THE MONETISATION OF THE UNDECIDED

How NOZ Medien and mh:n Medien are increasing the target group for paid content.

At Newscamp 2019 in Augsburg, Jan Golka, Product Lead Digital Subscriptions at NOZ Digital GmbH, publicly presented the results of his collaboration with Welect for the first time under the title of this blog post. In this post, we would like to share the most important content from the presentation with everyone who was unable to attend this great conference this year:

This year's reports on the publishing and media houses prove that the industry is still in a period of upheaval. At the beginning of the year, we read a lot about Buzzfeed, Gannett Media and Vice in the USA (‘layoffs’ and ‘employees vote to unionise’). Unfortunately, there have also been reports of job cuts and planned sales of newspaper divisions in Germany.

Declining print and advertising revenues combined with only slowly growing paid content revenues on the Internet are forcing publishers to look for additional sources of income. And a lot has been done in recent years: native ads, content marketing, video, digital subscriptions, microtransactions, e-paper, voice, artificial intelligence and the use of machine learning, the expansion of tech and data are projects that all publishing houses are working on to some extent. No standard solution has yet emerged worldwide, which is why we are in a very exciting time of development, testing and exchange.

NOZ Medien and mh:n Medien are focussing on increasing the number of digital subscriptions. To do this, the digital readership is divided into segments based on their reading behaviour, which are addressed with different strategies. The most difficult challenge lies in converting irregular, occasional readers such as flybyers. These readers make up over 90% of daily sessions and offer great potential for additional revenue. NOZ Medien and mh:n Medien have focused on this readership in their collaboration with Welect, with the aim of monetising as many of these readers as possible with the help of Welect.

NOZ Medien and mh:n Medien successfully achieved this by offering readers who did not want to sign up for a subscription or register for free access in the paywall another alternative: to select and watch a promotional video themselves via Welect in order to then receive time-reduced access to the content. See also the following images:

The most important results so far:

1. Paywall conversions have remained constant.
2. The reach has remained stable despite the barrier.
3. The high CPMs achieved by Welect - especially in regional self-marketing - represent a relevant and qualitative new source of revenue.
4. The alternative offered to readers prevented negative comments on social media and in customer service when the payment barrier was introduced. 
5. Clicks on the barrier have increased by 300%.

The success of the paywall project has led to NOZ Medien and mh:n Medien also successfully integrating the Welect service into the AdBlock barrier and currently examining further possible applications. Further development and testing is also ongoing in this collaboration.