Digital Works Podcast: George Montagu

Episode 34 of the podcast is a conversation with George Montagu. George is Head of Insights at FT Strategies which is the consulting arm of the Financial Times.

I talked to George about the big shift the FT has made from being a print-focused organisation with an ad-based revenue model, to being a digital-focused company with a subscriber-based revenue model.

We also discussed how George and his team talk about data and insights with journalists, and the work that FT Strategies did with the National Theatre.

Here are some highlights:

On the FT’s digital pivot

“in the last year or two we've reached a million digital subscribers. So digital only subscribers, which you know, is a huge landmark for us. And if you actually look at our revenue splits between 2005 and today, it's, you know, indescribable the difference.

We used to be a majority print business, you know, be like 70, 80% of our revenue. It's now the reverse in terms of digital. And we also used to be a predominantly ad-based business, again, similar numbers, but we're now far more subscriptions as a source of our primary revenue.”

The power of a single, shared goal

“at the FT, we obviously had multiple revenue sources, whether that be advertising or print or or whatever. And to be honest, everyone was pulling in different directions based on their position within the organization and what their own KPIs are. And I think that's probably a very familiar story for most organizations including cultural organizations.

So what our CEO and our leadership team did, which I think was really transformative, was they just said, okay, in the next three years we want to achieve 1 million paid-for subscribers. And you can imagine the reaction amongst our advertising team, our events team,  our print circulation team. They weren't particularly happy, but what they did understand is there was actually a really clear direction that the organization was pointing towards and that was where they were going to focus their resources”

The importance of meaningful metrics

“you need to look beyond really rubbish metrics like page views, for example, as a proxy for the value that people are getting from your content. You need to look at multiple metrics to build up an understanding and also compliment that with some qualitative metrics that you get from audience surveys or or interviews or focus groups.”

“what we try to move away from is like connecting subscription acquisitions to individual articles because it's so blunt, a user or a reader goes through so many steps before they decide to subscribe. And just measuring that point of conversion and attributing value to that is pretty bad, to be honest. So we're really careful about what metrics we show journalists and we try to focus on the good engagement ones […] we  look at what we call quality reads at the FT, which is the percentage of content that people are reading, looking at their scroll depth and also the amount of time that they've spent on pages”

“one of the best metrics in video on demand, and something that's used by Netflix, is total number of hours used or viewed. And I think that's a reasonable proxy for the value that someone's getting from your service or your, whatever you're putting out there”

Low cost validation

“So with NT at Home, the original story for that is based on YouTube during the pandemic. And what I love about that story is it shows that you don't have to have an expensive tech stack to validate demand for digital cultural experiences.

I think that's a really important thing to say because a lot of organizations and news organizations are the same. They'll come up with an idea and they'll be like, this is the best thing that's ever gonna happen to us. We're gonna grow so much digital revenue, let's invest a million pounds in our tech stack. And before you know it, they don't have any viewers or any people visiting any of their digital content.

So what I would say is, you know, YouTube was and is often a perfect place to start if you just want to validate demand amongst audiences.”

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