The Value of the User Persona: An Informal Case Study.
A quick look into the application of user personas and their impact on the newspaper industry.
A user persona, to me, is an exercise in that age-old adage “Know your audience”.
As a PM, creating an incredible product is only the first part of the process. Getting folks to listen to the value props, engage with the product family, and ultimately drive the wave of adoption is an entirely different skill set, yet arguably more important than the ability to create something truly word class. A loveable, good enough product is better than a great product that simply does not resonate.
I’m a millennial. I grew up with a foot in both the digital and analog worlds and appreciate the unique value props that come with both. Take reading the morning news for example. I do not get a morning newspaper delivered to my house and have not lived in a place that did since college, yet I jump at the chance to read a physical paper anytime I see one. I do, however, pay for a subscription to the New York Times app and very much appreciate the productization of their online presence. At a time when almost every physical newsprint publisher was desperately trying to stop hemorrhaging money in a dying industry, I noticed camps form: The flexible and the rigid.
Both camps still wrote news stories, continued with the standard journalistic pursuits, and both shifted their presence toward an online publishing strategy, but one camp seemed to appreciate the concept of user personas much better than the other. And this has made all the difference.
The rigid camp attempted to maintain the “pay at the door model”. You may get a couple of free online articles per month, but any appreciable consumption of their content was going to cost you the standard monthly fee. And this model made sense when you subscribed to a single newspaper, got a physical copy of that paper delivered to your door every day, and the price of general admission granted you thirty-plus articles per day when access to other news sources had significant barriers to entry. They did not, however, figure in the breakdown of those barriers. There also seemed to be a failure to understand demographic shifts within the industry. Highlighted by blaming the largest and fastest growing demographic, Millennials, for the death of numerous industries, the subtle air of superiority of printed journalism over online publications tended to cater to older groups who were less likely to stray from the path, so they didn’t either.
The flexible camp did and did so through the appreciation of the user persona. They observed, presumably through metrics, interviews, and their own personal experience, that the number of news articles read per day probably didn’t shift much. People only have so much time to catch up on current events and thus the market was not expanding. They also noted that access to someone else’s coverage of the main current event that day was immediately accessible via the advent of news aggregation services, and that, if blocked by the pay-at-the-door paywall, the reader would simply type in a couple of keywords and have another publisher’s version of the article immediately available. In economics, this concept is called fungibility and essentially means that the news stories are, for practical purposes, interchangeable to the consumer.
This appreciation of the user persona by the flexible camp drove two major paradigm shifts: Some revenue is better than no revenue so marginal market capture is the new goal and value-add services are key to subscriptions as differentiation combats fungibility.
The New York Times took this new playbook and ran with it.
They increased the number of free articles per month to 10, effectively meeting the average consumption rate of their average user, but without devaluing the paid subscription plan, and created a suite of targeted content streams in line with their audience's interests. Come for the main news headline, stay for the recipes, games, travel advice, and curated tv-series content. This is huge because reading the newspaper was generally a single event per day, usually in the morning. By providing a service that helps de-stress at lunch, plan dinner, and recommend evening-time entertainment, the NY Times increased their daily user engagement by 300%, while giving away their primary product for free.
This attention to user personas has literally been the make-or-break factor in the news industry. The five-year stock price trend for the New York Times (NYT) shows a 46% return while the stock price of the McClatchy Company, owners of the Kansas City Star, Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, and numerous other regional newspapers, has seen a negative 96% return over the same period.
Obviously, effective implementation of user personas as a product development tool is not a silver bullet and we have glossed over the hard work of software development, app building, content creation, etc. but adoption of this type of tool and methodology has the propensity to trigger significant industry disruption and novel product strategies.
Or maybe Millennials really are killing the newspaper industry...