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The Washington Post has hired its first chief subscriptions officer, former vice president of global marketing at Paramount+ Michael Ribero, effective August 16.
The privately-owned Washington Post shared with Axios last November that it had nearly 3 million digital subscriptions. Ribero is tasked with growing that globally. Rather than replace the chief marketing officer role after the departure of Miki King in March 2021, the news organization is expanding it with Ribero’s appointment.
“In terms of goals, my remit is clear: it’s subscriptions,” Ribero told Adweek. “[Subscriptions] are an outcome, not a product. A good marketer wants to meet consumers where they are, putting them in the middle, whether that means we need to be better at ads, or what products we offer them. Having that better customer experience will allow us to do things other organizations aren’t able to.”
Appointing a C-suite role to manage subscriptions speaks volumes, signaling the importance of subscription revenue to the economic viability of the Post. There are some examples in the publishing and streaming ecosystems, with Dow Jones and sports video service DAZN both appointing candidates to the role in the last 12 months.
As publishers of all stripes compete in an increasingly cluttered landscape, reader fatigue on pandemic-related news coverage and a less volatile political ecosystem, retaining covid-cohorts is a battleground. This Trump Bump is showing up in data: the latest Reuters Digital News Report found a 7% point drop in the most avid news users (who access once a day or more), along with a decline of 11% points in respondents who are extremely or very interested in news.
But while it’s too soon to detail team structure and objectives now, Ribero plans to bring his perspective on how to better acquire and retain subscribers, whether that’s “in the context of the news cycle or not.”
The subscription and advertising halo
As the appetite for recurring reader revenue has grown, some publishers run into tensions between the ad sales and subscriptions teams over which side takes priority for resources. Ribero added that CEO Fred Ryan said that everyone works on the subscriptions team at the Washington Post. The company said that digital subscriptions is its fastest-growing revenue source.
“Most people think these two business models, subscription and advertising, are ‘either or,’ but in reality, they’re symbiotic,” Rob Ristagno, CEO of consultancy The Sterling Woods Group, told Adweek.
In a virtuous circle of sorts, a strong news product worth paying for has good user experience, which encourages more pageviews and generates more ad revenue. Not only that, an experienced subscription leader has a deeper understanding of who the audience is, what they want and where to meet them, whether that’s free content complete with ads or serving up a relevant newsletter.
“The demand for subscription and DTC skillsets has been a sea change in media executive search over the last five years,” Keith McAllister, partner at executive search firm SRI, told Adweek. “For legacy businesses historically sustained by advertising, it’s been a revolution.”
