Producing great content as a publisher is all well and good, but you need an audience to see it. Retaining and gaining new readers is becoming ever more difficult with changes to Google search and AI overviews so at the Future of Media Technology Conference, a panel consisting of Anna Sbuttoni, deputy head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, Liz Wynn, chief support officer at The Guardian, and Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral: The Visitor Relationship Management Company, came together to discuss the key metrics to focus on, the importance of value, and how to keep audiences engaged.

Check out our round-up of the key takeaways from the day here.

Building habits and engagement to retain readers

With so much media and social media for audiences to consume, retention is now even more valuable to publishers, and The Times has been looking to do this by getting readers to keep coming back to its app. Anna Sbuttoni explained:

‘70% of the subscriber audience is reading the app over any other platform, and that’s where they get the best experience of our journalism. Some of the new things that we’re working on are specifically defined to just keep bringing people back to the app as we have a whole new emphasis on community. We’ve been tracking this figure and we can clearly see since the launch of the new app, it’s a clear upward trajectory on that metric’.

Liz Wynn sees similar trends at The Guardian with habitual users, who come back to support the outlet’s mission. However, the emotional driver isn’t enough on its own and Liz said they must show ‘the value that we’re driving to people day to day’. Dan Rua added to this by saying that it’s about ‘cultivating the relationship over time’.

The Guardian is also looking at investing in more innovation around editorial output, particularly in relation to multimedia and community building activities, as Liz explained:

‘We think it’s very important to move and evolve with our audience and allow them to consume journalism and access news, entertainment, and informative content in a way which is relevant to where they are, the platforms they’re on, and how they want to to consume it.’

This all contributes to helping to retain readers and Dan believes that ‘there’s a greater commitment to the overall journey’ from publishers and ‘you need teams aligned around the idea that this is a single visitor journey’ if you want to keep readers coming back.

Bringing new readers in

While retention is important, publishers still need to bring new readers in. Liz says that The Guardian is an ‘open network for you to access’ and that ‘continues to be a huge asset’ but it does open more risks to the changes in traffic trends. She said they have to be ‘wherever the audience wishes to encounter them’. It also means further emphasising its mission as a publisher:

‘We need to make sure our brand is present and that our purpose, our mission and the quality of journalism is really salient. That does drive engagement and it’s a really strong asset for us’.

Brand presence is also a consideration for Anna at The Times and is currently what the news brand’s off-platform and development work is focused on, encouraging audiences and new readers to consider getting a Times subscription. It’s required a change in approach, as Anna explained:

‘We’ve changed how we do our social video formats and now we’re really putting our journalists at the front and centre. This is because we have seen that if someone sees a journalist-fronted video from The Times, then they have been more likely to subscribe afterwards’.

Unique content that offers value

Publishers are having more success engaging with readers by focusing on value, instead of just ‘pumping out content that anyone can pump out,’ as Dan mentioned. There are fears that readers may just get their news and information through LLMs, but Dan said that ‘a generic LLM has a hard time being the best conversant in all domains’ and if you want to go deeper on a specific topic, for example sports, then it’s best going to a sports news outlet that can deliver that value.

For Liz and The Guardian, the value comes through the news outlet being independently funded by its readers. For Anna and The Times, they have to show the value of their subscription:

‘The whole conversation is moving away from volume and views and reach, and it’s more about the value that a subscriber brings. However, it’s also about what value you can give to a subscriber, and it’s not necessarily volume.’

Dan also explained that ‘visitors are diverse, websites are diverse. and even articles are diverse’ so publishers need to be considering what is most valuable to that reader in order to move the relationship along:

‘You have value to deliver. They just read an article and you probably have a related article somewhere that you can offer up. Some sets of people will take you up on that and they’ll stick around’.

Merging AI into the reader experience

While there may be concerns with AI and LLMs diverting traffic away from publishers or providing audiences with summaries so they don’t have to read news sites, it’s already being used to enhance the reader experience. Liz said:

‘Our focus is in superpowering some of our predictive models and making sure that we are making the right decision about that interaction with users, and being as relevant as we can be’.

Both Dan and Anna talked about using AI for recommendations. Anna had been testing concepts like next best action and next best read, while Dan was looking at creating a visitor co-pilot that was not just a ‘recommendation engine, but a relationship engine’ to help create that deeper engagement with readers. Anna also spoke of the benefits of bringing in AI to support comment moderation:

‘It’s still overseen by humans, but they were spending hours before on this moderation job. It’s brought that workload way down, and freed up that team to do much more interesting and innovative community-focused work than they were doing before’.