How Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com doubled its paid members-only club

Key executives: Chris Chamberlain, president and Pat Scanlon, Director of Interactive Media, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Summary:  Six months after launching paid membership site PG+, the online team at the Post-Gazettes.com evaluated the sites performance.  Non-sports content was cut and "niches within niches" added, dedicated to individual teams. The resulting changes doubled membership in the club. Fans are also purchasing huge numbers of sports memorabilia items in the PG Store and FanDuel is now beta testing on the site. 

Challenge: To generate more revenues from the  sixth month-old paid membership club. 

Strategy: Before refining the channel, the interactive staff conducted a member survey and took note of data from members who "voted with their pockebooks" to refine the site (click here a full Q&A with Scanlon on how he refined PG+). The feedback was straight forward:  Sports and more sports, plus sports fans also wanted to be able to talk directly with the newspaper staff and with eachother. Upgrades to PG+ focused on elminating some non-sports topics and adding more sports "niches within the niche."  They also organized the hierarchy to make a clean division between the two sides of the channel, sports and non-sports.  Other changes included:

• The platform moved to the cloud and used two IP addresses to cut load-time in half, an improvement in user speed from "ok" to "superfast". 

• Unpopular feeds were removed. "We started off creating a lot of content," Scanlon says, so paring the content allowed room to place more feeds on popular topics - ie sports. 

• Subchannels were added to Sports on the navigation bar  for key local teams, Penguins, Steelers, Pirates and the Pittsburgh Baseball Cub. 

• Chats were given prominent positions in the new sub-channels and a top sports reporter was moved to the section to blog and chat.

• The best material was promoted on the  front of the Sport channel (see promos in the images to  the right on this page). 

• A new paid game, FanDuel is being tested now, with promotions that say  "Play Fantasy Games, Win Cash. Click here" (also shown in and image to the right of this article) 

The club also offers discounted tickets and roped off reserved seating at numerous events, including some that are not sports related.

Results: Membership in the site has doubled since the site was updated and teams all now have huge chat followings with commenting threads that can be 400 to 500 comments long. "They are not just commenting on the article, they are having conversations; they know eachother by reputation." "Huge" traffic spikes of mostly male visitors take place three times a day, noon to 1 p.m., 5 to 6 p.m and 9 to 10 p.m. Scanlon says that revenues from the site, while "not a magic bullet" are "significant". Scanlon says membership levels are on track to match 2 to 3% of circulation, or in this case 4000 to 6000 memberships. At maturity this revenue stream should total about $18,000 to $22,000 a month. Two new revenue streams from vvid fans include buying sports memorabilia at  the PG Store provide another six figures a year. The FanDuel partnership is also expected to provide a significant revenue stream. In total, monetization of sports in a market like Pittsburgh adds up to a significant number. 

Lessons learned:

•  Scanlon is a huge advocate of user-driven revenue as "crucial to any digital media company who used to only have a newspaper." He is hinting there are plans underway to expand the store. See more of his ideas on top user-generated initiatives here a review of technology partner allmenus.com.

• Sports fans are a potential base to create passionate local communities, and may be as lucrative as Moms. 

• The "experience" of club membership, ie chatting with the staff and with others in the community, is as important as news coverage. 

• Testing and refine. PG+ originally  including lots of feeds and then refine the site to eliminate what visitors did not use, and focusing on the most utilized sections and "experiences".