While many sports media entities have been dying off or getting gobbled up by conglomerates (who then eventually kill them off or sell them for pennies on the dollar) for some time, some verticals in the industry have seen positive momentum.
While it can seem downright impossible to maintain a sports content website these days (you don’t have to tell us), the newsletter has become a valuable and critical tool in a media company’s toolbelt. You rarely, if ever, see a new media entity announce itself without a newsletter component anymore. They’re no longer just ways to drive traffic, they’re integral parts of the overall content strategy.
The Athletic appears to be well aware of all this. According to a report from DigiDay, they’re about to hit the three million total newsletter subscriber mark, an almost 20 percent uptick year-over-year. Most of that growth comes from The Pulse, their free daily newsletter, which has around 2.4 subscribers.
The Athletic’s director of creative development Chris Sprow told DigiDay that The Pulse has an open rate between 46-50% while Full Time, their women’s soccer newsletter, has an open rate that surpasses 60%. That’s pretty good in an industry where 34% is the norm, per MailChimp.
Sprow noted that while The Pulse is free, more than a million paid subscribers to The Athletic get it, which means they’re getting steady access to content they can click on. Plus, that makes it a lot easier to convert free subscribers into paying ones.
“Thousands of new [paid] subscribers to The Athletic last year came from our newsletters,” Sprow said.
Plans call for more newsletters soon, including a sports business newsletter, on the heels of Andrew Marchand’s recent hiring coupled with Richard Deitsch’s work.
[DigiDay]
