Video: McClatchy’s Grant Belaire on selling subscription ‘side products’
For local news, the main selling point of a subscription is a broad range of coverage and content. But for McClatchy, a media organization producing a lot of local news content, the future of subscriptions lies with the readers who continuously over-index in specific content categories. In this presentation from Digiday’s Hot Topic: Subscriptions and Commerce, which took place in New York City this past February, hear from Grant Belaire, vp, digital audience development at McClatchy, on finding the right content verticals, the creation and launch of Sports Pass, a sports-only subscription product, and what content categories they’re looking to next. The key hits:
- Consumers are being conditioned to expect that they will have to subscribe to something, whether it’s a food delivery service, or a news source.
- Side products, like McClatchy’s sports-only subscription Sports Pass, allow the consumer to feel like they are paying for the content they are already over-indexing in.
- It’s OK if a full-paying subscriber wants to convert to a smaller product, because the important result is that they’re still a subscriber, since the other option is no subscription at all.
Listen to this presentation on the Digiday Live podcast here.
More in Media
Forbes tests a creator-led audience play to grow off-platform reach
Forbes is yet another publisher tapping creators and their audiences to drive off-platform growth – with a slightly different structure.
How Lipton Ice Tea is using local creators instead of building in-house social teams
Lipton worked with Billion Dollar Boy to activate local creators across six different markets; a new approach to global marketing
How a German publisher JV is turning LLM visibility into a premium brand buy
Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.