Join us Oct. 15-17 in Phoenix to connect with top media buyers
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

Mitigating ‘Google risk’: The Independent maps four-pillar growth plan for the AI era
The Independent has built its growth strategy around the “blue links risk” and has stopped measuring its success by audience reach.

Advertising Week Briefing: Creators emerge as the industry’s new power brokers
Advertising Week has had creator-focused content tracks in past years, but the rising presence of content creators at this year’s event represents an evolution in how creators are engaging with advertisers, both at industry conferences like Advertising Week and in general.

From walls to frameworks: Publishers and tech giants push weekly talks on AI content use
More than 70 companies gathered for the workshop, roughly half of whom were publishers – a handful from Europe.