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10 audience development takeaways from our forum with The Rebooting and The Guardian

Last updated: September 18, 2024

The traffic era is giving way to the audience era. Depth beats breadth. And The Guardian’s adapting their audience strategy in response. 

So our CEO James Capo and Brian Morrissey, founder of The Rebooting, talked to Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth of The Guardian, and Thomas Johnson, VP of Audience and Strategy of The Guardian US, about how they’re shifting from a volume- to frequency-focused audience strategy. (We recapped this part of the conversation here.) 

But along the way, we covered a lot of other topics, segmentation best practices, media business revenue models, how media companies should be approaching product design, and a lot more. Keep reading for our biggest takeaways from this great conversation: 

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(And for the full session, watch the webinar recording.) 

Note: All quotes have been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity.

Most media organizations are prioritizing growth at the expense of engagement — and that’s a missed opportunity. 

Capo: We’re seeing a move back from sort of what I would call the traffic era to understanding the audience and that the audience and the data equals revenue.

That’s a clear path to us that we see. And some of our more progressive clients have really leaned into the understanding and the activation around their audience.

In our most recent State of Audience Report, 70% of respondents said, ‘I want to grow the audience size,’ but only 25% said that engagement was a top priority. So everyone’s out there trying to get more, more and more more, but a lot of folks, or at least only 25% of them, are actually thinking about engagement and how you are going deep with the audience you have.

That’s an area that we as an organization are doubling down on. The clients that we work with in the industry that are really focused on that I think are the ones that are going to win. 

Consider organizing your audience strategy around one simple, easily measurable North Star metric. 

Harkin: North Star metrics need to be simple, durable and flexible. Multiple people around the organization need to understand what the metric is — and how they can improve it. So for us that frequency metric is the number of unique browsers across a 31 day period and we have a bunch of people who are working around different ways that we can influence this. So Tom, as the head of audience for The Guardian US is really effective at moving the top funnel kinds of initiatives.. 

The area that I play in, where it comes to growth and reader revenue, is deepening things with app downloads and newsletter signups and so forth. But we have this ability to have a centralized objective for the entire company that people can use the tools and expertise that they have to run at and try and effect.  

It’s a fairly new initiative that we’ve launched, but so far it’s been really embraced by people who are just happy to have that clarity — where it’s not some sort of black box engagement score that people don’t really understand. 

They’re not asking, ‘How do I get an engagement score to go from 2.5 to 3.5?’ They’re saying, ‘We know we want to get people to 10 visits or a frequency score of 10 in a 31 day period.’ It’s very clear. And I think that’s essential.

You don’t always have to choose between traffic and engagement. 

Johnson: There are still signals that, even if they’re not driving the same volume of referrals, are worth paying attention to. 

Unless search were to completely go away, I still think there’s going to be value in looking broadly at ,’What are the questions people are asking attached to a major breaking use moment?’ 

And often for the same questions that people are asking, yes, you can use it to optimize for a top of funnel story, but also often you’ll see very high correlation with click through from the homepage. 

There’s often sometimes a false binary of are we chasing new readers or trying to engage our existing audiences? But often you can find formats and formats within topics that really serve multiple purposes. 

So that’s a big part of what we’re thinking about: How do you make sure that you’re serving audiences across different platforms?

But to your and Emily’s point, we need to think about obviously those high scale moments where we’re reaching a new audience. In terms of sheer volume, it’s going to lead to probably a higher top-line number of reader revenue support. 

But what I find just as interesting is looking further down and seeing what are the pieces that aren’t necessarily having the same scale but driving really strong reading times or breaking through with our very frequent users? 

I think you’ll often see some interesting overlap between those sorts of stories and the ones that are high converting and also really distinct to The Guardian. 

For example, our climate crisis coverage — or pieces that are looking at an issue related to the climate crisis in a way that maybe isn’t being broadly covered. Maybe that doesn’t have the same sort of high scale interest across all frequency groups, but you’ll see a very sort of loyal audience that has that intentionality. 

They associate The Guardian with climate coverage and those are some of the sweet spots where you see the strategic opportunity of, ‘Right, well, let’s make sure that we’re getting those pieces in front of the audiences that have really shown a really, really strong interest in those topics.’ 

Done well, segmentation creates riches in the niches.

Capo: First, you need to get the data together. Obviously there are other tools out there that can do this. It’s a philosophical question of all in one or pieces and parts, but you got to have, you’re bringing all the audience data into a central data warehouse or you have tools like Omeda to do that for you. 

But having the segmentation is key. There’s been obviously this rise of the micro-audiences that are high value that you can target with that. 

And I think when Tom was talking about climate change, now you have to think, ‘OK, how do we package that up?’ If you are a heavy ad business, how can you now offer that up as a segment for advertisers that might be interested in that environment? 

From there, you start to resell the sawdust. You have this audience and then you are segmenting it based on the needs of either a subscription model where you can have premium tiers of subscription, a donation model or an ad model or even a lead gen model. 

There’s these models across the spectrum in media and media is not a monolith, we think we sometimes think about that it is, but where I sit in the industry, I see broad-based consumer type of publications like The Guardian down to very targeted in the weeds, B2B brands that have 10,000 audience members but are doing millions and millions and millions of dollars of revenue because they’ve been able to segment and be targeted. 

And everything along that spectrum can be monetized in the way if you have the right content and audience combined here. 

At the end of the day, I think we sometimes overcomplicate this when it is an environment where segmentation can create some riches in the niches so to speak with this. 

