Despite its name, The Print is actually a pure digital play that was launched in August 2017. On its website, it has the stated aim to have the substance of print and the reach of digital.

With a staff of about 100, The Print is focused primarily on news relating to politics, policy, government, governance and strategic affairs, said Kohli, who joined WAN-IFRA’s recent virtual Digital Media India conference to discuss their experience in taking part in the bootcamp, which was led by Gregor Waller, Principal Consultant, WAN-IFRA Consulting along with Ola Henriksson, WAN IFRA Expert Advisor, Independent Media Consultant, who also both took part in the session.

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. The bootcamp was offered by WAN-IFRA in partnership with the Meta Journalism Project India.

Moving from advertising to reader revenue

While The Print was initially financed largely through advertising, Kohli said that during the pandemic they began asking readers for their financial support. They also began thinking about moving towards a more reader revenue supported operation overall.

The bootcamp came at an opportune time for them, she said, because they were in the process of trying to figure out whether they should have a log-in, or a paywall, as well as whether they could benefit from having a premium offering only for subscribers.

As for that 37.7 percent engagement increase mentioned earlier, Kohli said it was due largely to three key factors:

• Automation, especially in the area of handling their wire service stories
• Tracking, in particular paying closer attention to their “brand lovers”
• New products, including newsletters and offering readers opportunities to speak with journalists.

She expanded on a couple of these points.

For example, “we were not tracking ‘brand lovers’ before the bootcamp,” she said. “In fact, we did not know much about brand lovers before. We were using the general GNI metrics of unique users and how many people were coming to our website. But once we started tracking brand lovers we realised that within a very short span of time we were about to increase our brand lovers by about 14.5 percent,” she said.

‘A reader is central to whatever we do’

Kohli credits their successes to their strong reader focus.

“We believe a reader is central to whatever we do,” she said.

Expanding on the new products, she said the aim was to get new readers to try out The Print’s content. 

“We launched products around the trends,” Kohli said. “We launched products around strategic affairs. We launched products on security. We launched a number of different products to cater to the different audience personas, and we also felt that this got different audiences to come and try out The Print,” she said.

“This was an increase of 48.1 percent purely during the period of the bootcamp, so I think these experiments really helped us,” she said.

Among these offerings were curated newsletters, events, and opportunities to speak directly with reporters, who also began sending monthly reports to subscribers.

“We are growing at a phenomenal month-on-month rate,” she added.

Helping new subscribers form daily habits

Furthermore, Kohli also noted The Print put an engagement strategy in place that focused on the formation of daily habits early in the life of a subscriber.

“I think this really helped in retaining the subscriber very early in the stage. It was also key to reduce churn because we figured out that anyone who engaged with our newsletters early, they’ve stuck, and they’ve renewed their subscription month-on-month or annually. So this was something that was very critical for us,” Kohli said.

The big project for The Print during the bootcamp was the launch of a project they called S.P.A.R.K., which was where they focused on the Subscription module, Premium offering, and also working on data, which was Reader Knowledge.

The aim was to help The Print use the subscription model to get more data, she said.

“The challenges that we faced were that 80 percent of our readers wanted to consumer news for free, so when we did the audience survey, we figured out that while 20 percent said ‘Yes, we believe that good news needs to be paid for,’ 80 percent said ‘If you put up a paywall, we will leave.’ So that was a concern: How do we keep our readers, but keep our month-on-month ARPU?”

A second challenge was changing the skillsets of their own staff.

Most of the people The Print was hiring on the editorial side were people who primarily had print backgrounds and when they came to work for the digital publisher, they needed to quickly upgrade their digital skill sets to be able to take video, photographs, talk on podcasts and so on.

“There were multiple skills to get on a digital platform,” Kohli said. “I think a lot of people have done this very successfully. And people who are successful on the digital platform are people who have quickly upgraded from the print mentality and moved on to a digital mentality where they are looking at doing quality stories but in multiple different formats.”

Key learnings

“We figured out that articles that were published early in the day got a lot of traction. We got 50 percent more page views for articles that were published before noon. And if we only looked at the exclusive articles published by us, that was about 78 percent.”

These findings led The Print to change up their news cycle in order to start pushing out more stories before noon.

They also found that relevant themes in their newsletters helped to increase open rates by about 8 percent, she said. Also beneficial was to make sure the newsletter’s subject line was specific to the main story.

What’s next?

Kohli said The Print’s next focus will be on more exclusive content.

“We have realised that our readers – our user base – want premium offerings. They want deep dives. They want investigative reports. And they are willing to pay money for that,” she said.

The second focus is a stronger emphasis on readers.

“We need to get the reader in the middle of what we’re doing, and I think a sharp reader focus which is something that is very critical for the organisation now,” she said.

In addition, they plan to experiment with different formats, Kohli said.

“While we are digital and we have been doing a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos, we are also looking at putting different elements in our stories,” she noted. “How we use cards. How we do infographics. What kinds of graphics could work? So, we are experimenting with different formats, and that is also leading to increased traction in getting readers to our website.”

They have also tweaked the editorial structure, and are now looking at “speed news,” Kohli said.

“We have a speed news desk that is constantly pushing out breaking news and important news that is very time bound. And secondly, we have somebody who is helming the premium desk, whose only focus is getting out exclusive, premium articles,” she said.