How the French financial newspaper Les Echos boosted account creations with a new “app hour” feature

Founded in 1908, Les Echos, the first daily economic-financial newspaper in France, has recently launched a new feature on its application, called “18-20” in reference to the hours of 6 to 8 pm. 

Accessible in a special section of the app Les Echos, the “18-20” offer fifteen articles that are thus highlighted, so as not to miss anything, both on the economic news of the day and on that of the sectors chosen in particular by readers in advance (industry, services, tech-media, start-ups, finance, and heritage). Added to this selection, a “surprise” article is offered for reading every day.

Particular attention has been paid to storytelling, focusing content on photos and graphics alongside short texts. Advertising has also been removed, as have paywalls for the time being. That’s a way to attract more younger readers. 

The first results after a few weeks are beyond expectations: +27% of visitors to the app (vs. the same period in 2024), +118% of account creation (vs. the monthly average in 2024), and +500% of account creation in the “18-20” feature (vs. the monthly average in 2024).

We talked about it with Christophe Jakubyszyn, editorial director of Les Echos.

The idea was to modernise the way we read Les Echos. I wanted a product that both conveyed a different image of Les Echos, which is still a newspaper that's difficult to walk through the door for the first time, and also to make the editorial team understand that the newspaper, whether in its linear PDF or print format, is now just one of the newspaper's media.

We spent almost two months thinking within the editorial team to determine what content to include and at what times. Initially, I suggested a late show because Wall Street closes at 10:30 pm, and there's a lot of stuff that happens after hours.

But looking at our peak audiences, we realised that 6:20 pm, which for us is the after-work time, is the time when people get off work, take the subway for a large part of them, and are therefore available. We can therefore offer them a product that is both easier and more accessible.

We pay a lot of attention to the photos, the maps, and also the titles. We're looking for catchy titles. We want to show people that there's content in Les Echos that they would probably have missed if we hadn't presented it this way.

The first objective is to reach out to a new audience, younger, and adopt their codes, like Instagram, maps, and the vertical layout for phones. The second objective is to strengthen our subscribers and give them more value for their money. We have a very high subscription rate; we're at over 90% renewal rate for Les Echos.

Cryptocurrencies are indeed one of the topics we've invested in and will continue to. We'll probably dedicate someone to this topic. There are also stories related to work life, which are of great interest to them, such as work-life balance or related to wealth.

We have journalists who specialise in this area now and are truly targeted. This allows us to reach this readership of young decision-makers.

All articles in the “18-20” have been free since its launch, but later we'll put some articles behind a paywall. Since we'll have won over a lot of new readers by then, we'll be offering a subscription for young managers/decision-makers. There will be special rates for this new target audience that we've won over, and we can't disappoint them with a subscription that doesn't match their current purchasing power.

There are no new articles for the "18-20" issue; it's simply a matter of different ways of presenting the articles. We've reorganised the editorial team accordingly to be able to create different ways to use the same content.

This means that now, in the morning, around the editorial meeting, it's a bit like MasterChef, a sort of competition of who is going to make the best product. On one side, we have the ingredients, which are, the department heads and the papers (we produce 130 articles per day), and on the other side, we have the media managers (the heads of the home page, digital, newsletters, social media, and print) and the one who will take the ingredients we offer to create the product.

We have a publication strategy, a serialisation of the main news with rebounds and analyses, and, in fact, a bit like a TV series, we serialise the different news and the different important subjects of the day.

The newspaper Le Monde, for example, has a lot of difficulty managing these two separate apps, and people rarely use both (Le Monde has a regular application and another application for the morning). That's why we created an in-app feature and gave it a radio show name, so people would understand that we're a newspaper, but we also created a time-based program.

That way, it's pretty clear, you know what time it is, and you can find it at other times of the day in the “18-20” tab, which is always available.

In the first six weeks, this had a huge impact. We're up 27% on our app traffic, up 118% on the number of new subscribers, and over 500% on the “18-20” subscriptions. This clearly means that it's thanks to this product that we've generated interest. We've also noted a significant increase in the number of times subscribers visit the app and website per day. This means that we've actually renewed their interest, we've strengthened it, so we're well beyond what we expected.

Furthermore, for the “18-20” category, there's only one person who writes the headlines. Of course, she comes to the editorial meeting and then needs the approbation for the topics, headlines, and photos, but we're producing this new app hour feature with huge audiences, with just an additional person who relies on the entire editorial team.

We have very strong audiences on our site, linked to both international news and French news. There's a lot of uncertainty about the French minority government and the budget, so that's contributed significantly to increasing the sites' audience. We have weekend numbers that were, before our weekly numbers, so very high. I think it's also because we've redeployed our resources and that on the homepage, we now feature news stories on weekends as well as during the week. So it's due to that, but it's also due to current events.

We'll announce it soon, but we're also expecting record audiences on the mobile app. Ultimately, it's a good thing we launched new editorial products during this period because we rode the wave. We could have been swept away by the wave, and in fact, thanks to our new offers, we surfed, so I think we enjoyed it even more than others.

We often did one-offs before, but when you don't create recurrence in the video market or an editorial promise, you're invisible. So we created several formats, like Business Drama, which talks about all the business failures, or the Secret Sauce series, which is the ingredient that has allowed a company to survive and establish itself in the market.

We serialised them, and in fact, that too lived up to our expectations; we've entered YouTube's top 10 several times, which is something new for us. If we're talking business, it's perhaps not the best way to monetise, because we're not as large as the big media groups. We use video more for branding, in fact, to make our brand, Les Echos, known to this young target audience who consumes video. It's also a way to acclimate them to our universe.

Source of the cover photo: Jon Tyson via Unsplash