“From 2015 until now, we have had a complete transformation in our finances. The Guardian in 2015 lost 85 million pounds (approximately 100 million euros), and we are now making profit. So from minus 85 million to profit as a result of this reader revenue strategy,” Richard Furness, Managing Director of Consumer Revenues & Publishing for Guardian News & Media, told participants at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in Oslo, Norway.

And it’s not just the positive financial change, but also where that reader revenue is coming from, which is now all over the world.

Most contributions coming from outside the UK

“This isn’t readership, this is support. Not surprising I think for a brand that’s had a 200 year heritage in the UK, 77 percent of our supporters were in the UK,” Furness said of the period of late 2015 / early 2016.

Fast forward to today, and more than 60 percent of The Guardian’s support now comes from outside the UK, literally all over the planet, including two people who support them in the Antarctic, “which we are very proud of,” he said.

There are now more than 1 million supporters, he said, including 419,000 digital supporters.

There are 585,000 people who are members or recurring contributors, and 475,000 people who have made a one-off donation in the past 12 months. A further 114,000 people subscribe to The Guardian’s print products, he said.

“The reader revenue strategy has been utterly, utterly transformative for us from top to bottom at The Guardian,” Furness said.

Understanding why people contribute

He then offered some key lessons from what they’ve seen in their contributions business during the past seven years.

One of the most important, he said, was the amount of emphasis they’ve put on listening to their readers.

“We’ve really invested in this area,” Furness said. “We have an in-house UX and research team, a really brilliant team in lots and lots of ways. They help us understand our audiences’ motivations and behaviours, their attitudes towards The Guardian, our journalism and the world around them.”

Some of the ways they are doing this include through in-depth interviews, constant surveys on their site, and running A-B tests continuously. “And crucially,” he added, “I think we’ve gotten much better at understanding the motivations for support. So why are people supporting The Guardian when you can read all of our content for nothing on the web?”

There are several key reasons, and interestingly, he said the main ones that people have given them for contributing have remained the same for several years.

“One is our independence,” he said. “People value our independence. They value the quality of our journalism. The fact that we are an open platform is perhaps the most humbling one. We hear time and time again, particularly from the higher givers, the people who donate higher amounts, it’s the fact that they want to donate to keep The Guardian open for everyone. So the fact that we haven’t got a paywall. They pay so that others can benefit from it, which we hear over and over again. A really altruistic motivation.”

Also a strong motivator for contributions is The Guardian’s mission to protect the free press and to challenge the powerful, he said. “So investigations are really important: WikiLeaks, the Panama Papers. Whenever we do those sort of big investigations and challenge the most powerful people in the world, it’s always a really big and fundamental moment for support.”

Essential to this reader revenue contribution strategy is the small article that The Guardian routinely runs at the end of their articles to encourage reader support. (See an example just below)

While at the very beginning The Guardian put this “ask” in ad position they had available, Furness said they changed that almost immediately.

“We quickly learned that the position of the article is vital,” he said. “You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the conclusion very quickly was it has to be part of our journalism, it has to be embedded in what we do at The Guardian. It can’t be an ad.”

“When we went from an ad slot to custom unit, there was a 90 percent increase in conversions overnight, and that’s continued to grow and grow,” Furness said.

Internally, this short pitch article is called “the epic,” he said. “It’s a really fundamental part of what we do in our reader revenue strategy. It’s presented here at the right time, a natural moment when you have finished reading an article, and we are in complete control of it,” he said.

Crafting the pitch: Testing makes perfect

Furness then explained how they have developed the content for “the epic” over time.

First, they try to provide context about the industry, the world we are living in, and articulate The Guardian’s values, and try to link these points to encourage people to support them.

“Every phrase, every word, every bit of punctuation has been crafted over time and a huge amount of effort goes into what is on here,” Furness said.

He noted that he was previously Marketing Director for The Guardian for several years, and his initial inclination for “the epic” was that it should be short form.

“Short and snappy,” he said, “surely no one will ever get through this, and I can’t stress enough how long-form leads short-form every time with this message. We’ve tried to do it in a sentence, we’ve tried to do it in a paragraph, but this is absolutely the optimal length for people who are going to give money to you. They want to understand why. They want to understand the reasons, and the marketplace and why you’re asking. So we’re not crazy in doing it long, that is tested and tested and tested.”

“We do hundreds of tests every year,” he continued. “This started just before the pandemic. We tested a variant of the epic telling readers how many articles they’d read. I was a bit skeptical about it, I thought it felt a bit big-brothery – ‘how much do you know about me?’ But that proved completely unfounded, it was the best test that we’ve ever run.”