The struggle is real: falling traffic, AI summaries and unreliable social media referrals are pressuring publishers of all stripes. For many, building direct audiences is a key goal. For The Guardian -with supporters delivering 45% of its revenue – direct relationships are the North Star.
Liz Wynn, Chief Supporter Revenue Officer at The Guardian, joined MediaVoices at The Publisher Summit in London to talk about how she has helped secure 1.4 million recurring supporters for the paper. Interviewed by Craig Llewelyn-Williams, SVP for Customer Strategy at Woodwing, Wynn emphasised the importance of direct connections, and shared how the Guardian’s product strategy supports those relationships.
You can listen to the full session below, or by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you find podcasts.
No billionaire bailouts
Wynn is essentially the brand’s chief marketing and customer commercial officer, responsible for marketing and direct consumer revenues globally across The Guardian’s print and digital products.
Owned by a non-profit trust, The Guardian has never been able to call on billionaire owners to bail it out. “We’re now two-thirds funded by our readers across our products, but if you wind back 10 years ago, we were in very well-documented dire straits.”
Wynn explained that, losing £100mn a year and faced with the prospect of closing, editor-in-chief Katherine Viner together with then CEO David Pemsel, landed on ‘quite a novel’ method of driving revenue. “They recognised that the promised sunny uplands of advertising-funded, reach-driven digital news really wasn’t going to transpire, and they needed another revenue source to offset the structural decline in print.”
Their ‘novel’ solution was the supporter model, founded initially on reader donations, to secure The Guardian’s ‘open to all, funded by many, beholden to no one’ ethos. Wynn said: “Lots of people were very sceptical internally and externally, but it did start to work.”
Globally, digital reader funding is now 45% of The Guardian’s turnover, representing a 30% uplift in revenues over 10 years. “It hasn’t always been linear progress,” said Wynn, “Particularly in the last three years. Although the donation aspect is very famous, more than 100% of our revenue growth has actually come from subscription products.”
Subscription success
The Guardian’s direct subscription is a metered premium product that gives subscribers unlimited ad-free reading through its primary app, plus access to its bundled Feast recipe app. Wynn said when the Guardian’s product development team talks about revenue strategy, they focus on three things.
The first – foundational – pillar is driving motivation to support. “That’s all about the distinctiveness of our brand,” explained Wynn. “It is extremely reassuring to know that when we survey folks on the site, 99% of them can correctly identify that we’re not funded by a billionaire.”
She said that is the consequence of consistent brand work over years, speaking directly to ‘the DNA’ of the organisation. “We do a lot of work there, together with editorial, and you’ll see that in our messaging and our broader brand marketing work.”
Wynn acknowledged that emotional connections alone are not enough to drive conversion, and therefore the second factor The Guardian’s product development team considers is direct audience connection to build habits on its platforms. “We have a very sophisticated email programme – newsletters and registration strategies – which has led to a dramatic expansion in our direct marketable audience,” she explained.
That marketable audience has grown from less than a million about two years ago to more than 8 million, globally. Wynn said: “We see a direct correlation between the number of visits, the number of sessions in a month, and propensity to convert to be a supporter. The more often someone visits, the more often they convert. It’s so intuitive.”
The third thing that the team considers is that potential subscribers understand The Guardian’s mission, but also see utility in what the paper has to offer at the point they are ready to subscribe.
“It does make a material difference whether someone chooses to give a single contribution or if they choose to support us via one of our premium subscriptions,” Wynn said. “If you go onto the site and give a single contribution, that’s amazing, it’s wonderful, hundreds of thousands of people do it every year. But frankly, when we evaluate the lifetime value (LTV) over three years of that transaction, we get more than 10 times more if somebody takes our all-access digital product.”
Better subscriber benefits
Wynn said there are lots of interesting commercial aspects to how The Guardian packages up its donation and subscription offers side by side. She explained that the overwhelming motivation of all supporters, subscribers or donors, is to ensure the survival of The Guardian.
However, beyond better LTV, Wynn highlighted clear long-term advantages in building subscription revenues.
With donations, given freely for no direct benefit beyond the Guardian’s journalism, she said product development can be ‘quite constrained’. In contrast, subscriptions facilitate the continual evolution of the product. “You can add benefits and over time, as inflation takes its toll, you can make sure that the pricing of that subscription adjusts. It increases over time and you get an awful lot better retention.”
When it comes to product development, Wynn said a blend of editorial, commercial and product thinking is crucial. “We spend quite a lot of time thinking up new ideas… and trying to filter out which ones are really going to move the needle. We’re not a huge team at all, like a fraction of the size of the New York Times Puzzles team. We’re trying all the time to look for that magical balance of simplicity and focus on big bets and big ideas.”
The supporter revenue strategy helps organise priorities against The Guardian’s broader North Star Goals and Wynn said daily audience is the first core metric to consider, both on and off platform. “On platform is very valuable to us, but we need to sustain reach and the ecosystem is evolving constantly,” she explained. The second is centred on direct community and how registration details are gathered; the third is the number of supporters.
“Those are the goals that we’ve landed on. They focus essentially on audience, which is the intersection for all of us, whether we’re in advertising, editorial, or commercial. Life’s not so straightforward for us that we have one goal, but I think that is a very helpful framework. Is it going to move the dial on any of those three things? If it’s not, why are we doing it?”
International expansion has played a big part in The Guardian’s supporter revenue growth, with audiences in Europe, Australia and the US all growing over the last three years. “That has been based on the product work we’ve done, and the direct audience work we’ve done,” said Wynn.
In the global context, Wynn described supporter revenue as ‘phenomenal’ because it is scalable and simple.
“It works wherever you read the journalism. It’s essentially the same experience, the same product, the same commercial logic. Where we focus our effort in terms of customization is all on the last mile localization. It’s all about the relevance of the messaging. It’s all about ensuring that it speaks to the audience where they are.”
Listen to the whole episode above, or search ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.
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