The Age finds success for Eat Street series by mixing proven content strategies

By Mex Cooper

Head of Audience Development

The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times, and WAToday

Melbourne, Australia

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Using audience data to assess content performance is useful, but its true value lies in providing insights into the reasons behind the results.

As newsrooms evolve in their use of data, they are able to draw on diverse insights to generate new content ideas that will resonate with readers and increase subscriptions. A recent example of this data-driven, reader-focused approach is The Age's Eat Street series.

Audience members responded well to highly localised content that spoke to the places they knew and loved.

As Nine's metropolitan mastheads tightened paywalls to grow subscriptions, we keenly analysed content that converts readers to paying subscribers. Among various insights, we have identified that hyper-local and food content can be significant drivers of subscriptions with key moments supporting this finding.

A sense of place

In 2022, The Age covered the Victorian state election using an innovative audience-centric approach inspired by the work of journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen of New York University. A citizen's agenda was developed based on readers' priorities. (Learn about how we did it.)

A crucial insight from the coverage was that a story on a particular suburb, Dandenong, had particularly high engagement and attracted new readers. Many of these readers arrived via search, likely looking for information on this highly populated but often overlooked Melbourne location.

The Age built on this audience lesson with its coverage of Australia's federal election in 2023, which included embedding reporters in the communities of Hawthorn, Richmond, and Melton. Close political contests were expected in all these electoral seats. However, while Hawthorn and Richmond were considered familiar territory for our readership, Melton, one of Australia's fastest growing suburbs, was lesser known. It was the Melton stories that yielded the most new subscribers.

Both these elections demonstrated the opportunity to attract new readership and, in turn, new subscribers by writing about specific neighbourhoods. This lesson helped inspire a regular opinion series in The Age called "Life in the burbs," in which contributors and staff pen a love (or hate or indifferent) letter to the suburb in which they live.

The series has now had more than 50 contributions and resulted in hundreds of new subscriptions. As Growth Content Editor Sophia Phan has written, our social team also found local content helps us connect to younger readers and reach the right audience on TikTok and Instagram.

A sense of taste

When the Good Food brand was first added to our subscription bundle just over a year ago, its content was subject to a metered paywall. Good Food readers had been accustomed to open access, so we aimed to entice them down the subscription funnel.

However, as Nine's mastheads tightened paywalls, we began experimenting with locking some Good Food content behind a hard paywall. Our renowned Good Food Guide list of hatted restaurants, when released and locked, became one of our highest-ever converting pieces of content.

A blended approach

Eat Streets draws on these insights by taking a hyper-local look at food. Accomplished restaurant reviewer and food writer Dani Valent wrote about five streets across the city known as culinary precincts. The series deliberately focused on streets across the breadth of the city and eateries specialising in cuisines from a diverse range of cultures.

The series was among Good Food's top converting content for The Age when published. It attracted 61% of its traffic from non-subscribers, more than twice the average ratio for other content in the same period. Once again, targeting neighbourhoods proved to draw in new audiences, and food articles proved enticing enough to convince people to subscribe.

The series continues to drive engagement and is housed in a collection. This allows us to curate a finite set of content and is used to present our magazines - Good Weekend and Sunday Life - and investigations. Audience sessions that include a collection are nearly three times longer than those that do not.

Eat Streets is also a driver of community engagement with posters made and presented to the restaurants featured in the series for them to display in their venues. The marketing team also creates press ads for our printed newspapers.

The popularity of Eat Streets has provided another audience insight and inspired a Sydney version for The Age's sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald. Eat Streets has proven that, when it comes to audience insights, success can breed success.

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About Mex Cooper

Mex Cooper is head of audience development at The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times, and WAToday, based in Melbourne, Australia.

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