Things like what The Guardian is doing with segmenting around these North Star metrica of frequency around topics is exactly the strategy that I think a larger consumer type brand should be thinking about. Because we see it across the board on that. That is where you see the data segmentation happening from there. 

Encourage repeat visits by creating customer journeys and product strategies around individual news moments. 

Johnson: One way I’m thinking about it, and this is definitely something we’ve thought about at The Guardian is for an average US reader, what is the brand impression that you’re making during those moments? 

As one example you could sort of test for, do you want to really highlight the breadth of your coverage in a moment where someone’s coming to an article page for one story? 

Is that the moment to highlight other stories that we think are also compelling for a new reader that maybe aren’t a one-to-one topically related? Is it something where we want to really highlight the depth of our coverage? 

So I think we are looking at it a lot as maximizing that moment of interest and offering clear paths to go deeper into the journalism. 

And that’s part of what I try to communicate in the newsroom during these moments — that you’re often meeting a very wide range of readers at very different points of their informational journey. Are you offering the context that can really create that hopefully some clarity around a very difficult issue or topic to understand? 

Those smaller first, or first and second and third impressions… They are kind of hard to quantify in the moment and say this is the direct impact of that one story. But I think if you really think about that as part of a longer term strategy, and then again sort looking back at the big picture of, ‘Are we sort of moving the needle in terms of frequency over time?,’ those stories are still valuable. 

So one side we need to offer a clear product journey, but also have a very clear editorial strategy around curating an experience that maximizes the moment. 

Consider — and account for — the individual nuances of each audience member. 

Capo: From where we sit, and I think this is a negative in some cases we forget there’s an audience member behind there and that person who’s reading the New York Times or The Guardian also runs a media business and reads the Rebooting. And they’re also a runner who reads Runner’s World. 

And I think we tend to forget about the nuances of the person you’re actually talking to. And that there’s other ways to think about that audience member outside of just the channel in which you think they’re coming to you from there. 

And to your point, “primary news source,” “primary interest,” “first primary business source,” these are all things that we have to take in account when you think of your audience and it is beyond just the household too. I think there’s a lot of different ways to look at that. 

So I think sometimes I think we get a little pigeonholed thinking about news when we’re thinking about content in media as a whole and how the audience experiences that across the things they interact with from there. 

Media companies — and their revenue models — are not a monolith. 

Publishing companies that are looking at that inverted funnel of all the traffic that’s coming in. If you take that inverted funnel and you drive a line down the middle of it, and on one side you have what I would call direct revenue and the other side I would have indirect revenue. 

And the direct revenue is donors, it’s audience reader revenue, it’s subscriptions, it’s attendance. And then I have the indirect revenue of advertising and lead generation and sponsorships and things. 

Each publisher needs to decide how much they want to fill up each of that sort of funnel there. And there is a way to think about it and break it down that way.

Just because you don’t have one side of that inverted pyramid filled up doesn’t mean you’re not at a successful media company. It’s just the business model is different from there. 

And I think we tend to lump folks together instead of taking a step back, looking at the audience and then thinking, ‘How can I then think about – Do I want to drive direct revenue or do I want to drive indirect revenue? And which one’s harder for me to do with the brand and the audience I have?’ 

And we tend to make it harder than we need to instead of focusing on an area we know where our brand, our content is going to drive outcomes in a faster way. 

In an era of signal loss, focus on directionality over precision. 

Johnson: I think about our metrics more in a directional sense, rather than thinking about it as a firm concrete target necessarily. 

If we feel confident that the directionality of the metrics have not been impacted by changes in privacy, then that I think at least helps where we see the over indexing relative to our weekly baseline. 

So that’s how I often think about it — knowing that the numbers might not perfectly reflect your audience that we’re looking at unique browsers, not unique individuals. 

So if I’m very engaged, I probably go to the website while I’m at work. I probably look at it on mobile web. I might also have the app. And that wouldn’t necessarily translate because unless the person signed in without having a hard paywall, it’s not necessarily going to be the same sort of percentage of our audience. 

So even with those limitations, I think you still do, if you cast a wide net over the coverage you’ve published in a week, you do still see those distinct differences across different groups. So again, I think trying to find the moments where you see an over-indexing as sort of a directional cue. That’s how I try to act on it. 

Audience development needs to be a top-down, organization-wide priority.  

Capo: It’s not just the one group of the business that needs to focus on audience, the entire organization. I think media companies at the core have two things, content and audience. That is what we do and is what we have. 

And you can argue they’re ranked 1A and 1B here. But it needs to be, I hate to say the cultural mindset shift, but there needs to be a mindset shift amongst media organizations where the audience is what they do — that’s at the center of the organization. 

It’s driving the business, obviously with the content as the product as well. But that’s driving the business. 

Frankly it starts at the top… There’s very few industries where, if the audience is the product, why are the audience people not paid the most in the organization? 

In every other industry, the product people or the people that are in charge of the product or the audience are the developers at a software company or developers at certain things that are actually driving it are generally the seen as the core of the business. 

Disjointed workflows and the lack of a top-down audience plan is keeping media companies from growing and engaging their audiences. 

Capo: We have folks that are focusing on driving audience and driving engagement or frequency or things like that, but [in our recent State of Audience Report] 65% of our respondents had no formal audience plan. … So what are we doing here? 

… From there you do need to look at the systems you have, I mean there is a key piece of this the Frankenstack of tech that has permeated across the media industry here. There is a way to simplify that and that is self-serving. And I’ll say that out loud here, but it is true. I’ve done it. I was a publisher. You have to do it to make things a little bit more simpler within the world we operate from here and do more with less. 

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