At Harvard Business Review, Paid Circulation Surges For a Second Straight Year | TrainMyNews

At Harvard Business Review, Paid Circulation Surges For a Second Straight Year

0 months ago
At Harvard Business Review, Paid Circulation Surges For a Second Straight Year

After Harvard Business Review kicked off 2017 by reducing its print frequency to bimonthly-eliminating 40 percent of the issues offered in a $99 annual subscription-it was a combination of smart positioning, creative new digital benefits, and a heavier investment in the six print issues that remained, which allowed the magazine to end the year with 10-percent more subscribers than it began with. The lack of subscriber outrage around the dramatic shift "Was almost hurtful," editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius quipped to Folio: last August. Far more than an editorial pivot, the last two years have represented a fundamental, company-wide shift in the way the Harvard Business Review approaches its readers, both existing and prospective, as well as a redefining of what it means to be a subscriber. We did a lot of up-front communication with subscribers and took advantage of things that were available to us, like the fact that our subscribers can maintain libraries on HBR.org, and we were able to have the editors select content that we could drop with our compliments into their libraries-just to get them to start using those digital elements of their subscription, if they hadn't been already. Folio: What indicated that a good portion of your subscribers weren't aware of or weren't taking full advantage of their subscriptions? We saw a spike in subscriber satisfaction starting last year after the frequency change, tracking net promoter scores, and one of the leading indicators was that the cohort with the highest satisfaction self-reported that they were using print and digital interchangeably. If you pick us up a couple times on the newsstand in a year, and then you do the math and you realize you get access to all of these other subscriber benefits, it's actually a pretty good deal to subscribe at $99. Folio: Where will you be focusing your efforts in the year ahead? Read more