Engaging readers and monetizing content: Twipe’s mission

For hundreds of years, newspapers have been learning, perfecting, and innovating on a beautiful concept: the daily edition.

Newspapers have mastered the art of the perfect layout, aesthetics, hierarchy, finishability, forming habits, and much more. This fine art has not always translated into the digital news experience we know today.

When newspapers first went online, publishers viewed their value proposition as purely the content they created, so articles were simply published to their websites. The design and hierarchy that had been perfected over time was missing. Publishers did not realise that it was actually the product they offered that was valuable to readers. Having a collection of curated stories, placed in a well-thought-out order, is especially important in today’s world where keeping up with the news can feel overwhelming.

That’s why we founded Twipe in 2011, to help newspapers bring their content to digital spaces in such an engaging way for their readers that they would be able to better monetise their premium content.

Power of editions

Today readers have more choices for news than their grandparents could ever have imagined. To stand out in this crowded space, publishers need to provide something readers cannot get elsewhere. It’s the service of curation in today’s busy world that stands out as valuable for many readers. While they can access free news anywhere online, they cannot freely receive an expert’s opinion on the exact order of the stories they need to read today. The daily edition has fulfilled this need since the first newspaper was printed, but what is the digital equivalent?

We believe in the power of editions. Our readers love the curated order, finite experience and editorial choice. In times of limitless information and limited time, editions provide the valuable service of selection and judgment.

Alan Hunter, Head of Digital at The Times & The Sunday Times

Some publishers have tried to replicate this experience by putting up pure PDFs of the printed newspaper on their website. But this doesn’t provide the nicest reading experience. We spent years researching, digging into the data, and designing to create a Replica Digital Edition that does provide the best reading experience.

Edition readers have often been a neglected reading group, with a general feeling that there is something old-school or dusty about ePapers and digital editions. But research shows that half of all readers do prefer to consume news in the edition format. This is true across countries, but also across age groups, with younger readers just as likely to prefer editions as older readers.