Goals of audience engagement – What is success?

Just as audience teams are known for their expertise in audience behavior and distribution channels, they also deeply understand performance metrics. They know their audience and channels because they know their data. These roles emerged alongside the rapid evolution of digital analytics, and in my interviews, it was striking how often goals and measurement came up as core themes.

Before digital tools, news success was measured in broad terms like circulation or public impact, often guided by instinct. But with the arrival of real-time analytics in the 1990s, newsrooms began adopting a data-driven mindset. Metrics became more granular, tracking repeat visits, scroll depth, and time spent, shifting the definition of success from reach alone to deeper engagement, loyalty, and trust. These changing metrics have since reshaping both newsroom priorities and publishing strategies. For a deeper look at this shift, see the early but still relevant Tow Center report The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times (2015).

Real-time analytics and ad-based business models have raised a critical question: are newsrooms using metrics to better inform the public, or to better package audiences for advertisers?

By the mid-2010s, a noticeable shift began as leading publishers and industry thinkers pushed back against the dominance of pageviews. Raw traffic volume was increasingly seen as a poor measure of journalistic success or business sustainability, especially with the rise of digital subscriptions. A user who bounced after a few seconds held far less value to both publishers and advertisers than someone who spent several minutes engaging with an article. In 2014, Chartbeat publicly suggested that the industry pivot from counting clicks to measuring attention, arguing that time spent actively engaging with content was a more meaningful metric of value.

We know that roughly 70% of unique visitors don't return within the time period that we can track them, which is typically 30 days. So saying we had however many millions of unique users in a given month — even in a really high month driven by a major news event — means little if only a handful of them come back with any regularity, if at all. That is why we focus on readership, frequency, and deeper engagement. Metrics like newsletter signups, email database growth, and app usage tell us more about loyalty. In a subscription model, unique users can be a diminishing metric because most will not return.

Ross Maghelsie, The Philadelphia Inquirer

By prioritizing engagement, newsrooms aimed to redefine success around deeper reader satisfaction. For example, The Financial Times introduced a metric called Quality Reads, which tracked whether readers consumed a meaningful portion of an article, not just clicked on the headline.

So how do we measure success? There are a couple of ways. One is pure audience metrics, pageviews. But that mostly tells you if you wrote about a topic people are already searching for, like Gene Hackman right now. It also reflects things like whether your headline was strong, your promo image worked, or the story got prominent placement on the homepage. To complement that, we look at how much time someone spends on a single story. We call that attention time. We have built models to estimate how much time we would expect a reader to spend, factoring in things like story length, visual content, and where readers are entering the article. We refer to this as an attention time score.

Anna Dubenko, The New York Times

After decades of chasing scale and immediate clicks, many news organizations in the late 2010s and early 2020s have pivoted to a more sustainable vision of success: building loyal audiences and long-term relationships. After pressuring a generation of journalists with an intense focus on pageviews, the pivot to reader revenue has shown that quality matters more than scale when it comes to subscriptions. A study by the Lenfest Institute found that readers who view eight or more articles per month are significantly more likely to subscribe.

In addition to just total subscription growth and retention, we also track what we classify as story driven subscription conversions. That means subscriptions that result directly from someone consuming Inquirer content and hitting our smart paywall, as opposed to converting through marketing promos, ads or other sign-up mechanisms. In the newsroom, we focus heavily on the stories and coverage areas that lead people to subscribe most consistently.

Ross Maghelsie, The Philadelphia Inquirer

The same study reported that, for the typical publisher, only 4 percent of unique visitors qualify as “regular readers,” meaning they view more than five articles per month. In this context, the growing focus on engagement becomes clear. As quality metrics gained prominence, so did quality-driven goals. Audience teams began combining the most relevant metrics to better understand the complex nature of engagement. 

In 2014, the Financial Times adopted an engagement metric from the e-commerce field known as RFV, which stands for Recency, Frequency, and Volume. The metric calculates a score over a 90-day period based on how recently a user visited the site (recency), how often they visited (frequency), and how many counted content pages they viewed (volume). RFV was applied only to known users, not anonymous ones. This framework helped the Financial Times reach one million digital subscribers by 2019. Since then, the model has gained popularity and is now widely used in newsrooms around the world.

For centuries, publishers were masters of habit, earning a place at the breakfast table alongside a cup of coffee. But after the mobile revolution, they lost ground to new digital players like Facebook. Inspired by the modern-era classic Hooked, the Belgian media technology company Twipe published a blog post and report suggesting publishers could reclaim their place in users' daily routines. Twipe has also published a report titled Habit Forming News Products, which includes multiple examples and practical tips for newsrooms aiming to foster user habits. The report provides insights into how publishers can design products and experiences that encourage regular engagement.

After optimizing traditional news products, publishers began competing to become part of users’ everyday habits through non-journalistic offerings. One of the most cited examples comes from Jonathan Knight, Head of Games at The New York Times, who said, Come for the news, stay for the games. He was not wrong. By the end of 2023, users were spending more time on The New York Times' games app than on its flagship news platform.

In 2022, Der Spiegel built on the RFV model with a focus on habit by developing a new loyalty metric called regularity. This RRFV metric measures how consistently subscribers engage with the site on a daily basis over a seven-day period. The values are standardized within a range of 0 to 100. Their data reveals important insights about subscriber behavior and engagement levels: only seven percent of subscribers have an engagement score below twenty. However, they also found that forty percent of cancellations came from low-engagement, full-paying subscribers.

Some industry-standard metrics are impossible to apply in smaller or mission-driven newsrooms. At The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that leverages third-party platforms without access to first-party data, this led to the development of Total Journalism Reach. The metric helps demonstrate the reach of their journalism to partners and funders by capturing how their content is consumed across platforms. It includes website views, story pickups on platforms like Apple News, newsletter opens, event attendance, video views, podcast listens, and Instagram engagement, and changes as they launch new platforms or products.

To set meaningful goals and measure success, you must first define what success looks like for your newsroom. This starts with a clear understanding of your strategy, business model, and lifecycle. Once these foundations are in place, refer to the section on Defining and measuring engagement and read the chapter on Performance measuring frameworks and explore what key metrics Condé Nast, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal are prioritizing in 2025.