Three strategic questions crucial to Nine Publishing’s future
Tory Maguire at the Mumbrella Publish Conference
Nine’s publishing strategy has been a long and winding one. Twelve years before Fairfax was subsumed by Nine, the Australian Financial Review became one of the first major mastheads in the world to launch a hard pay wall for its content.
This was back in 2006, four years before the Times London introduced its own paywall, and half a decade before the New York Times experimented with its own rather crumbly wall.
This pioneering work has set Nine Publishing on a twenty-year journey into the gentle art of convincing online audiences to pay for news — something they willingly did for centuries, before the internet came along and effectively set the price for news at zero.
“Can I say bless the people who decided to do that, because that business is, in 2025, an incredibly high-margin and very digitally funded business,” Tory Maguire, Nine’s head of publishing, told the audience at Mumbrella’s Publish Conference, held at the State Library in Sydney on Tuesday afternoon.
“It is the envy of a lot of publishers around the world because it is so far along the digital journey, and it is very, very solid, and that work was started 20 years ago.”
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age introduced paywalls in 2013, with a generous 30 free articles each month that, as Maguire recalls, “essentially made those websites free for everybody”.
“We managed to train millions of people to expect the incredibly high quality and expensive journalism that was produced out of those newsrooms to be provided to them for nothing – and if they ever hit the meter, they would just clear their cache.”
In 2017, the business brought the SMH and The Age operations together, under a project called Project Blue, which created a national structure, and tied together print production, while modernising the newsrooms.
Maguire joined Fairfax in 2018, and within months she was an employee of a post-merger Nine. Within a year, the meter on the Herald and the Age was reduced to 10 stories a month, and the company tightened up its data dashboard, allowing journalists and editors to more readily understand what audiences were clicking on – and what they may pay to click on in the future.
“In 2023, we conducted what we said was an experiment,” Maguire recalls. “We locked a series by Peter Hartcher about China to see what would happen to acquisition, and we have never looked back.
“That experiment very quickly became our business model, and we now lock about 40% of content on the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.”
Nine’s newsrooms soon had an entire team working under a director of audience growth, Aimie Rigas, a team that “sit[s] in the newsrooms, they spend all day every day looking at the data and talking to journalists.”
This led to a few counterinitiative decisions, such as “significantly” reducing the volume of content produced – which saw traffic rise.
This year, Nine Publishing launched what it calls “the growth desk” under Lisa Muxworthy, who previously took news.com.au from an also-ran to the country’s most-read news website, before News Corp unceremoniously dumped her. News Corp’s shortsightedness was a boon for Nine Publishing – and for ABC News, which has since overtaken news.com.au as the most read news website.
Over the last two financial years, Nine has managed to grow both its readership, and average revenue per user, which Maguire claims to be “quite unusual around our counterparts around the world.”
Another counterinitiative move – this was achieving by “tightening the paywalls and pushing up the prices”.
Maguire said that from 2013 until 2023, the price for an entry level subscription to the Sydney Morning Herald remained at $3.50 a week. The company has since done three annual price rises on both the metro mastheads and the AFR, while keeping churn rate within the margins needed to make the price rises profitable.
“So, we don’t think that we have yet reached the tension point on pricing — our existing subscribers have a lot of tolerance for paying for journalism — and it’s good that we are now actually asking them to do it.
“Having said that, we are experiencing the same challenges as every other publisher and brand.”
Maguire shared the slide she presented recently to the Nine board that she says “sums up the multi all-day, everyday conversations that we are having in the publishing team about our audiences right now and our audiences in the future.”
After distilling “this fire hose of information that is coming at us all the time, from conversations with our peers, from going to conferences, from looking at audience behaviour, from talking to each other, from asking our audience”, Maguire and her team identified three strategic questions for Nine Publishing to focus on.
The first: What is scarce in a world where everyone can afford 10,000 writers?
“Everyone assumes that journalism is under threat from just the sheer volume of AI content … We actually consider this to be an opportunity,” she says.
The answer for Nine is, Maguire said, “to lean into our heritage harder than ever, both in the way we conduct and present our journalism, but also in our brand.
“Trust in our newsrooms and our mastheads has never been more important. In this world at the moment, where everyone is in their bubbles and there is so much happening that is so confusing, people want to feel like they are reasonable people, capable of engaging in ideas rather than retreating into their bubbles.”
The next question: Where will our subscriber revenue growth come from outside of price increases?
“We can’t just keep jacking up the prices and hoping for the best,” Maguire reasons.
This question has led Nine to focus on volume and what she calls ‘win-back’.
“When we dropped a steel gate on the metros’ paywall in 2023, we scooped up a huge amount of regular readers who were probably just sitting there waiting for us to actually ask them to pay.
“We are acutely aware, despite the fact that we’ve maintained really healthy growth in volume, that at some point that cohort might be tapped out. So the top of the funnel remains really important, as well as our data [that] shows a huge number of people who show up in our system as new subscribers are actually former subscribers returning for a new offer or because of the hard paywall and the story that they just can’t miss.
“So we are undergoing a mindset shift in the business at the moment about our lifelong relationship with our subscribers, as they potentially cycle in and out of subscriptions.”
The third question: Who is going to engage in publishing products in the future?
“Like all businesses since the dawn of time, we are constantly thinking about where our next generation of customers come from.”
Key to this is Campus Access, an enterprise license for universities, which started last year at Sydney Uni, and will expand into other universities. Maguire says this gives Nine “access to tens of thousands of young people and their teachers.”
The reading habits start there. “And, we are now working really hard to work out how to keep those people as they graduate and move on from university.”
These are not easy questions to answer. And the answers will change as the industry changes.
Maguire lists off the many challenges ahead: “The exponential acceleration of change, the cost of living crisis making people more discerning about what they spend their subscription budgets on, the advertising market is incredibly tight…”
It’s a tough industry, but when looking for answers, it helps to start with questions.
“These are the three key questions that occupy our minds all the time.”
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