Max Ho
topf, President, Healthcare Europa, London
SIPA: You have an interesting background.
MAX: Yes I started off working in public relations and advertising and then moved into trade journalism ending up on the Daily Mail. Being a journalist was great as it gives you so much more freedom from censorship. But it was very useful to have a PR/marketing background. It meant I had the rudiments of direct marketing.
Yes, most journalists stay clear of the business side.
Or are horrified if they are asked to sell. They position themselves as skeptical purchasers of information pumped to them by PRs. I think good journalists have to be good salesmen. They have to win the trust of contacts for instance. Bernstein and Woodward sold themselves to the Watergate story.
It takes time though, which I’m sure you know.
Yes. It’s hard to build a new subscription site from scratch. In fact I remember people on the SIPA listserv saying in 2008 that it would be impossible to launch a new newsletter in a new industry as response rates are so low.
Though you did do this before.
I set up my last subscription newsletter, IT Europa, in 1991—mailed stuff out, which [in some respects] was actually easier. The barriers to entry are harder today, don’t you think? Just the technology alone. Although I did launch this business on Subhub at just $70 a month. But IT is a huge cost these days.
What does Healthcare Europa focus on?
We write about private healthcare service across Europe. It was something no one else was covering. We’re all B2B, going to investors, nursing home groups, hospitals, banks. There’s really good journalism value about it. It seems good content has become more valuable now.
How often does your newsletter come out?
It’s weekly with a big 20,000-word pdf issue at the end of 10 months. We don’t necessarily always send the weekly on the same day—depends when news might break. We think of ourselves as the journal of record in this field. We dig deeper. I find Google news to be helpful there. It provides me with a good introduction when I ring people up for a dig around which often results in something totally different. I may also talk to a guy from Sweden and benefit from his news sources.
Did you have a hard time pricing your content?
We’re a niche market, so it wasn’t that hard to figure pricing. I knew about how large the market is and about what we would get, and what we needed to take in. It’s priced at about £900 for a year and £2300 for a site license.
And your renewal rates?
Around 90%. But getting new members is hard. I tried telesales without much luck. It’s hard to recruit good people to do it.
Have you done much with referrals since your renewal rate is so high?
No. I should try that. This is not the most open of industries though. Writers may not even put their names at the end of blogs. Healthcare is a bit secretive
I see you have a Conference.
Yes, this is our 3rd year and it keeps getting bigger. I find differentiation to be very important. No one else is producing a conference like this [whereas] there’s a plethora of events funded by academics or the public sector.
That’s a good foundation.
Maybe—or maybe it means there isn’t a particularly big audience. Actually, no there is a huge audience, it is a slow burn but we keep adding new constituents like medtech. Healthcare is tough to cover, and there are no shortcuts in subscription publishing. We’ve done well with personalized introductions. ‘Hi Ronn, here is your…’ in a little headline article. Just a jaunty little note. You can personalize with the new CRM system.
How much do you let people read before they have subscribing?
We have headlines with the first line of the story. The problem is I think they kind of get used to that level of “subscribing.” Maybe I should send them the whole article when it’s particularly good to show the difference.
And you do all this with just you and a deputy editor plus a part-time administrator and your wife working part time? Pretty good.
Yes, my wife works some on IT and has a medical background that helps sometimes. But we do take August off and two weeks at December plus a week at Easter as we have five kids. Sometimes it feels like a lifestyle business, other times like a build and sell.
Thanks Max. We’ll see you in September at SIPA’s London Conference.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA