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How La Presse Monetizes Engagement with Live Blogs

Case study

La Presse is the oldest and largest French newspaper in North America, founded in 1884. In 2018, the newspaper shifted to a purely digital format and made a fundamental change in its revenue structure by removing paid subscriptions entirely, focusing instead on broadening its digital presence and engaging a wider audience. La Presse’s main offering is a tabloid e-paper, La Presse+, as well as a mobile app and main website. The newspaper reaches over 4 million readers / monthly.

The challenge: Scaling a Digital-First News Strategy

In 2013, La Presse launched its first digital edition of its daily newspaper, pursuing a hybrid model with both print and digital editions until 2018, when the French-Canadian newspaper embraced a 100% digital strategy. 2018 marked a turning point, where La Presse discontinued its print publication and shifted towards a digital-only strategy. Its flagship product, La Presse+, offers a daily digital edition on Android and iOS tablets, mirroring the traditional newspaper’s daily publication rhythm. Catering to 4 million digital readers, users spend a daily average of 45 minutes on the digital edition.

La Presse complements this with a website and mobile app focused on delivering real-time news and dynamic coverage, attracting a predominantly younger audience keen on consuming news swiftly without extensive browsing.

Following its mission to provide high-quality news to all readers for free, La Presse transitioned from a paid printed newspaper to a free model, adopting a trio of income sources: advertising, donations, and governmental support.

The Solution: A Live Strategy to Draw Attention And Boost Audience Interaction

La Presse leverages Live Center for pivotal live events coverage, from elections to significant sports events – particularly hockey being naturally a national point of interest – as well as the Super Bowl, and the Canadian Grand Prix for F1. “These types of events that are set in time provide us with an opportunity to pre-announce our coverage, drawing in audiences who value such live updates,” shares François.

How Live Center Strengthens La Presse’s Revenue Model

“Live blogs are highly engaging and play a key role in attracting and retaining our most dedicated users,” explains François Guy, VP of Technology at La Presse. “These highly engaged readers not only generate more ad revenue but are also more likely to support us through donations. They actively participate in our news ecosystem, reinforcing our brand and sustaining our business model.”

Beyond driving engagement, live blogs have become a vital monetization tool, helping La Presse convert active readership into financial support.

“Our content—whether on our website, mobile app, or tablet edition—is entirely free. The only requirement is that readers log in, allowing us to better understand our audience and increase our advertising cost per mille (CPM). Remarkably, 80% of our readers log in, which is a significant achievement,” says Guy.

By leveraging Live Center’s interactive and real-time capabilities, La Presse has successfully nurtured a loyal readership, optimized its ad revenue, and strengthened its donation-driven funding model.

A key ambition for La Presse is fostering deep reader loyalty and maintaining a dialogue with readers. Having previously Scribble Live for live blogging, La Presse now uses Live Center to facilitate real-time interaction and engagement when reporting on live events outside of their website.

“We don’t simply want to tell readers facts about what is happening. We want to nurture a conversation with them and explain to them why this story is important and how it affects them. We do this in several ways across all of our platforms, and Live Center serves as our most direct communication channel with our readers,” explains François Guy, VP of Technology at La Presse.

Results

Live Center has enabled La Presse to attract 15,000 visitors per live blog, with significant spikes in traffic during major hockey games, reaching up to 23k visitors. That being said, visitor engagement notably varies with the hockey team’s performance. Overall, La Presse attracts about 600,000 unique visitors daily, which typically takes them to an average of 3 articles per visitor, leading to approximatively 2 million daily page views.

In its 2023 annual report, La Presse announced a 13M CAD EBITDA, which marked the fourth consecutive year of financial success.

 

Use case conclusion

“When Scribble Live discontinued their platform, we looked for a replacement and came to Live Center. What really swayed our decision was the team. The Live Center team was super nice, super flexible, understood the fact that we needed a translation of some interface items to French, and were very flexible in building out new modules based on our needs. We highly appreciated the collaboration and the quality of the team.” – François Guy, VP of Technology at La Presse

Conversation: La Presse's digital-only strategy

We discuss the newspaper’s digital-only strategy and how La Presse maintains an agile team. Jean-Marc de Jonghe also shares how high reader engagement is prioritized and emphasizes the irreplaceable value of human-driven storytelling.

How to engage readers through Live Q&A

La Presse leveraged Q&A functionalities to encourage participation and moderate comments smoothly. Read up on tips for moderation and recommendations to organize live Q&A events.

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