Ad Experience for Non Subscribers
An exploration of frameworks and concepts that explore new ad supply opportunities across specific cohorts of users.
Project Brief
With 64% of The Times' non-subscriber traffic having zero-to-low ad exposure, a missed revenue opportunity emerged. This project delves into untapped potential, exploring ways to monetize non-subscribers while maintaining a consistent ad experience across the user journey. The focus rests on strategies applicable across the subscription bundle, ensuring a unified approach.
Impact
My strategic thinking and thought leadership has made continual impact, sparking conversations with senior leadership throughout the company.
The proposed frameworks provide non-subscribers access to articles through advertisements, demonstrating value and also spark innovative new methods to convert users into subscribers. This initiative broadened the scope of the Advertising portfolio, introducing unprecedented opportunities and unlocking new, never-before-done possibilities, ultimately leading to increased ad supply and revenue. As a result of this exploration, we started an experiment to introduce top ad on mobile web articles for non subscribers.
In this exploration, when an anonymous user encounters a regiwall, they are given the option to access the article by watching a video ad or engaging with an interactive ad unit. This empowers them to decide their access method, ensuring a more attentive audience for advertisers and further showcasing the value of Times journalism and content. This strategy utilizes existing advertiser assets and addresses one of the top most advertiser request of engaging with Times readers through video, creating a mutually beneficial experience.
Additional explorations focused on partnering with advertisers facilitating users with sponsored access to articles through the content itself. In this example, access would be provided through a selection of articles curated by the sponsor, or a partnership highlighting a contextual moment. Additionally these opportunities are scalable across the bundle, maximizing user exposure to the breadth of our offering and providing clients with a premium advertising environment.
Prototyped the user journey, illustrating when and where users would encounter paywalls. These touchpoints, which are traditionally the end of the journey for non-subscribers, now present opportunities for displaying ads instead.