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How Le Monde plans to reach 1 million subscribers by 2025

2022-06-15. With more than 540,000 subscribers to their digital and print products, Le Monde has among the highest number of subscribers of any daily news publication in France, but as its name states, it’s really the world they’re interested in, and their goal is to have 1 million subscribers in the next three years.

by Brian Veseling brian.veseling@wan-ifra.org | June 15, 2022

To do this, they are taking three approaches: reaching out to younger audiences in a variety of ways as well as by trying to gain new readers across Africa with a dedicated section, and new ones internationally with a new English edition.

“We want 25 percent of our portfolio in 2025 to be international,” Anne Tostain, Vice President of Subscriptions for Le Monde, told participants at WAN-IFRA’s recent Digital Media Europe conference in Oslo.

They know that high quality content is essential to achieve this, and they have invested heavily in their journalism. Today, Le Monde employs 520 journalists in France (where it is has the largest newsroom in the country) and around the world.

“We are convinced that investing in journalists, in good information, diversified information, rigorous information, is the best way to convince people to support us and to subscribe,” Tostain said.

She added that new editorial and product innovations are also helping them to reach new audiences around the world.

And Le Monde has been growing quickly, she said, increasing subscriber numbers by more than 12 percent last year, and by more than 56 percent from 2019 to 2020.

While they use a freemium model with a mix of free and paid content, the amount of free content on their website has been steadily declining. Today, Tostain said 58 percent of Le Monde’s content is behind a paywall, whereas five years ago, in 2017, that figure was 33 percent.

“We think now we have found a good mix between free articles to capture audience and paid content to make people subscribe,” she said.

Traffic too has grown, and it’s now 10 percent higher than last year, she said.

She also noted that, like many news publishers, Le Monde gained a lot of subscribers in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, but they recorded a slowdown in much of 2021, which began growing again around last September.

“Since September 2021, we see people again want to have a full access to news and the beginning of the year is really good,” Tostain said.

Doubling down on social media

“Le Monde has been present on historical social media for years, and it helped us a lot for our digital transformation to make our content more visible, more accessible to diversify our audience,” she said. “We have a dedicated team of journalists who publish and edit and moderate all the publications on social media.”

Le Monde has 5 million followers on Facebook, which Tostain said is really important for them because Facebook represents 4 percent of their web traffic. They have 10 million followers on Twitter (Le Monde publishes more than 100 tweets a day, and the platform represents 1 percent of their web traffic). They also have 1.6 million subscribers on Instagram.

“But times are changing and new social media are emerging with a much younger audience, and we need to adapt,” Tostain said. “We need to be where they are … some of them are on Snapchat and TikTok.”

She added that Le Monde launched its first daily edition on Snapchat in 2016 and since then, they have adapted their content regularly and today have an audience of 1.5 million subscribers on the platform.

Likewise, they became active on TikTok starting in 2020 and it represents 4 million views each month for them.

Furthermore, in their efforts to gain new subscribers, they have experimented with new ways of allowing readers to pay for subscriptions. In 2020, she said, they added Subscribe with Google.

“We think it’s also a good way to reach younger people. We offer, with Subscribe with Google, a 50 percent discount, and we think it’s helped us a lot. Subscribe with Google is now 30 percent of our new subscriptions,” she said.

And they are clearly reaching more younger people. For example, Tostain said that in 2021, among new subscribers, more than 48 percent were younger than 34 years old.

Expanding in Africa and the world

Since 2015, Le Monde has a dedicated section on the website regarding Africa. They have 35 journalists from France in Africa, who cover 55 countries and produce 4,000 articles per year.

While they have been successful in building an audience on the continent, getting more people there to subscribe has been difficult, Tostain said.

Doing some research, she said they realised that subscription habits are much different in France than in many African countries, and also because of the differences in purchasing power, Le Monde was also simply too expensive.

“We decided to offer the possibility to pay by mobile banking with a partnership with Orange. We launched this way of payment in Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. We discounted the price by 50 percent, and now we are still working on the product mix,” she said.

After Africa, the next ambition is the rest of the world with their new English language edition.

“We launched it in the middle of 2022, just before the [French presidential] election.”

Their site now has a toggle where you can choose between French and English. For now, they don’t have an English-language app, but she said they are working on it.

Overall, Tostain described Le Monde’s English-language strategy as a second-reading one. They know people in the US, UK or Norway won’t subscribe only to Le Monde, so it is intended rather  “for people who want to have an alternative point of view on international and European news, we can be an alternative.”

The way the new edition works is like this: Each day, the editorial team at Le Monde selects 70 articles to be translated into English by professional translators. The team at Le Monde then checks and edits the translations so the quality remains exactly the same as the original, she said.

To further encourage potential readers, the price of the English edition is set quite low, just 2.49 euros per month, she said.

However, people in France are not eligible for the offer. “They have to subscribe to premium offers, from 15 euros per month,” she said. “Our target is really international.”

And the early results are promising, Tostain said. One month after the offer began Le Monde had recorded 1.2 million visits, and gained 1,000 subscriptions.

“Our goal, our ambition, by the end of the year is 30 million visits and 25,000 subscriptions, so we have a lot to do. We have to improve awareness abroad,” she said.

Partnerships and investing more in social media

They are also working to build some partnerships, such as one with The New York Times. At the beginning of the launch of the English edition, they sent an email to New York Times subscribers to promote their offer, which she said worked very well.

Looking ahead, she noted that Le Monde plans to invest more in social media overall, and also in different forms of social media that they have not been active on in the past, such as Reddit, which Tostain noted is big in the United States.

“Our priority right now is really the app,” she said. “We think it’s necessary, crucial to offer an application when you offer a subscription model.”

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