In the digital age, free is best to maximize audience size. Hippo doesn't create artificial pricing barriers around its content. That means people who want to reach our content can easily do so. And that gives Hippo with another audience advantage over traditional print products.
Also, free is simple, which is what people want in the digital age.
At Hippo, we offer no subscriptions and don't mail the paper to every home in any part of our coverage area. There's no commitment and no cost to enjoying Hippo, which is a key reason our audience has grown to 284,965 readers—larger than any traditional print product in our market.
We offer non-traditional home delivery. It works this way: people pick us up and bring us home. There, they spend multiple hours over multiple days perusing the week's issue, much like people once did with the Sunday paper. We know this because as part of our polling of Hippo readers we ask readers how long they spend with the paper.
Because of our model, about one-third of our audience turns over each week. That means each week, about one-third of the people who picked up the last Hippo will not pick it up this week. They might be out of town, or slammed at work, or just too busy. But they're replaced by reader who might have missed it the week before.
Over a four-week cume, Hippo's audience of unique individuals is quite large. In any one week, Hippo's audience will number about 125,000 people. But over four weeks, the total number of people who spend significant time with Hippo swells to about 284,965 people, including about 20,000 people from Massachusetts where we do not distribute any copies.