Q&A: Travis Bernard, Senior Director, Subscription and Audience Insights @ TechCrunch

This week, The Idea caught up with Travis Bernard from TechCrunch. We talked to him about the development of TechCrunch’s new subscription product, Extra Crunch, and why it made sense from a business and audience perspective.

Tell us about what you do.

I’m responsible for subscriptions and audience insights. Almost six years ago I started with AOL. I’ve been working exclusively on TechCrunch (today part of the Verizon Media portfolio of brands) for about five years. I’ve been working exclusively on our subscription product for the past year, and then not exclusively for the past two years.

My background has been in audience analytics. I started working on the agency side in social media analytics when social media analytics were first getting popular. I eventually started doing some work with AOL and doing audience development consulting for all its different media brands. From there, they transferred me internally to work exclusively on TechCrunch.

I’ve been doing audience development for TechCrunch for a while now, and then as we were gearing up to build a subscription product, I was put in charge of that new product, which became Extra Crunch.

Where did the idea for a subscription product originally come from?

There are a few different lenses that we can look at this through. There’s the audience lens, and there’s the business lens.

From the lens of our audience, we started to look at our audience in a different way. There had been a big focus in media to scale, scale, scale, and in order to scale, you have to broaden your coverage a little bit. We were looking ahead and thinking about how if we keep broadening our coverage, we’re going to alienate the people who are our core readers — people who are coming to TechCrunch to read about startup news and to help build their companies better and learn about what’s happening in Silicon Valley.

We started looking at our analytics from a different perspective and started focusing less on monthly active users and looking more at how frequently people were coming into the site. Like many other media companies, we found that there was this core group of readers, roughly 1–2% of our audience, that were coming in very frequently to our site.

At the same time, we also had this events business going on. We have about 10,000–20,000 people who attend our events every year, and event attendees are also very loyal readers of our site and very engaged with the brand. We thought there was an opportunity to build something that met the desires of this loyal, core group of readers, as well as our attendees who were coming to our events.

We did a lot of research and tried to figure out what our users wanted. We brought people in and interviewed them, we put out surveys on our site asking for feedback, and from there, we got a big list of different kinds of features and different types of content and experiences that our users wanted to see.

We found that people wanted more information about how to build their companies better. This is one of the big reasons that people come to our events. We have a massive conference in San Francisco every year called “Disrupt,” and the main people who are coming to these events are entrepreneurs, founders, people who are part of startups, and people who are building new companies.

So that’s more from the audience perspective. From the business perspective, it’s no secret that digital advertising has been in an interesting spot recently, and there’s a reason why you’ve been seeing so many media brands trying to pivot to different things — whether it’s video, e-commerce, audio — and if you look around, there are some examples of brands that have been doing a really great job with having other sources of revenue that are more substantial than the advertising side.

The New York Times is a great example. They’ve been crushing it recently. So have The Washington Post, The Ringer, The Athletic, and a number of other sites. For us, from a business perspective, it was about an opportunity to diversify revenue.

Right now, TechCrunch brings in its revenue from advertising and events, so from a business perspective, this was also an opportunity to create another revenue pillar for us.

What is the product?

At a high level, the membership includes three main pieces. The first part is content. The content itself is much more utility-driven than what you would see on TechCrunch; most of the content on TechCrunch is news-driven. The editorial content for this is going to be more how-to and looking at more analysis in different startup sectors.

Part of that content is this area we’re calling EC-1s, which is a riff on SC-1s, which is something that a company files before it goes public, like Lyft or Slack recently. The idea behind EC-1 is to dive really deep into a company that is not publicly traded yet, but worth a lot — we call them unicorn companies. We did our first feature around Patreon.

There’s also content that is diving into companies that have had a lot of success — how we can learn from them in order to have success in our own companies, how they are approaching design, business strategy, international expansion, etc. — and helping to give founders a different lens as to how they can improve their own product building and business building.

The second pillar is around reader tools. When we did this research phase, we got a lot of feedback from readers that said, “We love TechCrunch, but there’s so much content on the site that it can be difficult to get through everything in a single day.” So a lot of the reader tools are focused on how to get better utility out of the site.

One of those tools is a feature called Rapid Read, which shows you a condensed version of the headlines so you can see a lot more on a single page. The inspiration for that really came from the site TechMeme, which has been a big favorite of a lot of the TechCrunch writers, as well as our staff.

Another one of the tools is a list-builder tool. This is very similar to a “Save for Later” tool that you might see on other websites, but what’s different about this tool is that you can actually save companies and people as well. We heard a lot of feedback from readers, especially people who work in sales who read TechCrunch every day, that they wanted a way to be able to compile a list of companies that they had been reading about. We also removed banner ads and video pre-roll as another way to get through the site a little bit faster.

The third part of the product is about community. This is where we’ve been doing some of the tie-ins with our events. If you are an annual subscriber to Extra Crunch, you get a 20% discount on our events. It also goes the other way — if you’re an event attendee, you also can get a 20% discount on an annual subscription to Extra Crunch. We’re also doing conference calls on a bi-weekly basis right now.

How did you pick those features?

It really ties back to what I mentioned before. It was a combination of research, talking with people who are reading our site regularly, looking at analytics for what kind of things were popular and what kind of things our regular readers were reading, and interviewing and talking with people at our events.

The other thing that’s really interesting is our two editors who are leading this project, Danny Crichton and Eric Eldon, have come from either the VC or startup world. Eric Eldon actually used to be the head editor of TechCrunch. When he left, he went and founded a startup called Hoodline, which is also a media startup. So he has a lot of experience actually building a company himself. Likewise, Danny Crichton previously came from Charles River Ventures, which is a big VC firm out of Boston, and is really well-positioned to be able to talk about venture capital. And obviously we have our own writers who are talking with these startup founders and builders every single day.

So it’s a combination of our own expertise, just being TechCrunch and the people we have involved, and then also bringing in research from talking with our audience and polling them.

Do you think there’s a subscription ceiling?

To be completely honest, I don’t think it really applies a ton in our scenario. But I do think it applies to other subscription products.

I think it may apply if your product has a lot of similar overlaps to other products — for example with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, everybody’s covering political news. There are obviously differentiations as far as scoops, writers, and that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of overlaps. I could see how a reader might not want to pay for all three of those products, for example. They just want to stick with one.

I do see there potentially being an issue for users if there are a lot of similar products out there and you have to make a decision — by no means are you ever going to subscribe to everything.

I think what’s different about our product is it’s typically going to be a tool that people are using for their jobs. I think that makes it much different than something that is just news driven. And then the fact that there’s also an offline portion of it too — the community and networking piece of it. There’s a lot of value in that and that’s something that people are willing to pay for. I think that gives us a competitive edge.

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

As I mentioned before, The Athletic. I think they’re doing an amazing job with their Q&A features. It’s a really awesome way to engage your most loyal readers.

Outside of that, just as a larger trend, something we’ve been paying a lot of attention to and something I’m really fascinated with has been the concept of subscription podcasts. It’s been something that has been really popular in Asia, but it hasn’t really started to pick up too much in the U.S. I think it’s something that more media companies should be paying attention to. It’s definitely something that we’re paying attention to.

One of the strangest things I’ve seen is BuzzFeed having a physical paper. That really had me scratching my head. I’m not really sure exactly what the strategy was there, but that’s definitely something different.