revenue will be up only.
From the reader's perspective, readers are tired of paying for so many publishers to get their news. According to reports, readers are unhappy paying for multiple online subscription fee. This is where they will be happy to pay for a bundle subscription.
But what is holding back the bundle subscription business model? There are three main challenges for bundles.
Identifying the subscription partner.
The coordination of the news outlets.
subscription pricing strategy
If you identify the right subscription partner, the bundle subscription initiative will bring more revenue. The individual outlet can promote its offering if the coordination and pricing strategy is sound. Further, they can also promote their paid subscription models to existing customers and new revenue.
Final word
If you haven't thought about a bundle, think out of the box to boost your subscription revenue. Schedule a demo with Accesstype to learn more about Quintype's bundle subscription offerings. Understand how existing customers at Accestype have already implemented a bundle subscription business model to extend their revenue strategies.