How Condé Nast Experiments, Bundles, and Wins — Michael Ribero, Condé Nast

“We put up a reg wall, registration wall for certain folks. The next day, there was a big announcement on the editorial side, and the backlash that we got of, "You're going to put up this reg wall to now make us register when it was completely free before and now you're doing all these changes."”

“I think it helps that it's Anna Wintour and she's going to have a very strong opinion too, but her gut was right. It was like, here's the most important stuff and this is the stuff we should make people pay for.”

“We would try all sorts of messaging, all sorts of packaging to say, "Hey, just get six to eight channels." Every single test that we ran, it lost when you said, "Get over 100 channels."”

“And now all of a sudden we said, "Hey, this is now part of the subscription. We're only going to make it subscription only."”

“Coffee and newspaper go together really well. And so we hammered that a whole in a bunch of different ways. You can have access in certain cafes or get a Washington Post-branded coffee bean with your subscription, so that made sense.”

“The context also helped in the sense a lot of the research we got was people were just overwhelmed by the news.”

“So we will offer the business membership after purchase, and we get pretty decent conversion rates in that five-ish percent and all of a sudden I have zero incremental customer acquisition costs and now I'm driving something like $100 to $200 in lifetime value from just one pop-up.”

“So when I was at The Post, we did something called starter pack and as opposed to getting an unlimited subscription, it was essentially read four stories every single month, and then you can decide.”

“And so he recently introduced online intensives, one-on-one coaching, monthly four-hour meditation events, week-long meditation retreats”

“Before it was like, let's just launch new products and new tiers to capitalize on this very dynamic. Some people are willing to pay more than others. The adoption rates I've seen have been low single percentage, and it's like, well, is it even worth it?”

“And it's really like being in the app, doing those sorts of things, spending time with us so you're ready for that next event. That's been a way we've able to see this as a positive cycle.”

“We have extremely high price products, very elite select people, everything IRL, everything white glove to all the way down to freemium in an app”