Building reader loyalty for The Times

Engagement data could show when people were reading and for how long. It couldn’t explain why, or what need was being met in that moment, or what would make a reader reach for The Times rather than something else. To answer that, Times Media needed to understand the role The Times was playing in young readers’ daily lives across an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

Rather than asking readers to describe their media habits in retrospect, we observed them as they happened. Digital ethnography captured real moments of engagement in their natural context: the morning scroll, the lunchtime fact-check and the slower evening read. These routine moments — which often don’t come up in interviews — are where the most useful insight is found. Individual depth interviews then explored the meaning behind those moments, building a picture of reader behaviour that went further than just metrics.

What emerged was a set of distinct need states, each representing a different reason to engage. Some readers came for orientation (a way of making sense of the world before the day began), others for verification (using The Times as a trusted reference point against the noise of social media), and some for the deep, considered read they don’t get from social feeds. This gave The Times something more actionable than demographic data: it identified audience need states and mapped how its range of media platforms met those needs throughout the day.

The findings were launched at an invitation-only event attended by senior figures from across the media industry. The response confirmed what the research had suggested: that understanding a younger audience requires asking fundamentally different questions. The need-state model has since informed The Times’ content strategy, product development and how they communicate with this generation of readers across digital channels.