Sara Fischer: CNN CEO teases subscription product

This piece is by WWSG exclusive thought leader, Sara Fischer. 

CNN CEO Mark Thompson said he hopes that by the end of this year, “There are meaningful things out in the market that you can see which represent change,” to the company’s subscription product strategy.

By the numbers: Of the roughly 170 million digital CNN monthly users, there are around 17 million–20 million who are “really engaged,” he said.

• The company is exploring whether there’s a direct-to-consumer opportunity for them, he added. “This is going to be about getting even better at engagement and time spent and frequency.”

Catch up quick: Thompson has been teasing a consumer subscription product for months. He took over as CEO last October, more than a year after CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery killed its subscription streaming product CNN+.

• CNN is testing a registration wall for heavy site users that doesn’t require payment but gives it access to first-party data that it could use to improve its ad products or eventually sell subscriptions.
• Over time, Thompson hopes, “We can identify a really attractive, very strongly engaged, tenured and qualified news audience who I think could be very attractive to advertisers as well.”

The big picture: Thompson doesn’t have plans to move CNN’s business model away from being mostly ad-supported, but he said there’s more the company can do to make its products attractive to advertisers.

• “We’re thinking hard about verticals,” he said, noting the network has “a very big position” in topics like health, longevity and wellness. “If we have more regularity and clarity about that concept, we hope we can get some brands to associate with that,” he said.
• Other examples he noted that could work for contextual advertising alignment include tech, entertainment and sports coverage.

• “We understand that there’s going to be a range of different brands with different needs and that some of them — particularly, you know, in certain endemic categories — will be more interested in being adjacent to a particular topic rather than general news.”

What to watch: Thompson didn’t deny a recent Puck report that suggested cuts were coming to CNN, but he said change was inevitable.

• “You’re going to see a lot of change, and that includes investment and new hiring. We also need to make sure that as our economics change, we’re deploying capital across what we do as smartly as we can.”

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