The FatChilli Playbook #6: 3 questions your audience data should answer this week

Hi friend 👋

Welcome back to The FatChilli Playbook. One email for publishers, editors and product people who think about reader revenue more than is strictly healthy.

This issue starts in Ukraine, where the biggest independent news site launched a paywall and learned what works. Then it moves to your own analytics, and the questions worth asking them.

But first:

A pageview, a unique visitor and a subscriber walk into a bar.
The bartender asks, “Which of you is paying 💶?”
The pageview says, “I’m just passing through.”
The unique visitor says, “Put me down for two. I’m also on my phone.”
The subscriber says, “I’ve got this round.”
The bartender says, “Finally, a regular.”
You guessed it, this edition is about audience data.

David here (audience revenue & engagement at FatChilli for Publishers)

Let’s do this. 

Oh, and don’t forget to forward this newsletter to colleagues who might be interested. They can sign up here.

Ukrainska Pravda launched a paywall in the middle of a war. It has 8,200 subscribers

In the first two months of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainska Pravda’s advertising revenue fell by 90%. Programmatic ads, donors and syndication carried it for three years. Then US aid was frozen, and Google traffic began to fall.

On 29 April, it launched paid subscriptions on REMP. Just under 1,500 people paid in the first four days, about €19,000. By mid-September, there were 7,800 subscribers. Now there are 8,200. The plan for the year was 10,000.

Executive director Andrey Boborykin told us what worked and what did not:

1. Discounts beat bundles. He spent most of a year negotiating a bundle with a streaming service that has more than a million paying subscribers. It has not performed the way he hoped. Two discount campaigns at 35 to 50% off brought in more than a thousand subscribers each.
2. Core journalism converts. The business vertical was supposed to be the engine. It was not. Politics, investigations, and anti-corruption reporting drive the biggest sign-ups.
3. A face beats a feature list. Campaigns fronted by chief editor Sevgil Musaieva or other known editors, ideally on video, outperform the rest.
4. Google can punish a paywall. When metering went live, about 5% of the audience hit the wall at once, many of them Discover visitors who bounced on the first page. Google cut referrals within days. Ukrainska Pravda loosened the paywall on news, and the traffic came back.

If you ever find yourself thinking how hard it is for you, think of Ukrainska Pravda building a sustainable audience revenue in the middle of the war.

On a lighter note, it is super inspiring to see how the team has been leveraging AI.

Your dashboard answers how many. But that’s not what you should be looking for

Pageviews and top stories were always top of mind when I worked in the newsroom. Conversions based on articles came later, but rarely went further.

At FatChilli, we have put together a routine of 11 questions to replace that habit, and every answer should change what you publish or promote.

Here are three of them.

🌶️ Ask daily: Which story published in the last 24 hours converted unknown readers into known ones through a newsletter sign-up, registration, or paid subscription?

🌶️ Ask weekly: Which traffic sources delivered visitors who came back this week?

🌶️ Ask monthly: What share of last month’s new registrants is still active 30 days later, broken down by acquisition source?

The other eight questions are in a free eight-page PDF.

From the blog

At Denník N, digital subscribers make up 7% of overall monthly readers and bring in 70% of total revenue.
Seven people in a hundred are paying for most of the party. My new piece asks how that ratio should change the way a newsroom thinks about growth.

Beam+: the weekly question, answered by channel

“Which traffic sources delivered visitors who came back?” is the weekly question above. In Beam+ it has a name: the Channel x Loyalty matrix.

Every reader is placed in one of five tiers (New, Fly-by, Casual, Loyal, Lover) from their recency, frequency and volume over the last 30 days. The tiers update daily.

AI visitors get the same treatment. Beam+ tags traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI tools as its own medium, so you can see where those readers land in the loyalty funnel instead of guessing.

Every article also gets a label: Replicate, Optimize, Stop or Amplify. Editors get a next step instead of a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet fans, we are sorry. Beam+ runs on your own servers, so the data stays yours, and the pricing is flat, so it does not grow with your traffic.

We held a hackathon

The FatChilli team spent three days on the annual hackathon. Lots of discussion about the problems of publishers and how can we solve them. AI was also front and center. We will have more to share in the coming future.

Touch of positivity

In last month’s edition, we mentioned the successful “Let’s launch an independent radio” crowdfunding campaign by Denník N. Well, it grew even more and crossed the 200-thousand euro mark.

The newsroom said their ambition is to start broadcasting in January 2027. 

JournalismUK also caught up with the team behind the project, read more here if you are interested.

Stat to steal

In September, 45 of the 50 biggest US news websites had less traffic than a year earlier. In August it was 41. Newsweek lost 61%, CNN 48%, Axios 48%.

Worldwide, half of the top 50 English-language news sites fell by more than a fifth. Only seven grew.

That’s all, folks.