Monocle has been opening additional doors to its magazine brand for 19 years. It opened shops when newsstands started closing, then cafés in London, Paris, and Zurich, then a hotel, and even a radio station. 

“The first encounter may not be the magazine,” Anders Braso, chief marketing officer, explained in Madrid at the recent INMA Media Innovation Week. 

“Whichever door people enter through, we need to make them curious about what’s happening behind the other doors.”

Three ways to open a new door

Monocle is a boutique and builds every door itself. Most publishers cannot. 

The other ways in are the same three that professors Laurence Capron and Will Mitchell described for any resource a firm lacks: build, buy, or borrow.

• Build: You make the door. You own the product and the customer, and you cover all development costs and carry the risk that it does not work.

• Buy: You pay someone for access to an audience they already hold, and you keep the customer. Fast and certain, bounded by what exists to be bought.

• Borrow: You occupy someone else’s surface on their terms, which they can change. Fast to enter, slow to win, and the only route to platform scale. For example, Apple News+ has 1.7 million paid subscribers in the U.K., per Enders estimates, more than any single British news brand has of its own. 

None of the three is free, and none is preferred. Each buys a different thing at a different risk.

Four things a door can hand you

The second question is what comes back, in rising order of how much of the reader you end up holding.

• Awareness: Someone saw you. Nobody holds them.

• Visit: They came to your Web site or app. You hold a session and have nothing that lets you reach them again.

• Identity: They gave you an e-mail address or a mobile number. You know the person now.

• Payment: They gave you money.

The channel strategy grid

Put the two questions together and you get a framework. I filled the cells with examples that I heard about in Madrid.

Case studies

Here is what the grid looks like when publishers fill it in. This is based on selected best practices shared in Madrid:

• Build and borrow, elDiario.es: Of 123,000 members of this Spanish digital native, one-third join through the paywall, one-third through e-mail, and one-third through organic routes: the daily podcast, annual festivals, word of mouth. What ties them together: Every entry door is paired with one that captures identity.

• Borrow, Clarin: The best-selling Argentinian news brand, with 750,000 digital-only subscribers, offered access to its news and benefits of the loyalty programme Club 365 to fans of River Plate, a football club in Buenos Aires. More than 100,000 fans claimed the benefits.

• Borrow, HLN: The Belgian popular news brand is the most-followed news account on TikTok in the country, ahead of the public broadcaster, on a two-person vertical-video team. The TikTok channel paired with a free subscription for students under 26, took 50,000 sign-ups in a day.

• Build, El País: The Spanish news market leader has more than a million newsletter subscribers across 60 titles, one-third of them subscriber-only. This year they added e-mail courses: Sleep well, get your finances in order, live gluten-free. Each runs five to eight weekly installments, the first free and the rest behind the subscription. More than 100,000 readers have taken one.

• Build, Tamedia: The Swiss group built a door that stops, for now, at the visit. Its new standalone games app was prompted by insight showing news apps gave readers no reason to return on a quiet day. In six months, daily users of the four launch brands had grown by more than 150%.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

Banner photo: Adobe Stock by Reza.

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