The INMA's subscription benchmarking service is designed as an international peer-to-peer exchange, promising an active benchmarking community and featuring data-rich dashboards with actionable insights and personalised subscription best practices.
The paid-for service is available to the INMA's corporate members who publish at least one online news service.
Publishers are not locked into any hardware, software, or consulting agreements and may submit several brands at no additional charge, according to the INMA.
The pilot was conducted with 102 national and regional news brands from 30 companies in 19 countries.
The service is part of the INMA's Readers First Initiative and is led by Greg Piechota, the association's researcher-in-residence.
As part of the service every quarter, the INMA:
- collects 20 points of data on performance
- calculates 34 KPIs, and
- then slices them by cohorts including geography, maturity, target market and type of paywall.
The data is aggregated, anonymised and shared with participants in an online dashboard, which features more than 150 charts and tables across 10 interactive tabs.
Each brand has personalised scorecards on digital reader engagement, registration and subscriptions — allowing comparisons to cohorts of similar brands and the top performers in each KPI.
"We kept hearing from our members that running a business without benchmarking was like driving with your eyes closed," says Piechota. "So, we created the service to provide our members access to reliable and trusted information about how their performance compares to their peers. [It will also] assist them in improving that performance with evidence-based insights and best practises."
INMA partnered with Laboratorium EE, a Polish-Lithuanian research and software development company, to build the online report and assist in data collection, verification and analysis.
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