La Presse & Live Center
How the largest French-Canadian newspaper leverages live blogs in its monetization strategy
Background
Founded in 1884, La Presse is the oldest and largest French newspaper in North America.
In 2018, the newspaper shifted to a purely digital format and made a fundamental change in its revenue structure by removing paid subscriptions entirely, focusing instead on broadening its digital presence and engaging a wider audience.
La Presse is the oldest and largest French newspaper in North America, founded in 1884
In 2018, La Presse became a not-for-profit newspaper
La Presse's main offering is a tabloid e-paper, La Presse+, as well as a mobile app and main website.
La Presse reaches over 4 million readers / monthly
Introduction
In 2013, La Presse launched its first digital edition of its daily newspaper, pursuing a hybrid model with both print and digital editions until 2018, when the French-Canadian newspaper embraced a 100% digital strategy.
Going 100% Digital
On January 1, 2018, La Presse discontinued its print publication and shifted towards a digital-only strategy. Its flagship product, La Presse+, offers a daily digital edition on Android and iOS tablets, mirroring the traditional newspaper’s daily publication rhythm. Catering to 4 million digital readers, users spend a daily average of 45 minutes on the digital edition.
La Presse complements this with a website and mobile app focused on delivering real-time news and dynamic coverage, attracting a predominantly younger audience keen on consuming news swiftly without extensive browsing.
Three Revenue Streams
Following its mission to provide high-quality news to all readers for free, La Presse transitioned from a paid printed newspaper to a free model, adopting a trio of income sources: advertising, donations, and governmental support.
“The content on our entire ecosystem - website, mobile app, and tablet edition - is accessible free of charge. The only request we have is for readers to log in. The reason is that logged-in users help us know more about the readers we cater to and allow us to achieve a higher advertising cost per mille (CPM). Remarkably, 80% of our readers do log in - which is huge” underlines François Guy, VP of Technology at La Presse.
The outcome?
In its 2023 annual report, La Presse announced a 13M CAD EBITDA, which marked the fourth consecutive year of financial success.
The Challenge
A key ambition for La Presse is fostering deep reader loyalty and maintaining a dialogue with readers. Having previously Scribble Live for live blogging, La Presse now uses Live Center to facilitate real-time interaction and engagement when reporting on live events outside of their website.
The Solution: The role of live content in the strategy
La Presse leverages Live Center for pivotal live events coverage, from elections to significant sports events - particularly hockey being naturally a national point of interest - as well as the Super Bowl, and the Canadian Grand Prix for F1.
“These types of events that are set in time provide us with an opportunity to pre-announce our coverage, drawing in audiences who value such live updates,” shares François.
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The results
Live Center has enabled La Presse to attract 15,000 visitors per live blog, with significant spikes in traffic during major hockey games, reaching up to 23k visitors. That being said, visitor engagement notably varies with the hockey team's performance!
Overall, La Presse attracts about 600,000 unique visitors daily, which typically takes them to an average of 3 articles per visitor, leading to approximatively 2 million daily page views.
Live Center’s contribution to La Presse’s monetization
“What's interesting for us, is that live blogs are highly engaging, and represent a good feature for highly engaged users” explains François. “We monetize highly engaged users, not only through advertisement presentation, of course, but also because these are the people who tend to donate. They are participating in the ecosystem of the news activity and being engaged with the brand. This is the audience we hope to continue to nurture in the future as well.”
More than just a tool to encourage engagement, live blogs are instrumental in monetizing La Presse's most active users and play an important role in sustaining the news ecosystem.
“When Scribble Live discontinued their platform, we looked for a replacement and came to Live Center. What really swayed our decision was the team. The Live Center team was super nice, super flexible, understood the fact that we needed a translation of some interface items to French, and were very flexible in building out new modules based on our needs. We highly appreciated the collaboration and the quality of the team.”
- François Guy, VP of Technology at La Presse
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