Finding New Markets for Journalism With the 20% Use Case
How key user insights can lead to new revenue opportunities
The NPR podcast Radio Ambulante may be the most popular Spanish-language news podcast in the world, fueled in part by listening clubs in 19 countries. After doing some research, producers made a key discovery about how some listeners were using the podcast.
“When we started doing audience surveys at Radio Ambulante, we discovered something interesting: 20% of our listeners were using our stories to learn Spanish,” explained Executive Producer Daniel Alarcón. “So we started asking ourselves what we could do to better serve them.”
Last week Radio Ambulante, in a partnership with JiveWorld, launched a subscription app called Lupa to help people “learn Spanish as it’s really spoken.” Lupa provides real-time transcription and translation of the podcast’s stories at varying playback speeds with all kinds of innovative vocabulary features to help people improve their Spanish.
If you’ve taken a language class before, you know there’s a big difference between understanding your teacher — or that automated voice — and understanding real people in different regions speaking normally. As a “narrative podcast that tells uniquely Latin American stories” with a wide-range of interviews, Radio Ambulante may be the best way to learn Spanish.
When journalists think of new business, we mostly think of ways to increase distribution and drive subscriptions to what we already do.
But Radio Ambulante wasn’t looking to create paid subscriptions for their free podcasts or add a layer of premium content. Instead, they identified a new opportunity from how 20% of their listeners are using the podcasts.
“I mean, we knew there would be some people listening to Radio Ambulante for that reason, but, you know, 1 out of 5 is quite a high number,” Alarcón said in an NPR interview this weekend. “And, of course, you discover a portion of your audience like that, it’s so significant.”
They met that user need by combining technology with journalism to provide a unique service, and it broke them into a new market.
Lupa is an iOS app (free to $10/month) that’s categorized in the App Store as an education app, not a news app, pitting it against competitors like Duolingo (free to $10/month) and Rosetta Stone (as high as $16/month but varies.) This market is not only aimed at individual learners, but also educators, who use these products in their classrooms.
In consumers’ minds, they’re not paying for a news subscription—who would pay $10/month for a weekly podcast?!— they’re paying to learn Spanish.
That 20% use case may end up driving their entire business.
I had seen that 20% number before. When we conducted a user survey at Breaking News —the real-time verification company inside NBC News — we discovered that 20% of our audience used our free website and app to help them at work. It did something for them.
It was a hidden enterprise use case buried in our free consumer product. It turns out, organizations relied on Breaking News’ fast, verified coverage to help protect global employees, anticipate operational disruptions and identify emerging risks. They manually integrated it into their workflows and trusted it to make mission-critical decisions during active shootings, wildfires, hurricanes and global unrest.
But our parent company had doubts we could convert that 20% to a paid service –– after all, were were already giving it away for free, and advertisers weren’t buying it. So NBC News shut us down.
Several months later, we launched a company called Factal.
Similar to Radio Ambulante, we couldn’t just charge for access to our content. That would keep us firmly rooted in the highly-competitive, low-revenue news market.
We needed to break into new markets by making a product that enabled organizations — big companies with massive global footprints and increasingly automated systems — to make the best decisions as fast and productive as possible when faced with unexpected news events.
As I wrote last year, I called it “journalism as a technology service,” a product-focused approach to solving user problems, which is very different than meeting the needs of readers and viewers.
Let’s take a large retailer, for example. They employ security analysts to monitor social media using a variety of tools and methods to detect the first possible word of breaking news — like a shooting — that may impact their global employees. If it’s deemed a risk, they notify the store immediately to take precautionary measures.
That may be easy if you have 10 stores, but what about 10,000?
As social media became more noisy and plagued with mis- and disinformation, this process has become time-consuming and inefficient. With Factal, that retailer — or any other large global corporation — can upload thousands of locations into our platform. Then as our newsroom verifies, geolocates and publishes breaking news, the retailer is notified whenever a news event occurs in close proximity to any store. Instantly.
It saves time and money. Frequently, it saves lives.
One year after our 24/7 launch, Factal’s business is thriving as a “software as a service” company for global corporations with journalism at its core. Our product competes in the physical security market, not the news market. Consistent with our mission as a news organization, we also provide our full service for free for humanitarian aid and disaster response NGOs to help protect their staff and expedite their response to people in need.
By broadening journalism beyond stories to services like Factal and Lupa––and watching for those 20% use cases––I believe more news organizations can break into new markets and discover new engines of growth.
Not only does it sustain journalism. It elevates it.
(Cory Bergman is co-founder at Factal and the former GM of Breaking News. His first real job was a working in a Spanish-language TV newsroom in California, and it was very different than taking all those Spanish classes.)
