News outlets must follow the math in drawing in dollars
“Funnel mathematician” sounds like a job for an MIT brainiac. So why are newspapers hiring them?
It’s where the web meets the notebook — that frightening place where nobody wants to pay for real news, but they crave the latest scoop, score or video.
Jim Bernard, a funnel mathematician at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, says he’s determined to use his analytical e-commerce skills to keep his paper thriving.
“I don’t think journalism needs to be saved. It just needs to be frictionless,” he said. “We need to do all the little things that readers expect.”
Websites must respond swiftly, especially the payment portals. Once he introduced PayPal to his site, he said online subscriptions soared by 20 percent. Stories and multimedia elements need to load fast and flow effortlessly, too, he added.
The Economist, an influential global magazine, just featured Bernard and his team on how they are using funnel math to hook online subscribers. Bernard came from the business site MarketWatch and his deputy from Target.
The focus, they said, is on interested readers. The so-called “grazers,” who scan the Star Tribune for a Minnesota Vikings football score, for instance, aren’t worth the trouble. It’s the “test drivers” and “intenders” who read lots of stories who they offer deals to.
It’s a subscription-first model that sells a paper’s website by offering unlimited access and depth of reporting. Paper subscriptions are also part of the deal.
“The e-commerce playbook is long, so there’s lots of things we can do,” he said of selling readers online subscriptions that start at 99 cents.
But once you get them, he added, you must keep them.
The bottom line is to provide great journalism. Part of the funnel math formula is to then learn what paying readers like.
“That creates all sorts of opportunities to kind of fine-tune the behavior and the mechanism to help grow people who are paying for the product,” Bernard said.
The “megatrends” he sees driving the bus include giving readers a seamless mobile experience, focusing on consumers and building a better business model.
“We made it too hard for people,” Bernard said of old newspaper sites. “All the work around funnel math is making a better e-commerce system.
“There’s a whole lot of journalism going on, “he added. “I work here (at the Star Tribune) to help keep 250 passionate journalists working to make my community better.”