This article is a continuation of our Super Retainers series. The goal of the series is to identify signs of specific strategies being deployed by companies who have maintained high average revenue per account (ARPA) growth and low churn through recent economic times.
Given the abnormalities we saw with our customers in the Media Industry in our prior post, we decided to dig in on Media Super Retainers specifically.
We isolated the anonymized and aggregated cohorts for this analysis in two steps. First, we narrowed down to only Media customers of Zuora. Consistent with other published analyses, the media cohort here includes Zuora customers that are content providers, over-the-top (OTT) streaming media companies, television and radio broadcasters, cable operators, search and navigation services, editing services, and production companies. It also includes publishers of newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as educational content providers, and corporate research providers.
Second, we looked at data for these Media customers over the last 12 months and identified anyone that fit the following two criteria:
- They had the lowest churn – defined as being the bottom 30th percentile of Media customers for average account churn rate.
- They had the best ARPA growth – defined as being in the top 30th percentile of Media customers for Average Revenue per Account growth.
For the purpose of this analysis, those Media customers who fit both criteria are what will be referred to as “Super Retainers” and those who did not fit both criteria are what we’ll simply refer to as “All Other Media Customers.”
This approach helps us isolate observations that are truly unique to how Super Retainers’ businesses have changed over the last 12 months.
Now let’s get into the findings…