Bundling done right: How Ringier Axel Springer Poland built a winning digital subscription bundle
“The compound annual growth rate is huge. We’re very happy. The revenue last year was huge. The churn rate is going down. And although we are growing fast, we see a rise of highly engaged subscribers in our user base,” Bregula said.
The Ringier Axel Springer Poland group regularly reaches 22 million people, Bregula told our World News Media Congress participants, or nearly 60 percent of Poland’s population of about 38 million.
In addition to being one of the country’s strongest brands, the group is considered the most trusted media source in Poland, according to Reuters Institute, Breguła said.
Audio, an essential part of the Premium bundle
The group’s “Onet Premium” subscription plan is not an individual, standalone offering, but a paid-for, digital news media bundle, with a number of add-ons across around a dozen-plus brands that include the Polish editions of Newsweek, Politico, Business Insider, Forbes and more.
“We’re doing our best to deliver the multi-modal experience,” she said.
An important part of that is growing strength in audio.
“Our subscribers really love our audio,” Bregula said, adding that the company builds additional benefits around products to create unique relationships and offers perks, such as a recent series of events they’ve rolled out.
Opportunities, sure – but bundles can have drawbacks, too
For news publishers already thinking about bundling, Bregula noted that while there are clearly some advantages, there can be drawbacks as well.
For example, users’ willingness to pay can be difficult. Messaging can also be tricky when you have many brands that you are trying to put into one product.
There’s also the fact that some users may experience “feature overload” from too much content. Likewise, content discovery can be challenging for people, so some elements may seem wasted, she said. Ultimately, some consumers might think: “I pay for this, but I use just 10% of it, so why bother?” Bregula noted.
Pricing can be further complicated if some products have roots in print, with subscription reference points that are higher than those born in the digital era.
Then there are potentially complex management challenges, such as dealing with more than a dozen editors-in-chief of various products.
In addition to those issues, Poland is not exactly among Europe’s top countries when it comes to people being willing to pay for news.
As Bregula noted, when it comes to ordinary people who are not in the news industry: “How many of them would buy Newsweek and Politico at the same time? Well, you probably know the answer.”
Nevertheless, the company decided to build the bundle, and to create an immersive world around the bundled product, Bregula said.
Many brands, but a central message
What they did was this: reimagine the shared identity of all the brands across the portfolio and the shared values within the company.
The second thing Ringier Axel Springer Poland decided to do was elevate their multimodal storytelling by getting really serious about audio products, and also providing text-to-speech functionality, which Bregula said they did in cooperation with ElevenLabs.
Today, 30,000 of their texts are available in audio form each month. And that figure is rising.
“It’s growing because the consumers are really using it,” Bregula said. “Subscribers really appreciate this feature.”
The average subscriber spends 10 hours a month listening to audio features in Onet Premium’s app.
“We also decided to go beyond separate brands, so that it makes sense for the users that they subscribe to the whole bundle and not just a part of the bundle,” she said.
For example, they have podcasts hosted by editors-in-chief of different brands, or events where the journalists from brands across the portfolio serve as the hosts.
There is also a popular, subscriber-only, Onet Premium newsletter, Bregula said.
A new homepage, co-designed with users
Ringier Axel Springer Poland has also recently launched a Premium homepage, which Bregula said was co-designed with their users, and based on workshops, feedback from subscriber interviews, beta testing and multiple iterations of that testing.
Thanks to this approach, she said they have managed to gain stability and also eliminate things that weren’t working for them: Like one-off payments, which she said are pretty popular in their part of the world, “but they’re disastrous for retention.”
“We have larger inventory for our in-house, revenue-management tools,” Bregula said. “We’re really determined to grow our total ARPU from the user visit.”
“Also, we can play with new features and configurations, so, yes, games partnerships,” she added.
“The holy grail of what we’re doing here is to get the user to a situation where price is not even a consideration: It’s just a step you have to make. And the only thing we need you to do is to subscribe,” she said.
