Der Kongress für Medienprofis
speaker: GerBen van t Hek
topic: Gut verbrachte Nutzungszeit – Wie Mediahuis für seine Abonnenten sinnstiftender werden will
working
Is it
Probably all know rules like this, and I'm really addicted to this one, the algorithms of the big tech companies keep showing me this, this hydraulic pumps crushing toys and other material, and I can spend easily some minutes watching these reels sitting on a couch.
And afterwards I'm never, it's, it takes my time, but I'm never really satisfied. I'm never proud that I did it. It's like eating at McDonald's, you quickly take a hamburger and you're not very proud of it. So it's, the social networks are really
Well, in taking time in hunting for time, and we are as media companies also in that time.
And part of the time economic economy, but I think we have to do better than just hunt for time. We have to provide more
a better feeling than just.
OK, we've got some time, but we have to provide some feeling of time well spent. So that's what I like to talk about in the upcoming 1520 minutes. I'm having tech. I'm the strategy director newsroom for the Media house group. we're quite a
Young company only here for 10 years originated started in Belgium with the merger of two Belgian publishers, and now we are in already 6 countries.
Also in the German speaking part of Europe because we are having a newspaper in Aer and we also always like to say we are also in Germany, but only in Aachen but from here, so maybe the a part is a little bit too orange. Um.
The strategy of media house, the media house group. This is our North Star. We want to make more people, not to make more people because then their babies is enough, but we want to make more people pay for more journalism. That's the North Star. That's what we, that's our goal, that's our mission, and it should be, it should be journalism. It should not be just content. It should not be a hydraulic pump crushing toys. It should be something better. It should be journalism, and this is the statement we
always spread within our newsrooms and the newsrooms, people in newsrooms always like to say we need a better app. We need to be as good as Spotify, and the answer I'll respond to that is if we really want to become the Spotify of news, then our journalism has to become as good as Taylor Swift. The journalism should be as good as Taylor Swift because the success of Spotify is not the app, it's not the logo, it's not the subscription model, it's not the data, it's Taylor Swift. It's Chopin and
in between. It's quality and it's not a quantity game. So we have to play a quality game and focus on quality and not on quantity. We like to say first concentrate.
On the mix of your brand and then the clicks, the right clicks will come to you if you do the mix right.
But how to validate the quality of the clicks, how to validate the quality of the of our journalism of our stories. That's, that's a difficult question. It's easy to say, and we have to do reach more people, they have to pay more and we have to create more journalism, but it's about the quality and how
Can we validate the quality? That's why we have to chosen to
to do deep dive in which metric for the newsrooms should be used, uh.
We did, we did visitors, we did returning visitors, more heads, conversions, you can come up with a lot of metrics, but which one is really validating the quality of the of the newsrooms. And we have
We are in media.
If you look into the mirror, maybe you come up with the same conclusion in media, we are very good in celebrating false successes. We always call it our Tokyo lesson, one day.
For our smallest news brands and I look around. It's a small newspaper in northern part of the Netherlands. It only has 35,000 subscribers. It's the smallest title of our group.
At one afternoon we got over a million visitors on our website in an hour. And we're all coming from Japan.
From Tokyo, there was this big Tokyo click baiting site, promoting.
A movie in our archive of an artist who was able to make an artificial cloud floating in a little church with some mys mystical music and they were promoting it as the fire today, and we got over a million visitors from Japan, and we were and I was at the newsroom that day and we were celebrating. Yeah, we're doing go to millions and million and jump and then some smart guy at the newsroom, there's always this journalist asking the critical questions and it was not me. this me, is it really helping?
us
can we do it tomorrow again? Are we actually earning something? Did we sell any subscriptions, of course, no one in Japan will take a subscription on a small Dutch newspaper. So actually, we were celebrating something that really was not a success.
So we, yeah, for us it was our Tokyo lesson. OK, we have to hunt for the right to reach for the right ages, for the right success.
And then, of course, page uses.
Also, very common, is it working, yeah, it's also very common. OK, let's do page uses.
