Local Media Consortium Announces Partnership with Digital Business Platform Piano

Collaboration will enhance audience engagement and revenue generation for local media members

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Jun 18, 2020, 09:00 ET

NEW YORK, June 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Local Media Consortium, a strategic alliance of leading local media companies, today announced that it has partnered with Piano, the leading subscription management and customer experience technology provider, which will offer the LMC's members a suite of audience revenue generation and management solutions. Piano will enable LMC members to optimize the entire customer experience on a single platform, monetize content, and use machine learning to examine the metrics most important for driving subscription conversion.

Piano, which manages 1.6 million subscriptions and tracks 34.1 billion pageviews, will help the LMC's members, which include more than 4,000 local media outlets from 90 media companies, improve their ability to manage and monetize reader engagement, as well as streamline subscription acquisitions and management. Publishers using Piano software and services see a growth of between 200% and 2,000% in subscriptions in the first two years after launch.

"We are delighted to add Piano to our list of distinguished tech partners and provide their innovative digital business platform to our members," said Fran Wills, CEO of the LMC. "By joining forces with Piano, the LMC facilitates even greater benefits for local media companies, enabling our members to build dedicated audiences and increase revenue."

The LMC's partnership with Piano will offer LMC members preferred member rates on Piano launch services and license fees, in order to help publishers of all sizes grow their subscription business.

"Piano loves working with innovative media companies of all sizes, to help them better understand and engage with their users, and to build new revenue streams — and we're proud to be partnering with the LMC's members to do exactly that," said Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Piano. "Using the Piano platform and services, LMC members will be able to launch and optimize a paid content strategy, personalize their offerings, reduce ad blocking, and visualize their results."

The Local Media Consortium delivers significant ROI to its membership by harnessing its purchasing power to negotiate money-saving deals with digital business and technology partners that the individual companies could not secure on their own. A member's annual cost savings more than covers the cost of their dues to the LMC, with the majority of members realizing a 1,000% return on their membership investment.

About the Local Media Consortium

The Local Media Consortium delivers economic value through strategic partnerships on behalf of nearly 90 local media companies in top markets across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, and includes more than 4,000 outlets. The LMC delivers over $50M in annual financial benefit to its members by harnessing their combined volume and scale to reduce costs and increase revenue with technology and service providers like Google, Facebook, Monster and others. According to ComScore, the aggregated LMC audience footprint spans 212 million monthly unique visitors and reaches 80% of the U.S. online audience. More information is available at http://www.localmediaconsortium.com/.

About Piano

Piano accelerates content businesses' ability to understand, engage and monetize their customers. Leading organizations around the world — including Hearst, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, NBC Sports, Business Insider, The Economist, Gannett, Le Parisien, TechCrunch, Ringier Axel Springer, Thomson Reuters, Prometheus, Singapore Press Holdings, MIT, The Telegraph, Mansueto, the Harvard Business Review and more than 300 other clients — use Piano to power their subscription, advertising, analytics and personalization efforts. In 2019, Piano was recognized as one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world by Red Herring, Deloitte and Crain, and was included in the top 1000 of the Inc. 5000 list for its second consecutive year. Find out more about Piano at piano.io.

SOURCE Local Media Consortium