Learning from my mistakes ..

The Sun is launching subscriptions again, which takes me back to a period of epic personal failure

The Sun announced this week that they are rolling out a premium subscription tier called “Sun Club”. It is a dignified ten years since the announcement that we would close the previous iteration “Sun+”. For those of us lucky enough to work on that project this has been a nostalgic few days.

I say lucky, but I also should be honest. The Sun+ project was by all strategic and financial measures the greatest failure of my career. It launched with great fanfare in 2013 and lasted only two years. It underperformed, overspent and generally disappointed everyone associated with it.

I was the Chief Customer Officer at News UK who had to close it, so a lot of that disappointment was felt by me. We had set out to launch a paid content future for Britain’s biggest news brand, and it plain didn't work.

And yet… my guilty secret is that it is still one of the projects that I have worked on that I love. I learnt more from this project than most others, and a lot of the people who worked on it went on to be highly successful in other projects and businesses because they did too. The Sun tried to do something that no-one had done, and as the Aussies would say, we ‘gave it a red hot crack’.

Firstly a bit of background. The Sun+ project followed on from the Times digital subscription launch which had surfed the iPad launch in 2010 and built a growing, profitable and future proof premium revenue business which continues to thrive to this day.

There was appetite at Newscorp to try the same route for the tabloid businesses, and a belief that The Sun could make it work. To help, News UK had bought the rights to Premier League highlights on mobile for a serious price, and built a serious team to deliver it.

Looking back now, here are the main things I remember from the whole experience that stay with me now.

Pricing can be an objective in itself

The Sun needed a big move to go with the move to paid subscriptions. Securing mobile football clips was that big move, but cost millions. The Sun was also still predominately making its money from print and there was fear that if readers would substitute paid print for paid digital, the latter could not be too cheap.

Consumer insight suggested a price point around £2 a month or £20 annually (ironically the price at which Sun Club is launching). But the economics of rights licensing and threat of internal substitution created a price target of £2 a week, over £100 a year. Any cheaper and the case could not hold up.

In that way price became an objective for the project, not a variable to be determined. Our job was to find the right proposition and positioning that worked at the price we had fixed, not to fix a content offering and then pick a price.

Staying exclusive is hard work

Paywalls need exclusivity to function. We worried a lot about locking down the football clips from piracy, for example. The Premier League had a lot of experience in fighting that, but it was a never ending battle and most British pubs contained at least one fan who knew how to illegally stream and questioned why their mates would pay to get clips.

Closer to home it was obvious very early on that The Mirror, The Star and Mailonline were competitors for content and free, and exclusives were very short lived. At one point we stood in the newsroom with a stopwatch and counted eight minutes between The Sun breaking a big scoop and the Mailonline publishing a “fair use” version of the story which sat at the top of the search rankings.

The easiest content to protect was the star columnists who had personal brands and long form writing that was harder to replicate. The best part of the offering that had demonstrable value were the subscriber rewards with discounts on holidays and at retail. When we closed the service it was the rewards club that members asked to continue paying for, which tells you a lot.

Trial for show, commitment for dough

Acquisition was pretty strong throughout, because The Sun had a great strength in promotional marketing and the team had learnt a lot about subscription sales.

We acquired well over a million customers, but rarely got the subscriber base over 200,000. The drop off from free or discounted trial was recognisably steep. The drop off after the first bill landed was much steeper.

The measure of ‘90 day subscribers’ became the critical measure, and it spent most of the two years in A&E on oxygen surrounded by concerned relatives.

Whoops, there goes gravity

The teams working on the project were well funded, well supported and well motivated. They absolutely bust their asses. For a hundred straight weeks in a row we made the machine better, in a thousand different ways. We saw the much loved marginal gains in all of the KPIs on the dashboard, and we left no stone unturned to do it.

In the end though, you can’t optimise your way out of a black hole, the gravity is too heavy. We were marketing a product at a price point that was material to our customers, and giving them content which was largely available from our competitors for free. All the tweaks in the world couldn’t change that.

It just wasn't good enough value for money, and worst of all it made The Sun smaller when it needed to be big and bold.

It’s ok to change your mind

Marilyn Bergman wrote “Nothing is forever, forever’s a lie / All we have is what’s between Hello and Goodbye”. I don’t think she was describing the development of the mobile internet, but she could have been.

People will argue that if Sun+ was doomed to failure, then Sun Club must be a mistake. They will say “but we tried this before” as if an idea is taken off the board forever.

I prefer to believe that digital publishing has few fixed rules and a landscape that is constantly shifting. Just because an idea didn't work then doesn't mean it won’t work now - the proposition is different and so is the audience and the ecosystem and the platforms and regulation and payment systems and consumer habits and so on and so on.

So Hello to Sun Club, a different proposition in a different decade. I wish every success to the team working on the new launch - I hope you smash it. However it plays out, I hope you learn as much as we did from our time in The Sun.