Corriere della Sera and Its Digital Strategy Challenge

It is in the little things that you experience real emotions. The strength of the imagination is expressed in the small details. It is in the little things that Nicola Speroni, Corriere della Sera's systems manager and Bocconi graduate in Business Administration (class of 1999), finds the value of an existence unfiltered by digital devices. It is in the satisfaction of putting a golf ball in the cup, for example, that Speroni enjoys the real world to the most. But in his professional life, he must deal with the digital revolution: the online edition of Corriere della Sera, in fact, was the first in Italy to put in place an articulated digital strategy, introducing paid content, interweaving texts and videos (including those on the YouReporter platform it acquired) produced by its editorial staff, also giving readers the experience of being at the heart of live news with the Corriere video channel.

➜ From RCS Digital to premium content. What's the path taken by RCS?
In 2003, RCS Digital was born. It included corriere.it and gazzetta.it as digital platforms separated from the printed newspapers. Then in 2010, online and offline were embedded in a single publishing entity, becoming two expressions of the same product.

➜ What has changed from an organizational point of view?
Everything. A single editorial team was created, led by one editor-in-chief, producing acontent for both media. Also, from from a managerial point of view, a single management team was given the task of finding synergies between digital and paper: today any kind of marketing operation is conveyed across all platforms. In selling ad space, we can offer an integrated communication package that covers paper, digital, and events.

➜ Digital has transformed editorial content and ways of accessing it, but it has also stimulated the rise of new business models..
Yes, those based on digital revenues and we were the first in Italy to implement them. We realized that the use of online platforms was also growing because they helped build a personalized media diet. So, having started the digital edition for tablets that replicated the newspaper version, we decided to adopt the online subscription model, by taking as inspiration the New York Times online edition.

➜ What does it consist of?
We have established a metered paywall, a system that allows users to read 20 online articles per month free of charge, beyond which you need to activate a subscription. It is a deliberately porous system, with a wall that allows some access points and thus avoids the drop of traffic and advertising that a 100% pay-to-read model would entail.

➜ Why did you take this road?
Switching to a paywall is complex and suddenly forcing readers to pay for access to the site could mean a significant decrease in web visits. It is therefore necessary to accompany users in this cultural metamorphosis, which is crucial for the survival of online newspapers, where the balance between advertising and editorial revenues is crucial.

➜ With this new online version of Corriere and the Corriere Up app have you won new readers?
This was especially the case with young people who are accustomed to feeding on digital information and are willing to pay for quality content.

➜ Internet is understood as a free service..
Of course, but producing content costs money. Facebook and Google don't produce content, it's publishers that do. To watch a movie, foòlow a game or listen to a song you pay a subscription to Netflix, Sky. iTunes, the same applies to reading a newspaper.

➜ But consumers seem more reticent to digest the idea of having to pay for news content. Why?
It is the result of some errors in judgment that were made during the Internet bubble: it was thought that advertising would grow for everyone by allowing publishing content to be freely distributed. Instead, online advertising did not reach the expected volume: the use of advertising banners, for example, has declined all over the world and different online advertising models have developed.

➜ What kind of advertising works on digital media?
Native advertising, that is, the kind of ad content that is designed for the container in which is inserted, that take on the look of the context which they are designed for.

➜ What about online videos?
They work very well: videos are very much clicked and shared. In this area, pre-rolls are inserted at the beginning, those short ads that precede the beginning of a video.

➜ As far as news are concerned, are we going toward the customized newspaper, tailored on one's individual tastes?
This is one of the great issues we discussed in the past, since by not having to cover the fixed costs of printing, a publisher could start thinking in these terms, but to date no one has implemented such model. Readers want the authoritativeness with which a newspaper like Corriere della Sera selects the news, gives voice to a plurality of opinion, and orients reading.

➜ Did you think about creating a vertical subscription model where readers subscribe to single sections?
With CorriereEconomia Pro, we are experimenting with business information according to a B2B model, where we propose a business subscription that provides the contents of the Corriere site, those of the digital edition, special content, two daily newsletters (one at 7am, one at noon), and the opportunity to start reading L'Economia supplement on Saturday rather than Monday.

➜ What is the relationship of RCS with the big digital players, such as Google and major social media platforms?
Facebook and Google have so large users' bases that it would be a mistake to do without them, but at the same time these platforms need publishers for users to access content. There is therefore a coopetitive relationship, especially when it comes to discussing technological innovations: Google has involved us with regard to the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP); Facebook did it with the launch of instant articles, enabling us and other publishers to import our own content on the social network.