Q&A: Juliette Laborie, Director of Digital Reader Revenue @ Guardian News & Media

This week, The Idea caught up with Juliette Laborie, previously head of strategic projects for The Guardian and now leading its digital reader revenue team. The Guardian recently announced its goal of two million paying supporters in the next three years, so we talked to Juliette about how they chose that goal, how they plan to get there, and what they’ve learned from the last three years.

Tell us about your role and what you do.

This is day five of my new role as director of digital revenue. Up until now, I was head of strategic projects. I switched teams and moved from strategy to the reader revenue team, which implements our reader revenue strategy. It’s an interesting transition, and interesting to do it right now, as we’ve just published our new strategy.

There are three big blocks to what the strategy team does at The Guardian. The first one is the most straightforward and most classic in terms of what a strategy team usually does in-house. In any company, you have budgets, and to be able to make your budgets, you need an annual plan, to be able to have an annual plan, you need a long-term strategy, and we look after that big cycle. So every year, we facilitate making sure that people who need to be thinking about those things are thinking about those things. We also help bring in things like data planning to help them make the decisions they need to along the different steps of that strategy cycle.

The second bit is more outward facing. We do quite a lot of market research — looking at what competitors are doing, reading a lot of newsletters — just making sure we are keeping abreast of what’s happening in the market and making sure that whatever relevant information we find out there, we give it to the right people internally.

There is a tendency, especially in a big organization, to be quite internally focused. So we see it as one of our roles to make sure that we help people lift their heads. We also recognize how, when people have their day jobs that are very operational, it fills all of their time, so they don’t actually have the time to look outside and think about, oh what’s my competitor x or y doing. So we try to help them do that.

The last bit of the role is very much around specific projects and specific strategic priorities. So out of that big strategic cycle, you’re going to highlight things that actually need to happen and that need to be implemented on specific things. We are often integrated into project teams where we act as business leads to make sure that when we make decisions, we make them with as much information as possible and keep our eyes on the strategic objectives behind the project.

We are also integrated with another facet of the team, which is much more focused on project management. It’s really great to have both things living together, because if you have a strategy but no one to implement it properly, it doesn’t make any sense. Concurrently, if you’re just implementing stuff without any sense of the strategy behind it, you’re unlikely to be very successful. So we not only have to look at the big ideas and think about the concepts and frameworks, but also ask how that actually turns out in reality.

You recently set a goal of two million paying supporters over the next three years. How did you decide on that number?

The big thing with that goal is it’s very much a translation of the magnitude of our ambition. One of the things we’ve learned over the last three years is the power of the big, galvanizing goal that everyone can get behind.

The thing we’ve been pursuing over the last three years has been returning to break even. And it’s worked really well. It’s been hard and full of loads of very difficult decisions, but we actually made it, which I think not a lot of people would have bet on three years ago.

We were looking for the same type of thing with the two million supporter goal, but with a different twist, which is that we are now in a very different situation: We’ve started building a model that we believe can be sustainable. In November, we celebrated our one-million-supporter moment, which was just the first step, and we feel we can double that. It is very ambitious, and if you were to ask me the exact path to it in terms of this is where it’s going to come from, at this point, at this time, etc., to be honest, we do not know yet. But we feel it’s the right level of ambition for ourselves.

It’s important for us because we feel it’s something that also gets the whole organization together. So of course, everyone working with revenue is going to be able to recognize themselves in it, but also we know that people support us because they support the journalism. Getting more supporters also will mean that we are producing journalism that people want to support, and it’s incredibly important, and it’s probably the engine of the goal.

We also feel that the supporter model, because of what it says about brand affiliation and about the attachment people have to our brand, speaks to our advertising motivations as well.

What are the next steps for reaching that goal? What do you see as the areas of strategic investment moving forward?

We’re starting from where we’ve actually done quite a lot already, which is with our contributions model — contributions is an offer we launched in 2016, and we’ve evolved it quite a lot. Now it can be one-off, it can be recurring, it can be annual. So there’s quite a lot of regularity around it, and we really want to keep building this, especially in markets which are less core for us from the beginning. So we’re doing really well in the U.K., but we feel there is an important market in the U.S. as well, and we really want to pursue that and build that.

Obviously, it’s really important for us to build a base of supporters. When we started out, we were focused on getting one-off contributions. What we’re seeing, and what we want to build on, is that there is a community element in which, when we see one-off donations coming, very often they tend to be repeat donations. It’s really learning how to cultivate that base and making sure we keep building it and doing what they’re giving us money to do, which is producing great journalism and keeping it free for everyone.

The other aspect is more at looking at our whole suite of products, because we do have digital subscriptions, which are a slightly different offering — they’re based on experiences, not based on content. Up until now they’ve had more modest success, but actually it’s quite promising and we feel there are more things for us to do in that space.

What have you learned over the last three years and how do you plan to apply that moving forward?

It’s been very much a learning curve. We’ve tried a lot of things and have actually seen a lot of things fail. I think it’s one of our major lessons in terms of the culture you need to have to enter the spaces for which there is no real roadmap or no real user manual for how you do it. One of the key things has been this attitude that we need to learn how to test things quite fast, move away when it’s not working, double down when it’s working, and really embrace that. I don’t think we’re perfect yet at it, but I think at least we know how important it is, and we’re getting better at it.

