Speaking during WAN-IFRA’s recent Digital Media India virtual conference, Chakraborty added that every metric they were tracking saw gradual growth from November 2021 through January this year. 

During this period, the Deccan Herald was among a small group of participants of a Digital Subscription 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 moderated the session. The bootcamp was organised by WAN-IFRA and supported by the Meta Journalism Project India.

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

Chakraborty said that during the bootcamp, Deccan Herald (DH) had a few main focus areas, which included:

Enhancement of user engagement
Development of loyal readers
Acquiring user-sign-ups/user data

For example, she said as part of this process, they did an analysis of their brand lovers and loyal readers. For each category and article, they tried to understand how their brand lovers and loyal readers were interacting with the content. Based on this analysis, the editorial team worked on categories that were found to be highly engaging.

“Our brand lovers increased by 1 percent each month, and loyal readers increased by 36 percent during the three month period,” Chakraborty sai...