Are digital subscriptions like tablet magazines?

Perhaps digital subscriptions are also just a necessary diversions for newspaper publishers that will never really bring success. But one that has to be started once in order to find alternatives beyond that.

Everyone is convinced: you have to try it. Nobody knows: how does it really work, who was successful at what? Success stories always have an undertone of respectable achievement or an exceptional situation: at least this was achieved, better than others, not bad for the circumstances. Or: the media empire with global reach and international knock-down prices was also able to increase its registrations.

You have to do it, you have to try digital newspaper subscriptions because there are currently no alternative prospects. This makes it all the more urgent to develop them.

We realised 15 years ago that online media would no longer work like this. Not only because nobody wanted to pay for it, but also because the growing popularity of mobile devices had cancelled out design and usability considerations. Fancy storytelling formats were a thing of the past, navigation concepts (which were still being thought about at the time) were a thing of the past.

The hope rested in tablets. Tablets locked users in, limited their usage options and gave publishers the means to impose their ideas on users. If you wanted to be part of the brave new world, you had to own a tablet, download the magazine app and subscribe to the magazine. Publishers saw their future in the Nespresso model: create a convenience-driven model that offers users many conveniences and makes it very difficult for them to leave the closed environment.

The problem: nobody cared. A few unwilling early adopters, a few fashion victims and a few scroungers who were lured in by subscription gifts — that was the tablet yield of most publishers. Meanwhile, users were happily surfing on their mobile phones, not bothering with sophisticated multimedia user experiences and gathering their information from a wide variety of sources.

The situation is similar now with digital subscriptions. Publishers are trying to transform and digitise business models from the past, it seems obvious that the product has to work, it has hardly changed — but it hardly works. Nevertheless, it is necessary to expand the product, perfect it and perfect everything around it. Nobody can afford to leave this issue untouched. But it is quite conceivable that the digital subscription business will disappear just as quietly as the tablet business.

As with the tablet business, it may be side effects that point the way to the next experiment. Digital products are data-intensive and require us to engage with artificial intelligence. They force us to engage with users, tech companies and digital opportunities. They reveal new competitive relationships. And they are giving rise to new ideas about which partners could be of interest to publishers in the future. In the past, it was advertisers; readers didn’t want to fill the gaps left by them. Perhaps tech companies will once again be a source of money for publishers. They need content to engage and retain users, to fill networks — and to train AI models. Copyrights were one of the most hotly debated topics surrounding the EU AI Act. And it’s hard to say whether this was wise or short-sighted. Publishers need big tech, and big tech still needs content.

However, the last big wave of co-operation heralded the beginning of the possible end for many publishers. Around the turn of the millennium, when telecoms companies thought they were becoming the better media companies, syndication was the new hot source of money for publishers. They licensed content and thus had a third source of income alongside advertising and readers.

This was precisely their downfall. Readers got used to getting content everywhere and for free — and were even more likely than before to give up their newspaper subscriptions.

That could happen again. However, even Big Tech has now realised that content doesn’t grow by itself and that publishers are important. It is up to the publishers to do justice to this fact and develop the appropriate self-confidence. This self-confidence must be significantly different from that of the past.