Arun Rahim, Manorama Online’s Head of Business Development, joined last week’s virtual Digital Media India event to share their learnings and the results of the big project they undertook as part of the programme.

The goal of the programme was to encourage and coach participants on their journey towards digital reader revenues, said Ola Henriksson, WAN IFRA Expert Advisor, Independent Media Consultant, who moderated the session and led the bootcamp along with Gregor Waller, Principal Consultant, WAN-IFRA Consulting.

Changing the mindset from reach to engagement

The main objectives of the programme, which involved six individual modules with coachings in between, were to help the publishers with ways to drive engagement and grow digital subscriptions.

“It’s very much about the changing mindset from reach to engagement,” Henriksson said. “We also talked about the importance and relevance of data, the different revenue and paywall models, and we were also talking a lot about the user journey, conversion and retention.”

Manorama Online is part of a legacy media operation with a 130-plus year history. It is the online division of Malayala Manorama, a daily morning newspaper in the Malayalam language based in Kottayam, Kerala, at the southwestern tip of India. The company also has numerous other publications.

Rahim said they took part in the bootcamp as part of their efforts to build the subscription product for Manorama Online, which they are planning to launch in the near future.

He added that something that stood out initially for them was the importance of tracking certain metrics.

“One of the metrics we tracked right from the beginning of the bootcamp was Media Time, which is basically an aggregate of all of the time that all of your users spend on your content,” he said.

Manorama Online increased their Media Time metric by 15 percent during the bootcamp programme, Rahim said.

He credited this increase in large part to the use of tactics shared during the programme regarding premium articles, such as creating headlines that have more context.

“When we decided to go to a subscription model, we started working on premium content. We thought we should have a freemium model, where premium content would either be behind a datawall or a paywall, and that is how we started creating premium content,” Rahim said.

Increasing registration was one of the goals of that experiment and as part of that, he said they started tracking how users navigated their site and at what point they dropped out. 

“Each event was something we tracked to understand where we were facing dropouts,” Rahim said.

They also started tracking daily logged-in users and additional metrics.

Premium content does not mean ‘exclusive’

Another key issue for Manorama Online was around the question of how to define premium content? 

Rahim noted that Gregor Waller reminded the teams throughout the process that “premium is not a function of exclusive topics.”

Rather, an important feature of a premium story is one that adds context for your audience.

“The editorial team started understanding that and also started coming up with articles that were not exclusive by any means, but had context and some value added to them that you could call premium,” Rahim said.

He added that this was among the factors that helped Manorama Online increase their overall registered users during the process by 28 percent.

What also helped was several different experiments they conducted to their user interface (UI) of their datawall.

“We changed the colour. We changed the text. We made it simple. We changed the wording from “Register” to “Create an account.” We added Malayalam to it because we are a Malayalam language site,” Rahim said.

Help users by keeping things simple

A key learning for Manorama Online, he said, was “the simpler the better.”

“Your users don’t want to go through a complex maze. They just want to have a very simple registration process,” he said.

Coming to the other two experiments, on the segment, more than the segments and the categories, it’s clearly the articles per se that are getting you the registrations. If you have an article tagged as premium and you don’t really put it out there for users to see, and you don’t really put in the effort on the headline, it won’t work.

“If you work well with your articles, it’s definitely going to trigger registrations,” Rahim said.

He gave an example of a recent article that worked well for them was related to the death of cricket star Shane Warne from a heart attack at the age of 52. The story discussed “the health aspects of over-dieting and not consuming food. That article triggered the most registrations for us that day,” Rahim said.

“We want to try further experiments on registration walls. And when we start with the paywall, we want to try experiments on that,” he added.

“This whole process is an iterative process: you keep learning, and you keep testing and you keep finding out that some things work and some things don’t work,” Rahim said.