But we can, we see different behaviour in absent and this is one of our competitors just, yeah, I'm giving them.
25 pages in 10 seconds. Is this really valuable for a new brand this 25, it's too short to show that. Nobody read something.
Nobody bought a subscription, it's 25 clicks basically worth nothing, so only looking at pages is not is all for us. It's not the right way to go.
Maybe people hits. Is that, is that the right idea, uh.
Also happened, also a big lesson we called our Sunday morning lesson on Sunday morning, I was having my coffee in a croissant and reading a newspaper, a printed one. Don't tell my.
Don't tell my CEO, but on Sunday I like to read the print newspaper, and then we got this push notification of the horrific murder shocks passengers on Deso ferry.
Immediately opened the app and I have to know what happened. And then it appeared to be a historical story about the murder in 1880 or something.
And I was disappointed, a little bit angry with my own brand, and of course immediately close the story and the story was actually well made, but it was presented in the wrong way, and over half a million people.
Did exactly the same. Ober did got disappointed and get away. We didn't sell any subscriptions. We got a lot of complaints. So we got over 250,000 payroll hits and we didn't sell anything, so only pay on hits, only page you, it's not, it's not good enough for us.
Remember the time competition, and we have to do journalism, so yeah, I like this and probably it will work if you put res like this on our homepage, people will watch it, but they will not pay for it. They will not think, oh, this is a brand of quality, they will not get a feeling of time well spent. So we have to do better and that's why we decided to
Make the subscription attention time, the time our subscribers spent in our apps on our website, reading, watching, listening. We, we decided to make the subscription attention time in all of our newsrooms with entire media house company as the main and only KPI metric for the newsrooms.
What do we do? We divide our subscribers in 3 groups, the bouncers, the scanners, and the deeply red, and it's of course the bottom to the scanners in the deeply readers are connected to the length of your article. It's not that we can put a standard metric on it with the bouncers, everyone only reading maximum 10 seconds and leaving, we are not.
Measuring it as part of our success. We are getting this out of the metric of an article. So the example of the of the murder on the ferry.
Almost everyone was in this 12th group, and it looked like a success because if we added up all those 10 seconds, it was still on the top of our weekly report, but if we filtered out those bounces immediately we would have known, hey, this is a false success. We have to get rid of the bouncer. So if we want to get well spent metric, we have to get rid of this, the swipes, the bouncers, and the disappointment clicks you have to get rid of the click.
Betty
And clickbait the content in your, in your product.
So the time of the scanners and the deeply red together, we call it quality rates, and that's the subscription attention time. And why is it so
Helpful and important, it's
Really helpful for, for a lot of reasons and I will zoom in on 3 of those, um.
At first, it really helps to find us our hidden gems in our journalism because what is, what's happening, we are creating articles, we are creating audio, we are creating video.
But the ones appear on top of our weekly reports, daily reports, are the ones we promote.
If you promote something on our homepage.
On our, in our newsletter, via push, of course, those ones are getting the most of the subscription attention time.
So
But then it's not.
It's not valid.
To the quality because if you because we're using a subscription attention time per article, even the stuff we don't promote, there's this.
Hid an article in one of our sections, local section or culture or sport and immediately we know, we can see, OK, this the end this article didn't reach a lot of people, but the ones who opened the article really read it until the end. So and then we get a notification, OK, this is one it's it's, it says something about quality. OK, the rich wasn't, wasn't enormous, but the quality of what we made was, was.
good quality for the people who opened the article. Sometimes you can say, hey, there's some, there's this article, everybody's reading it and really reading it until the end, maybe we should.
promote it, maybe we should do something different. Maybe it should get a place in our newsletter.
So there are hidden gems and there's also
The opposite is we can see the full successors. Oh, it's where we did the promotion well it is reaching this article is reaching a lot of people, but most of the people are quitting halfway with 10 seconds.
There's something wrong with this article. We have to look at it, maybe it's too long, maybe it's too much enrichment. It's less enrichment, we, people get bored halfway. It's a learning process. It says about something about the quality, and it's a metric.
