Frédéric Desiles is the strategic and business director of the monthly magazine *Alternatives Economiques*. He is the guest on the sixth episode of the second season of *Chemins*, the Médianes podcast.
In this sixth and final episode of the second season of *Chemins*, we are joined by Frédéric Desiles, strategic and commercial director of *Alternatives Économiques*, a media outlet launched 40 years ago to make economic and social issues accessible. As both a print magazine and a website, Alter Eco has had to evolve to continue growing. How can it adapt to its audiences’ changing habits? How can it attract and retain a new audience? How does one get started on TikTok?
Key Points
- *Alternatives Économiques* is often regarded as the newspaper read by high school students specializing in economics and social sciences. However, this is becoming less and less true.
“We’re entering a period of change. Like all media outlets, we’ve experienced the digital revolution. It’s shaken things up for everyone—and even more so for periodicals, because the transition is much more complicated. For a long time, we’ve had a fairly broad audience of high school students, but that audience is starting to shrink year after year. For a long time, this group was our primary readership. We need to adapt.”
"People who pay for subscriptions are often highly educated and have substantial purchasing power. But according to Google Analytics, half of those who sign up for a subscription are between the ages of 18 and 35, with the largest group being those aged 25–35."
- Taux de conversion, taux d’abonnement, taux de churn… Alternatives Économiques scrute des indicateurs clés de performance afin de s’assurer de la fidélité de ses abonné·es.
“We’re always filled with doubt, so I wonder how we can avoid doubting too much. For several years now, we’ve been quite determinedly placing a digital product at the heart of our offerings, which isn’t necessarily a natural thing to do. Let’s not forget that the digital transition is more often something the media are forced to undergo than something they actively seek out. We often wonder if our readers will go along with us, so I do everything I can to make sure our instincts are right.”
- For Frédéric Desiles, competition is everywhere.
“Three-quarters of the people who unsubscribe say the same thing: they don’t have time to read our content. When they say that, it’s a polite way of saying that they’ve prioritized how they spend their free time and would rather spend that time reading articles in *Le Monde* or watching shows on Netflix.”
- Financially independent, Alternatives Economiques is published by a cooperative (Scop), in which the employees are members and hold a majority stake. The other members are its readers, through the Readers’ Association and the Readers’ Civil Society (sic), which welcomes external members who are friends of the newspaper.
“Capital and power are in the hands of the employees. The cooperative’s board of directors, which sets the broad strategic direction, is elected by the employees. One employee equals one vote. That’s very powerful—no other system guarantees independence better than this one. We use this as a selling point to convince readers to check us out.”
“We have about 40 full-time equivalents; a good half of that consists of the editorial staff, the editorial office, and the art direction team. Then there’s the marketing and communications team. We also have an in-house customer service department, as well as accounting, management, and human resources functions, and an advertising and diversification department.”
- Alternatives Économiques has developed a unique subscription strategy. The publication realized that, of all its content, only 30% made it into the print edition. If a subscription is sold, the reader should be able to access all the content offered. As a result, the print magazine has become an optional add-on.
“When we adopt a media-focused framework, we start talking to our readers and potential subscribers in those terms as well. It’s not a very convincing approach. We sell subscriptions, so we try to convince people to get their news from us. The platforms take a back seat; what matters is the editorial vision. What do we write, when, why, and how?”
“Since we adopted the single-subscription model, our conversion rate has increased by 20%. The average subscription amount has also gone up. We have more subscribers. In 2020, we posted the cooperative’s best financial results ever, with a net profit of one million euros. In 2021, that figure dropped slightly. And in 2022, we’ll barely break even—it’s a challenging year for all news publishers.”
- Alternatives Économiques has 30,000 subscribers. 20,000 have signed up for the single subscription. Of those 20,000, one-third have chosen to keep their print subscription. The rest are long-time subscribers who subscribe only to the magazine.
"More than half the time, someone who subscribes won't choose the print option. It's about a 60-40 split."
- The magazine republishes 30% of the content originally published online. This explains why *Alternatives Économiques* has refused to offer an e-reader feature on its app, despite requests from some of its readers.
“A magazine in e-reader format on the app—that doesn’t make sense. Everything’s already there on the website. And that can confuse a new user, who might think: I don’t get it—I’m being offered an additional monthly magazine when the website publishes daily. Am I missing out on anything if I don’t go browse through it on the e-reader? Especially since our print subscription is only one euro more per month, so people who prefer print can easily switch back.”
“To me, it’s heresy to flip through a print magazine on your phone, and I’m really glad we don’t offer that option. If we’d decided to build our product around the readers who complain the loudest, we wouldn’t have a website today, and we’d be taking subscriptions by check.”
- What drives subscriptions for media outlets is, above all, content.
“When we wrote about pension reform, we saw a spike in subscriptions. That’s news we had to cover, but we can also create our own headlines. Recently, we published an article that takes apart Jean-Marc Jancovici’s arguments, and it did very well. We’re not a marketing team that goes for big, flashy stunts; we do meticulous work to ensure that as many people as possible visit our site and become identified readers through our paywall’s email channel—and eventually subscribers.”
- A little over a year ago, the publication launched a TikTok account, managed by journalist Rudy Pupin. Today, Alternatives Économiques has more than 100,000 followers on the platform.
“Since our high school audience is shrinking, building brand awareness among them is a major challenge for us. We wondered if we could afford not to be there. We ultimately decided to go all in and hire a journalist to manage the account. It’s a first-come, first-served situation, so we didn’t waste any time. And TikTok will soon be our primary social media platform. We hope that within two or three years, a larger proportion of our followers will be students.”
"Chemins" is a podcast produced by Médianes. Season 2 is hosted by Marine Slavitch and directed by Morgan Prudhomme. The sound design is by Nicolas Peiron, and the visual design is by Christelle Perrin.
