USA Today Relaunches Subscription Crossword App

USA Today has amped up the features on its subscriber-focused crossword app, with a monthly $5.99 price tag, all in an effort to drive new, younger subscribers and keep churn down. While a paid-for tier previously existed, the publisher plans to expedite growth with new features and incentives. “We’re evolving as a media company from a primarily ad-driven model, for decades, to being a customer-obsessed subscription model,” Gannett chief marketing and strategy officer Mayur Gupta told Adweek. “It’s not about eyeballs and traffic, but driving incremental value for customers.” The New Yorker Unveils its Third Quiz Product in its Latest Bid to Build Habit The Gannett paper is less than two months into its subscription journey. This effort contributes to the broader group’s ambitious goal of hitting 10 million subscribers by 2025. But it's got some hoops to jump through before it gets there. Gannett added 145,000 digital subscribers in the second quarter this year, totaling 1.4 million. But total circulation revenue fell 9.4% compared to the same quarter in 2020, in all likelihood because people are joining at lower introductory offers. It wouldn’t break out subscriber numbers for USA Today. USA Today’s crossword is already the highest-ranking puzzle on Google search, the publisher said. Each day it reaches nearly 80,000 users. To keep this visibility and audience numbers high, it's still offering a free version of the game for anonymous users who get access to one puzzle daily. Registered users get features like more hints, personal stats and cross-device access. Subscribers get unlimited access to unlimited games, ad-free. It mirrors the publisher’s porous paywall, where most of the content is accessible for free and subscribers get additional content like exclusive investigations, visual explainers and what it calls immersive storytelling. Our core will always be news, but we’re no longer limited to that.Mayur Gupta, chief marketing and strategy officer, Gannett Gaming is just one area USA Today is investing in. It's expanding its products in sports betting (signing a betting agreement with platform Tipico) and nonfiction content. There’s a pool of potential interested readers: USA Sports Media Group reaches more than 46 million people a month, according to Comscore. In the future, it sees elearning and education products as another opportunity for audience growth. It will also bundle different products, including local subscriptions within the Gannett family, where there’s more evidence that people will pay for local content. 'The big Grey Lady elephant in the room' Like a lot of news publishers, USA Today’s core loyalists are older. These new moves are focused on growing the 25- to 40-year-old bracket. The marketing campaign for the crossword app references The New York Times and will be displayed outside the latter's building, in a nod to The Times adding 65,000 digital subscribers via its Cooking and Games products in the second quarter of 2021. USA Today noted that its ad campaign marks a change in how the company puts itself out there creatively. “We want to break out of that sea of sameness and be self-effacing, acknowledging other players in the market,” said creative director Spencer Mandell. “We know there’s a big Grey Lady elephant in the room—let’s talk about that.” Since USA Today is early into its paywall journey, it has a way to go to amass enough data to understand what will make its readers pay. It wasn’t able to share details of its tests and models so far. It found that people play crosswords to unwind and destress. Being able to track personal statistics was seen as a big plus, 80% of people said this was an incentive to create an account, the publisher said. “As part of [our] evolution, we’ll expand our portfolio and the propositions we provide," Gupta added. “Our core will always be news, but we’re no longer limited to that.” Dow Jones Annual Earnings Reveal Record Digital Ad Gains, Climbing Subscriber Growth