Gruner + Jahr (G+J) is one of the leading premium magazine publishers in Europe, based in Hamburg, Germany. As part of the organization’s strategic goal to build new revenue streams, G+J wanted to develop special interest digital subscription products all with their own distinguished branding on a whitelabel platform. The goal of this initiative was to evaluate if the platform can enable smaller brands to launch a brand compliant, digital subscription product with a short time-to market at reduced costs in order to make it affordable to them. The platform is a result of a collaboration between Google and G+J.

G+J’s subscription strategy had so far primarily been applied to general news content. At the end of this initiative, G+J had launched paid products for Capital (finance & economy) and GEO (popular science & nature), brands which did not previously have a digital subscription offering. Due to the platform’s technical capacities, the team time spent on developing digital paid products decreased to a huge extent. G+J was able to launch two new paid products in three to five months. Previously a similar launch would have taken at least 12 months to be fully implemented. The development of a new homepage structure, including an updated feature bar added to the overall attractiveness of the product which showed a positive impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. In-turn the design improvement encouraged more users who were already trialing the subscription product for free, to commit to paid subscriptions. The new digital premium subscription products helped to grow G+J’s digital revenue streams by opening up further revenue opportunities for smaller brands and providing a good proof of concept to expand the platform across more of the portfolio.