dmg media

dmg media publishes the Daily Mail, MailOnline, the i, Metro and New Scientist, among others. I joined from L.E.K. as a strategy manager working to the CMO, and the through-line of my two years was the same question the whole industry was wrestling with: how does a business built on advertising build something more durable underneath it.

The subscription pilot

MailOnline was making good money and almost all of it came from advertising, which is a lovely position until it isn’t. I built the business case for a subscription pilot, modelling competitors to show that an 8% take-up would beat the ad model, and argued for testing it in lower-yield geographies first so we could prove the unit economics without risking the core UK market.

We ran it across 25 international markets. Subscription revenue in the pilot geographies grew threefold while advertising there fell only 5%, which was enough to justify a full UK and US rollout. That pilot is now live in the MailOnline app, in front of tens of millions of readers a week.

Read more: MailOnline’s subscription launch in The Times, and a longer look at the Mail’s digital subs journey in InPublishing.

Strategy across the group

Around the pilot I did the kind of work my consulting years had trained me for. I led a review that moved the Mail’s ad campaigns from promotion-led to content-led, worth a 2% sales uplift and £1m of saved spend. I grew the Mail+ digital edition from 40,000 to 46,000 subscribers in five months. And on a six-month secondment I ran Mail Shop, a £40m retailer, and turned it from a loss into a profit.