Media success used to be all about traffic, unique users and clicks. Now the focus for any sustainable business must be on relationships, loyalty and habit. These new targets require new metrics. Reach is still important, and everyone still needs an audience, but that audience must be built and measured differently.

As the Senior Manager for Editorial Insights & Development at Axel Springer Germany, Janis Kitzhofer and his team have established a data-driven newsroom at BILD and WELT. But their focus has changed in the past year.

“I’ve been at Axel Springer five years now, and I think from the very first week I was saying page views were not the best metric to guide editorial decisions, or at least shouldn’t be the only one, partly because they are so easy to manipulate,” Kitzhofer explains. “Page use is so established here because it has an immediate advertisement revenue impact and easily translates into money. Something like a relationship or a return visit is much harder to put a dollar sign behind.”

Kitzhofer says that, although reach is still relevant, it is now vital to look beyond it. “We need to build relationships and then metrics like direct visits become more important,” he says, explaining that trust is now a huge focus. How you measure that trust, however, is not easy and Kitzhofer is currently building a pyramid-style framework on how best to do so. It has different layers covering original journalism, engagement (including scroll depth, video playback rates and expected reading time) and relationships and commitment (including frequency and retention).

Many newsrooms have created their own metrics to try to measure the less tangible, but now extremely important, attributes such as trust and loyalty, not to mention lifetime value (LTV). LTV, the total value generated for a publisher over the entire time a reader has a relationship with the brand, changes how success is measured. It means that instead of rewarding content that produces a one-off spike in traffic, the emphasis is on whatever creates lasting relationships. 

Because of this focus on value over volume, subscriber behavior has become much more important. The Wall Street Journal has adopted contextual metrics that assess content in relation to its aim, scoring every article against subscriber interest, subscriber engagement, purposeful reach (did it attract valuable new audiences from high-converting channels?) and conversion. 

Meanwhile the Times of London has made daily habit its “north star” while its in-house analytics tool, TED (Times Editorial Dashboard), is designed to rank stories by subscriber engaged minutes. Engaged readers are less likely to cancel, so anything which strengthens that engagement has become increasingly significant. 

Connecting newsroom metrics to business goals 

“The most important thing for me in terms of metrics is that they must have a strong link to business goals and the commercial operation,” says Sofia Delgado, audience development advisor and former director of audience at Metro. Delgado argues that publishers got used to chasing volume because it was easy to monetise, but says that approach no longer works. Instead, editorial, commercial and subscription teams should work towards shared goals rather than operate in separate silos. 

At Metro, Delgado’s team introduced a “golden metric” combining volume, dwell time and engagement such as polls and comments. 

“I’m a fan of compound metrics if the business has done their homework to make sure that it’s the right one for them,” she says. “They’re also good because once you lift the lid on metrics, there are so many, and for a newsroom to be paying attention to all of them while there’s also so much noise around, is just not efficient. If you can have one that does most of the job, that’s good.”

Kitzhofer is keen for his metrics to be available in real time as well as simple enough for everyone in the newsroom to understand. Otherwise, he argues, they will not influence editorial decisions. Delgado agrees, saying Metro’s golden metric became part of commissioning conversations. 

Measuring the value of repeat behavior 

At BILD, where a vast majority of users come directly to the homepage, Kitzhofer takes note of what interactions happen next, whether that is signing up for a newsletter, playing a video, or taking part in a quiz. Visits without any subsequent interactions have far less long-term value than those that start a relationship, so building habits – and frequency – is key. 

“Clearly now everyone would say I’d rather have a user coming six times a week for five minutes compared to once a week for half an hour,” says Kitzhofer, while Delgado adds that RFV (recency, frequency, volume) is an increasingly popular indicator.

“I think it’s a good general one that will help you regardless of your business model,” she says. “It’s a first step to start thinking about subscriptions but if you don’t have that as a priority, it also gives you an idea of topics that are strong.”

When it comes to habits and engagement, one of the most powerful tools a publisher has is their newsletters. However, the measures of success for these have changed too. 

Audience signals deliver deeper value

“Even a few years ago, so many publishers were focused on growth metrics like subscriber count and basic engagement metrics like opens and clicks,” says email expert Dan Oshinsky, who runs Inbox Collective. “But those are vanity metrics. A big list doesn’t necessarily tell you that you have the right, powerfully-engaged list. Now we’re all trying to go a bit deeper.”

Oshkinsky is a fan of surveys and reader feedback as signs of that deeper engagement. He is also very keen on conversion data and says: “We need to look at how good the newsletter is at bringing in not just new readers, but readers who will stay around and pay.

“Publishers are starting to try to find ways to prove they have a loyal, engaged audience who actually make time and space for their work.”

All this is well and good, but hard to show on a dashboard. Oshinsky says it might be time to learn from some of the modern newsletter platforms such as Substack and beehiiv which collate deeper data on newsletter performance. 

For example, they share useful data points such as engagement by cohort, which gives newsletter owners a way to check which particular sign-up sources are effective. “It’s about building a loyal audience, but also about making a better product,” adds Oshinsky. “The closer we get to something that’s actionable, the better.”

As newsroom priorities change, measurement needs to keep pace. The metrics that matter most will be the ones that help publishers understand what is working, act on that insight and build a more sustainable business.