The overarching mantra of the past few decades has been print’s decline at the hands of digital. Perversely, digital is now informing what’s printed and driving its growth. Harnessing a digital-first strategy, AFR Magazine now finesses its content in the magazine around trends deduced from digital readership.

For instance, the November issue of AFR Magazine is now purely themed around the Young Rich List following the success, both in terms of subscriber interest and advertising, of the Rich List issue published in June.

“Focusing on digital readership is helping us better understand the value of lifestyle content. We’ve found that the more likely a subscriber habitually reads lifestyle content on www.afr.com, the less likely they churn. That’s the reason we increasingly push lifestyle content to our readers, through newsletters and in key spots on the homepage,” Drummond explains.

There’s an enormous opportunity for brands to reach a growing audience via the AFR, in both print and digital. In Nine’s full-year results, digital subscription revenue was more than $100 million. This was up 20 per cent year-on-year. All three mastheads (The Sydney Morning Herald, The AFR and The Age) grew very strongly, but the AFR grew at the fastest rate.

“We’re hitting new heights in our subscription base. Subscriptions for the AFR are consistently selling at a rate that’s 50 per cent higher than pre-pandemic. And it hasn’t come at the expense of print. We know from readership data that the print audience has remained steady, and for our premium magazine and weekly insert it’s growing,” says Drummond.

“One of the very happy consequences of our increased digital audience is that it’s lifting print. AFR Magazine, in print, has a readership of 452,000.* That’s up a whopping 80 per cent year-on-year. Our audience is now over four times larger than our nearest competitor. Life & Leisure’s readership has grown by a similar amount to 460,000**.

“This reflects our digital-first strategy. Digital-first has a surprising benefit – it can increase print. Almost everything in AFR Magazine and Life & Leisure is published on afr.com before the print titles are published, and each article promotes the on-sale date of the magazine or supplement. We use digital content from the magazine to market the printed magazine, thereby connecting the larger and growing digital subscriber base with our print products. The more people who subscribe to us digitally, the more people who look out for us in print – provided we have compelling content.