Realistic and Ambitious Goals for Your Editorial Team

When I speak with managing directors, editors-in-chief, or audience development leads, I often hear questions like: How good are the numbers we’re seeing in Upscore? And how do we compare to others?

What goals can we set as a publishing house that are both ambitious and realistic? Where should we place our strategic focus?

Today, I can answer many of these questions with a good degree of precision. But when I joined Upscore as Head of Data & AI Strategies just over a year ago, that wasn’t the case.

Upscore Benchmarks provide an anchor to understand your own performance.

The result is our benchmark system, which we launched in the summer of last year and have been continuously developing ever since. It includes relative performance indicators that make small and large publishers comparable. Alongside classic metrics like traffic source distribution, we also introduce new indicators such as paywall conversion rates. Altogether, this creates a data-driven view of the market that hasn’t existed in this form before.

All of this knowledge feeds into our strategic consulting service, Upscore GRIP – and into our webinars. Internally, we discuss the results with great passion – some of our boldest hypotheses were first sparked in casual kitchen conversations. These discussions often lead to fresh perspectives that help our clients make better decisions.

That’s why we want to contribute more frequently to industry discussions in the future. Our data shows, for example, that loyalty is often overestimated. That reach doesn’t always need to be maximized. And that there is such a thing as an optimal article-plus rate. What this means for the industry is something our Managing Director, Andreas Demuth, explains in an interview with kress pro, which is set to be published in the coming days.

Many of these insights go against common intuition – and that’s precisely where their strength lies. We welcome the discussions they spark. Because our goal is clear: we want to make digital journalism future-proof.

Joachim Dreykluft ist Head of Data & AI Strategies