The newsroom is able to influence if you're with your writing, with your recording, with your videoing, you can influence the subscription attention time. If you do well,
At least for the people who opens the article without the promotion and the promotion bias is not in it. You can see, OK, I'm, I gave those people value for their money, value for that time for them, it was an interesting article.
Subscription attention time, we know it, we've known it, and I can show you the reports behind it. It has a
Huge relation with conversions.
If the if the
Subscriber attention time on an article or on a day on a brand is high, the conversions are up. There is a big correlation between subscription attention time and the conversions.
And it's also even a bigger
A correlation with churn and subscription attention time because if we treat our subscribers well.
And we, we are able to keep them with us better than we do. 1% more retention equals 10% conversions in our business, we are hunting for conversions. We're focusing on pay rates and conversion, and we did it ourselves and not taking enough care of our current customers, we have to treat our current customers.
in the best way we can, because they will quit, a lot less, and we will get more conversion. So focusing on your
Current customers is doing well fortune and also for conversion and especially with the introduction of flexible paywalls.
With the exact same content mix we try to reach our.
Current customers and new customers. It's, it's a little bit fun.
That sometimes in media we treat our subscribers differently than our prospects for our subscribers, we have quality content behind the pay and for our prospects, we do some clickbait things, cheap things to get traction. Oh, I have a quality restaurant. I really serve quality food and in front of the door, we get, we're giving away cheap hamburgers. He is a cheap hamburger for you because you have quality food inside. No, it's
It's, it's really my message too that's completely different wrong approach to subscribers and the neighbours of the subscribers, the prospects, they are not different people. They are not living in a different planet. They are living in the same streets. They are supporting the same football club there chase their challenges in life are the same. The kids go to the same schools.
If you treat your subscribers well.
You also treat your
Prospects well. So
For us looking at subscriptiontention time.
It was really helpful and especially for the newsroom because it gives you focus, what are we actually doing? Are we
Making journalism highly connected to the brand identity of our brand. Are we doing what we think we have to do? Are we writing about the topics and themes we really think these are ours, is our signature or are we just hunting for clicks and hoping for a result.
So for
For us
Subscription attention time and we have and the most.
Difficult part is, of course, that we can just philtre out all those 12th reads listens and watches, but the most, the most challenging parts, of course, how about the well part. Can we measure the well part,
And of course some story about Gaza, no one, no one of the others will say, oh, this is a great story.
No, it's not, it's a depressing story, but it still can be time well spent. So working with the rating system or thumbs up or thumbs down system, that's not working. That's why we've chosen.
Can we to start a programme and at least we, we implemented in all our own dashboards, daily reports, and we are
In this programme, and when I got the invitation for this congress of 6 months ago, I promised from organisation, we will have the results by then, but, University of Amsterdam and the University of Leufen in Belgium. We are doing this programme together with them. We are trying to get this well spent part measured on a scientifical level, but they are not join.
They're not very good at deadlines, so the results are not there, but the first
insights we got that is a correlation if you, if you remember the tree, the tree, the bouncers, scanners, and the deeply red, if we get the amount of deeply red, the highest of the tree, then there is high correlation with the well-spent part. This, this group says, OK, if I reach this level, most of them and we do a lot of surf and say, OK, this was well spent time and that's why we've chosen to
Implement this time well time well spent metric for the newsrooms and of course,
All the other things we are still measuring, of course we want average, of course we want to have pages, but we are hunting for the right ones and not just for some people accidentally fly buying our website.
That's my message, and I
Have all almost one minute left, so the time management of this presentation, finally, I got it right. Um.
If you have any questions and remarks, please look me up. I'm here all day and you can easily find me if I like LinkedIn or somewhere else. I hope it was that this was not a waste of your time. It was time well spent for you. And if you really were bored and I think I've done something better, scan the QR code and you will get to this hydraulic pump moves and you can be like me wasting.
your time on hydraulic pumps. Thank you very much.