Case Study: Helping Torstar to kick-start direct reader revenues

Helping Torstar to kick-start direct reader revenues – growing from zero to 100,000 subscribers in 18 months.

Having established a significant online readership, Torstar was ready to move with the times, with a data-driven strategy to monetize digital content, starting with thestar.com.

Realizing Torstar’s strategy meant taking a significant step in its ongoing digital transformation – selecting and implementing a subscription management solution to form the backbone of its digital offering.

Read the case study to find out how establishing Subscription Management as the basis for an industry-leading subscriber and revenue management ecosystem kick-started Torstar’s digital strategy, supporting its growth from zero to more than 100,000 subscribers in 18 months.

Torstar’s strategy to convert visitors into subscribers and build the sophisticated subscriber management environment needed to grow market share was built on two main pillars: Content and data.

However, its existing technology environment represented a significant barrier to realizing that success. It simply did not have the unified subscriber management solution required to manage and experiment with digital products, billing, entitlements and promotions at pace – and provide the data it needed to drive its strategy.

Torstar selected MPP Global’s Subscription Management as the backbone of its digital offering, and to deliver against all of its immediate goals:

1. Integration with Akamai Identity Cloud to facilitate customer registration and identity management, with seamless, secure data sharing between the two solutions.
2. Putting in place a robust digital subscription solution for creating products and pricing, managing customer accounts, subscriptions, orders, entitlements and billing.
3. Implementing a metered paywall to govern access to its digital products.

With Subscription Management in the cloud and connected to Torstar’s wider systems via simple API integrations, the bulk of the deployment was focused on configuring Subscription Management capabilities and data collection across subscriber management, billing cycles, and predictive churn monitoring to exactly meet Torstar’s needs.

The Client said: