Are Multi-Publisher Subscription Bundles a Good Idea?

Growing the number of paid subscribers you’ve got is incredibly hard. What if you could partner with other publishers and share in that difficulty?

That’s a question that an increasing number of media companies are starting to ask as they explore ways to generate more reader revenue. Whether it will work remains to be seen, but the theory behind it makes sense.

First is The New York Times, which Axios reports is trying to find bundle partners for its lifestyle subscriptions (Games, Cooking, etc.).

The Times recently reached out to The Ankler, a digital news startup covering Hollywood and the entertainment industry, about a deal that would have given The Ankler subscribers access to its subscription games content, two sources familiar with the pitch told Axios.

The deal pitched would have essentially seen The Ankler providing NYT Games access as an added benefit to its subscribers.

Subscribers to The Ankler would have received redeemable codes to access NYT Games. They would have been directed to the Times’ account sign-up page to create an account.

I struggle to see the connection between what The Ankler offers, which is in-depth Hollywood coverage, and the Times’ lifestyle subscriptions. To run an efficient bundle, the products need to be complementary. In that Axios story, there’s an example:

The Information and Bloomberg tested a consumer subscription bundle a few years ago that would combine its inside tech journalism with Bloomberg’s broader business coverage.

This always made sense to me. At some point over the last couple of years, they stopped the deal. Maybe the mechanics didn’t work, it didn’t drive enough subs or both parties got what they wanted out of it, but this was complementary in nature. Few publishers can compete with the breadth of Bloomberg’s total business coverage, but in the case of The Information, few—including Bloomberg—can compete with how deep it goes in its respective niche. It’s not really competitive since a reader will likely want both and both publishers can market the offer and benefit.

You can imagine Bloomberg doing this with numerous B2B media companies in a sort of hub & spoke style. At the center is Bloomberg. Then it does a deal with The Information for one slice of coverage. It does a deal with STAT News (B2B healthcare) for another. It partners with Skift on travel. And it partners with Arizent for its various niche finance publications. If not Bloomberg, then The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. The point here is that you’ve got the heft of a big publication tied to a niche one.

Bloomberg benefits because it has multiple partners promoting its digital subscription as an added benefit. Each publisher benefits because Bloomberg offers a lot of bang for the buck, making a bundled subscription seem like an incredible steal.

The New York Times could do this as well, but instead of its lifestyle subscriptions, it could do it for the core news product. Take the Dallas Morning News (DMN). For $52, you can get a full year subscription. The full NYT bundle also costs $52 for the first year. What if the two firms did a deal where, for $100 for the first year, you got both the Dallas Morning News and NYT?

Here’s why it could work… In 2020, Tony Haile (founder of Chartbeat) wrote:

The New York Times has more digital subscribers in Dallas–Fort Worth than the Dallas Morning News, more digital subscribers in Seattle than the Seattle Times, more digital subscribers in California than the LA Times or the San Francisco Chronicle.

As I wrote in 2020, The New York Times is a competitor to all local newspapers. For the cost, you get much more value with a subscription to NYT than you would with a local newspaper, except for that one variable: local. The deal would be that Dallas residents get all the local news they need from DMN, but if they want national/international news, they head over to the Times.

For long-time readers of AMO (going back to that 2020 story), you’ll recognize this strategy because I’ve advocated it for the Washington Post. Because of its Arc CMS, it was already integrated with quite a few publications, so rolling out this sort of multi-publication subscription product would be easier. Lee Enterprises and the Washington Post should do this deal—it’d save everyone money and help both publishers grow.

This model can also work between complementary publications. For example, if you’re a baking publication, you can partner with a lifestyle publication and offer a bundle. Or, if you cover one slice of an industry, you could partner with another slice. AMO could partner with an events publication since we only do some events coverage right now. The goal is for both publications to benefit from the joint marketing efforts and for the user to feel as if they’re getting a deal.

From an operational perspective, the key thing is for the user to wind up having two accounts. Let’s use NYT and DMN as an example. If the user comes to DMN and subscribes, the following steps should occur:

1. They receive their DMN login and can start consuming content.
2. They receive an email that includes a unique sign-up link on NYT’s website.
3. When the user signs up, NYT should ask the user to enter their credit card and explicitly say that they’re not being charged right now.

It works in reverse as well if the user first signed up for NYT and DMN. At the end of the month, the two finance teams reconcile the subscription revenue and determine who owes whom.

Why is it important to have the user create a new account and put their credit card in? You want to control the renewal so you have more leverage on price. Perhaps NYT wants to increase its price faster than DMN. Or, maybe the user realizes after the fact they don’t want both publications. It gives the user more flexibility over what they’re paying for.

However, you could also keep the bundle running in perpetuity. If that’s the intention, step three is just a sign-up without the credit card. However, it would still necessitate sharing of customer data to ensure that if the subscriber churns in DMN’s ecosystem, the NYT learns about it and churns the user too—or, at the very least, can try and market to them to retain their subscription individually.

However you set it up, bundles make a lot of sense, especially when they’re complementary. Just bolting on NYT Games to a B2B publication about Hollywood doesn’t make sense. Finding complementary partners where both are marketing and there’s perceived value saved for subscribers could be a win-win.