Knowing your audience: The increasing importance of direct relationships with your readers

FT Strategies, supported by the Google News Initiative, is proud to share the learnings from the 2023 EMEA cohort of the Subscriptions Academy, a five-month programme to help publishers fast-track their revenue growth from subscriptions.

With Google’s support, the Subscriptions Academy helped publishers understand the benefits of knowing their audience and provided guidance about how to do it on a practical level.

We hope that this report is a useful entry point for publishing executives and decision-makers who want to understand the topic of direct audience relationships more deeply and begin implementing related practices into their business.

We are hopeful that others can follow in the footsteps of our Subscriptions Academy cohort – creating more valuable products for their readers and establishing sustainable business models – which enable the creation of quality, independent journalism for years to come.

Case studies included in the report also provide practical examples of experiments that you can do yourself to develop your subscriptions business. These include:

• Launching initiatives to encourage more users to register, building the base of users whose characteristics and behaviours are known to your organisation
• Develop measures to understand engagement on a content level
• Implementing internal structures and processes that enable data sharing and collaboration across departments

We’re grateful to the the eight EMEA publishers that took part courtesy of our partnership with the Google News Initiative:

• BusinessLIVE
• Capital
• Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung
• i
• il Post
• The Local
• Mail & Guardian
• SME

We look forward to discussing the findings of the report with the wider industry in the coming months. You can learn more about the programmes that we run in partnership with Google News Initiative here.