The Hindu sees over 65% increase in subscribers upon leveraging Google Play’s subscription capabilities
The Hindu, a widely respected and influential English-language newspaper in India, is renowned for its comprehensive coverage of national and international news, politics, business, sports, technology, sports, science, culture, and more.
Back in 1996, The Hindu was the first news publication to launch their website in India. In 2019 they became the first mainstream publication to monetize digital content. With over 10 million cumulative app downloads, two of their apps - The Hindu Digital & The Hindu e-Paper - have been featured in the top 5 grossing apps in India on Google Play.
To further expand their reach across India as well as the world, they’ve been focused on increasing the number of online readers & subscribers by honing in on enhancing user experience across their apps. A key challenge The Hindu was keen on addressing was offering their active customers a more frictionless purchase experience and scaling their app monetization efforts simultaneously.
The subscription domino effect
The Hindu made a strategic change by shifting its monetization model from one-time purchases to auto-renewing subscriptions. They validated this shift by measuring the retention of total subscribers after running a split test between the one-time purchases and auto-renewing subscriptions. The superior flexibility and user experience offered in the subscription module helped make The Hindu’s decision to switch an easy one.
The Hindu's successful implementation of a new monetization model has been facilitated by Google Play Commerce, a seamless and secure monetization platform that provides a suite of subscription features like grace period, account hold, and acquisition & retention reporting. The introduction of subscription plans paired with support for UPI, led to an over 65% improvement in conversion rates. This, in turn, has led to an increase in app revenue of 3% to 10% from FY 21-22 to FY 22-23 & 30% for FY 23-24. Incidentally, the app contributes to one-third of their overall revenue collection.
The Hindu also reports that coupling Google Play’s commerce platform tightly with their app has led to improved user authentication and payment completion over their existing system. The updates to their app has led to improved engagement with their core reader base and has proven to be a channel for acquiring highly engaged readers who prefer consuming content on the app without any distractions.
These changes have shown effect with the app breaking into the top grossing apps in India on Google Play soon after implementing the subscription module.
Conclusion
The Hindu has seen an improvement in subscription rates as well as an increase in in-app revenue as a direct result of shifting to a subscriptions model and by leveraging the suite of tools provided by Google Play Commerce. All these changes have cumulatively also led to an improved overall rating from 3.0 to 4.2 on Google Play - a testament to the success of their efforts & experimentation!
By utilizing Google Play’s commerce platform, The Hindu has thus been able to achieve its mission of offering customers a smooth & flexible purchase experience and has simultaneously been able to scale its monetization efforts as well.