New York Media built a digital following with individual brands, and now it's trying to bring them under one roof to figure out subscriptions
- New York Media is rolling out a new subscription program while redesigning its website to bring all of its properties together.
- The program costs $5 per month for digital all-access or $70 a year for a plan that includes a print subscription.
- The publisher is experimenting with a dynamic paywall that will customize the number of free articles based on the articles someone reads.
New York Media this week is rolling out a redesign of its website and launching a $5-a-month digital subscription. For $70 a year, subscribers get a print subscription to New York magazine and unlimited access to web stories.
The redesign showcases New York Media's verticals (New York plus The Cut, Vulture, Grub Street, Intelligencer and The Strategist) at the top of the page and promotes all the stories across those verticals, which also have stand-alone sites.
Unlike other publishers that use static paywalls that cap the number of articles that every consumer can read at the same amount, New York Media is using a dynamic paywall that takes multiple factors into account to tailor the paywall service to individual readers based on their device, how often they're reading and which articles they spend the most time with.
Someone who reads 10 articles in a row on The Cut, for example, is less likely to be served a pop-up message promoting subscriptions than someone who reads articles across multiple verticals a few times a week.
"There's no fixed number of articles that I could hypothesize that separates someone who just occasionally wants to read us versus someone who is willing to pay," said Jason Sylva, New York Media's GM of consumer revenue and audience development. "When you limit yourself to just an arbitrary number, you don't allow for the nuances of [understanding] what kind of person would subscribe or what kind of person wouldn't."
New York Media will test hypotheses about subscriptions, such as whether people who read multiple types of stories -- like a long-form magazine cover, an online feature and blog posts -- are more likely to subscribe than someone who only reads one. Shopping vertical The Strategist will remain free and not part of the paywall.
Sylva joined the publication this summer to spearhead its subscription efforts after stints at The New York Times and Financial Times.
New York Media is looking to shake up its branding
One of the challenges New York Media faces with moving to a subscription model is that while the publication has strong digital brands like The Cut, Vulture and Grub Hub that are linked through the umbrella parent company, readers often don't realize that the titles are connected.
Jean Hellering, principal of Quantum Media, a consulting firm that works with media brands, said New York Media has built a portfolio of strong digital brands. To build subscription revenue, it will need to focus on their association with New York magazine.
"New York magazine, by doing all the verticals, was trying to create enthusiast brands because in a digital world, it's so much easier to target; it's almost necessary to target," she said. "If you're going to go after a membership club and subscriptions and all the rest of the things that everybody's trying, those tend to play off of that existing brand."
Sylva acknowledged as much, pointing to style vertical The Cut.
"The Cut, for instance, has an enormous, passionate following who consider themselves Cut readers, not necessarily The Cut as part of New York," he said. "We're OK with that. Nothing about this product or redesign is to take away from the identity of The Cut. What you'll notice on the homepage and the navigation of the site is that we do want to introduce to you is that there's more to New York than just this piece."
Over the next three to six months, New York Media plans to try cross-promoting stories across verticals and packaging them into newsletters.
With the new focus on subscriptions, the goal is to tie together all of New York Media's assets and broaden how consumers view the brand, he said.
"The broader someone's usage of your product is, the closer it is to a regular part of their life or a habit," Sylva said. "The more you can be a regular part of someone's reading habits, the more likely they are to pay for something."
While some publishers are concerned that paywalls will limit their traffic growth, New York Media's Sylva hinted that New York Media still has room to grow its digital presence as it expands its national coverage. New York Media has roughly 40 million uniques, as measured by Comscore, he said.
Over the coming months, New York Media will watch how print subscribers transition to the digital paywall in addition to tracking digital subscription growth.
"We don't want to set the meter too short that in any way stunts the growth of who we could be," Sylva said. "The reality is that we believe there's a large audience for the kind of content we produce."