As New Zealand’s most-visited news site, Stuff.co.nz earns the largest share of its revenue from advertising. However, market and macroeconomic conditions can make digital advertising volatile, so Stuff was interested in bolstering its consumer revenue proposition as a companion to advertising revenue.

Historically, Stuff’s content mix has been calibrated to attract at scale - maximising advertising revenue. However, domestic and international references show successful consumer revenue propositions are based on content recipes that foster propensity to pay and support subscriber retention. To enable its newsroom to transition to a content strategy that allows for both scale and subscriber audiences, Stuff sought to design, test, and adopt a ‘user needs’ framework to categorise content and inform commissioning decisions.
Employed by many leading news brands, user needs frameworks categorise each piece of content according to the underlying audience need it serves - e.g. ‘inspire me’, ‘amuse me’, 'educate me’. This allows newsrooms firstly to better analyse their existing content make-up and then to target commissioning and publication decisions toward underserved or valuable user needs.

With funding support from Google, Stuff decided to adopt one of the most well-known and thoroughly tested models for user needs - from Smartocto - modified based on in-house knowledge of New Zealand audience consumption patterns. That crystalised a system of seven user needs: update me; keep me engaged; give me perspective; educate me; inspire me; divert me; and help me.

After debating whether to implement AI auto-tagging of user needs, Stuff opted for a manual categorisation approach that its developers could build into the Content Management System - reasoning that imposing a workflow gate would ensure journalists consciously considered user needs during the creation process. Analysis of a large set of articles published in 2024 - retrospectively and automatically assigned user needs - gave Stuff baseline measurements of the number of stories in each user needs category and their relative performance in traffic metrics.

With those elements in place, Stuff ran a pilot programme with a hand-picked group of journalists to validate the user needs categorisation and measure initial results. That group of 10 journalists were trained to target their content to specific user needs, which they trialed over a two-week period. On average, unique visitors were 90% higher and page views were 85% higher for the pilot group’s content in the trial period than for the newsroom at large - as well as being significantly higher than the averages from the 2024 dataset.

Not all of the pilot journalists saw increases in content metrics, but the average results gave Stuff the confidence to scale up the pilot. Newsroom leaders conducted a thorough training programme for the full editorial workforce, explaining user needs, how to target content to each need, what the performance data showed, and how the adoption of the framework provided the final piece of the puzzle in Stuff Digital’s content commissioning system.

The final step was to mandate user needs as a compulsory element in the pitching, commissioning and publication process as of May 2025.