Three strategic questions crucial to Nine Publishing’s future
Tory Maguire at the Mumbrella Publish Conference
Nine’s publishing strategy has been a long and winding one. Twelve years before Fairfax was subsumed by Nine, the Australian Financial Review became one of the first major mastheads in the world to launch a hard pay wall for its content.
This was back in 2006, four years before the Times London introduced its own paywall, and half a decade before the New York Times experimented with its own rather crumbly wall.
This pioneering work has set Nine Publishing on a twenty-year journey into the gentle art of convincing online audiences to pay for news — something they willingly did for centuries, before the internet came along and effectively set the price for news at zero.
Fair bit of revisionist history here
Dark patterns also appear part of Nine publishing’s subscription strategy
Actively make their subscriptions more difficult to cancel than sign up for. Sign up instantly online, but you have to find a phone number buried in fine print to cancel.
SMH’s antiquated typography doesn’t suit YouTube and social media. I understand they want to lean into the brand’s heritage, but it needs to look kind of modern in those formats.