I would say we’ve also learned about embracing what we’re offering. At the beginning, you could say we almost had misgivings about the model and about asking people for contributions. There were debates sometimes of, are we just boldly asking people for money, that sounds weird, is that a bit like charity, and is that a problem. What we’ve discovered by asking the people who were giving us money, is that actually, it’s fine, because people are happy to support us for what we do and for the mission.

In terms of the way we talk about it and the way we communicate it, if you look at the website and our platforms and the messages about contributions, we’re evolving them to something that’s much more upfront about the mission and the project; whereas even two years ago, which made sense with our economic situation, we we’re very much saying, it’s really hard, we’re facing a lot of challenges, advertising revenue is falling, can you help support us.

Today, also because we are more sustainable but also because we are much clearer about what we do, we are saying much more clearly, our model is to have free and accessible high-quality journalism open for all, do you want to support that, and do you want to be a part of it. That’s something we’re been leaning into much more deliberately and I think it’s really positive.

Can you talk about the difference in thinking about paying member versus subscribers? How do you think about retention when it comes to paying members?

We do think they have things in common. We think that everyone who either contributes or subscribes to one of our products will have a layer of support for the mission. We don’t believe in people who subscribe to our digital products without any affiliation to the brand or support of the journalism mission.

For subscribers, they will have a transactional layer on top of it, which is that they subscribe to a service or a product. In this, it is extremely important for us to cultivate a base and retain it. It’s also one of the keys to building scale. I think we have experience from our print product and print subscribers, which we need to learn to translate to the digital space and understand what the big lessons are from that.

I do think one of the key things is that your products are serving the needs they’ve been bought for. It’s all about making sure that when someone buys something, they’re actually using it so that you can help them build a habit around it and make sure they stay with you afterwards.

Is there anything else you’re interested in learning more about or something you’re really excited about?

There is loads to be very excited about. It’s one of the things about this sector that I didn’t really know about before I came to work at The Guardian two years ago. I said it earlier, but there isn’t a user manual. There is no one who can say exactly what things will look like in five years, and I think that’s massively exciting in general.

In terms of how people will consume news, how the subscription business evolves, and how, hopefully, we will address the massive challenges we are all facing, whether it’s fake news, low quality journalism, or even what’s happening with local news, I think there is something very exciting, a little bit scary as well, about the moment we’re at. But I’m really happy that I’m at the forefront of it and able to see what’s happening.

There is still a large question in the news industry around how many subscriptions a user is willing to pay for. How, if at all, do you see yourselves fitting in to that landscape?

I think it is a very valid question— whether you reach a saturation point and how that happens. I do think we are part of that question. If you take it back to more business-type concepts, like share of wallet, maybe they’re not paying for the content, in the case of donations, but still, it’s in someone’s disposable income. This is still money that goes to the news sector.

I think where we are at risk of reaching a saturation point is probably on what you could say was low hanging fruit — the audience that was already reading the news, the audience that was close to us already, collectively as an industry. I think that’s probably going to get slightly more challenging.

There are loads of things that come into play. There is the question of scale and how much scale helps you get ahead of others, but overall, I think it just means that we’re going to have to become better at reaching out to people. If you look at the actual numbers of how many people could become news readers, even how many people actually consume news in one form or another, and the person that they pay currently, I do think we still have room to grow. All of us. Though recognizing, however, it’s much, much easier when you’re big. The scale advantage is really not one to dismiss.

For example, we see it in less core markets. In the U.K., our positioning is very much aided by the fact that we are attractive to a liberal person in the U.K. who is interested in news. It’s very likely that this person will be a Guardian reader and we will be their first source of written news.

If you start looking at what we do in the U.S., however, it’s a very different landscape, and it’s already much harder because the overlap of our audience with other audiences. Some people have The New York Times, and then the question is, do they have enough to give to another paper. Can we become the second resource of news and how many people actually have a second source of news? It is a real challenge.

I think it means we’re going to have better at reaching new people and new audiences, and also demonstrating the value we bring to people who have already bought a subscription — why they would need another one and why what we’re offering is something distinctive on top of what they’re already having.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen from a media outlet recently other than your own?

There is something I really like from a French media startup called Les Jours. What they do is they serialize journalism. It’s investigative journalism, and the way they publish it is in episodes. There are around 15–20 episodes to a series, and the stories are really well-told.

The stories play on everyone’s obsession with TV shows and things that you follow and want to know what’s in the next episode. It’s really well done, high-quality journalism, and it’s very inventive. The design is also quite nice. They try to fight the live, breaking news obsession by going into topics really in-depth, and I think it’s really interesting.

Their model is actually a hard paywall model — you can’t access anything if you’re not a subscriber. To the point I was making about how in a more competitive market, you need to distinguish yourself, I think that’s an interesting way of distinguishing yourself because you’re also bridging the gap between reading news and your reading time. Instead of reading a book or reading fiction, you can just take one of those series and it will last you for an hour or two. I think it’s a really interesting foray into different modes of storytelling.