“Our long term goal is simply to build strong multiple platforms,” Aigbogun told participants at our recent Digital Media Africa conference in Nairobi. “Get readers to come. Get them to stay. Get them to pay. Get them to stay paying instead of churning. Bring them in with good content, with technology to ensure seamless distribution. Technology that allows a seamless payment.”

This overall strategy of having content that is worth paying for also applies to the publisher’s growing events business. Events now account for 32 percent of BusinessDay’s annual revenues, but more on that in a moment.

Click here to see images from Digital Media Africa in Nairobi

Three main revenue streams

Established in 2001 and based in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, BusinessDay has three key revenue streams.

• • • Subscriptions – BusinessDay has a paywall, but some content is also freely available.
    • Advertising – An important pillar, BusinessDay continues to build and strengthen its ad sales team.
    • Events – BusinessDay organises dozens of events each year in a variety of sizes and formats.

Ultimately, Aigbogun said BusinessDay’s success is dependent upon the quality and relevance of their content. As a result, they are focused on creating content that helps explain the effects and impacts of news events, policy and regulatory decisions to their readers. They are less concerned with trying to break news, he added.

BusinessDay’s editorial concepts are largely based on learnings they gained from temporarily taking down the paper’s paywall in April 2023, Aigbogun said.

Learning to understand what readers will pay for

The reason for dropping the paywall began with a highly controversial Nigerian election that resulted in legal disputes that went on to the country’s supreme court.

“When the supreme court was about to start hearing these cases, our editors thought it was perhaps the best time to open our content for more people to begin to experience it,” Aigbogun said.

Website traffic quadrupled, and BusinessDay’s editors gained deeper insights into their audience. Specifically, they were aiming to understand what kind of content they engaged with, and what they would be willing to pay for.

“We are no longer struggling to break news at BusinessDay,” Aigbogun said. “We are focused on explaining. And because we deal with things like exchange rates, volatility: If the inflation rate goes up, what does that mean for the average Nigerian? What does that mean for businesses? How does that affect disposable income?”

All journalists receive weekly reports about how many people read their stories and how those compare with the average traffic. They can also benchmark themselves alongside their colleagues.

Today, the paywall is back, and BusinessDay is rebuilding its subscriber base after the intermittent period when it allowed free access to its content.

Focus on driving advertising over subscriptions

However, while subscriptions are one of their key revenue streams, BusinessDay actually places a much stronger emphasis on promoting the paper’s value to advertisers, Aigbogun said.

“We go to the advertiser and we say to them ‘We are not sure that you would prosper as well without BusinessDay.’ We engage policy, and we engage policy makers. We engage regulation and those who regulate industry,” he said.

To support these efforts, BusinessDay has been hiring more people, specifically in sales and marketing.

“We believe that if we do not have a good sales team, we will not succeed. So we have been very strong at that,” Aigbogun said.

There are some subscribers incentives though, to be sure. For example, they offer bundled subscriptions that combine access to their content with tickets to their events.

BusinessDay has also been building their B2B subscriptions. They sell bulk plans to banks and insurance companies, for example, for their staff and high net worth customers.

“That has been successful as we grow paid subscriptions sales,” Aigbogun said.

Today, these bulk subscriptions account for a substantial percentage of their total subscriptions, he added.

Events proving to be major revenue generator

From a starting point of zero in 2010, BusinessDay’s events business now accounts for 32 percent of its annual revenues, Aigbogun said.

“This year, we think, it will account for about 40 percent of our profitability,” he added.

BusinessDay is holding 38 events this year. These cover a wide range of business related topics from a Family Business Summit they do annually with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, to a CEO Forum. Another event is done in collaboration with the Nigerian Stock Exchange and spotlights the exchange’s top 25 companies by valuation.

“It has been exceptionally successful,” Aigbogun said.

BusinessDay is also creating very small gatherings for what Aigbogun calls a policy intervention series.

“We are able to bring leaders in business sectors into the same room with policy makers already. And we find that they hardly ever talk to one another. So, we are making that engagement possible,” he said, adding that “sometimes regulators are shocked as to the perception that industry leaders have of them and of their regulation. So we are helping to bridge that gap,” he said.

‘Our future is digital’

While BusinessDay regularly produces video content, Aigbogun sees video becoming even more important for them. Today’s younger audiences have a marked preference for watching over reading, he noted.

This is also part of their general outlook. “There is a consensus that our future is digital. We are no longer struggling with that,” Aigbogun said.

He also encouraged participants to regularly take a moment to acknowledge their ongoing accomplishments.

“Sometimes we do not recognise the progress that we are making,” he said.

BusinessDay regularly publishes video content, something publisher Frank Aigbogun says they plan on increasing.