Publishers are Growing Audiences by Producing Less Content

exec (on IRC) submitted this story for chromas:

Publishers are growing audiences by producing less content:

Increasingly, publishers are seeing that less is more when it comes to producing content.

Publishers including the Guardian, News UK's The Times of London and Le Monde have trimmed the number of articles they publish, leading to a growth in audience traffic, higher dwell times and ultimately more subscribers.

Over the last year, the Guardian cut its weekly output by one-third[...] In December 2019, the Guardian had 25 million monthly unique users in the U.K., a rise from 23.4 million the previous year, according to Comscore.

From 2017 to 2019, French subscription publisher Le Monde reduced its total number of articles 25%[...] Comscore reported that during December 2019, Le Monde had 9.1 million unique monthly users in France; that's a rise from 8.4 million in December 2018.

Last summer The Times of London published 15% fewer stories on its online Home News[...] Readers of The Times smartphone app spent on average 28 minutes each day on the Home News section; that's a 25% rise as compared with the same stretch the prior year, according to the publisher.

[...] Publishers often find that the types of stories they produce the most of are often the least read, so they don't generate as much ad revenue as the more widely read pieces. This leads to difficult decisions about whether publishers should cut back on premium content (that typically costs more to produce), change the ratio of non-premium to premium content, or tweak the pricing of subscriptions, so that people start to read more of what the newspaper wants them to read, he said.

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