You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #54 sent out on January 8th, 2025. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
Happy new year!! I hope you had the most amazing festive period and enjoyed time with friends and family, away from your laptop!
In today’s newsletter:
- The content to ace 2025: from dynamicity to community and personalizable interaction
- Debating > commenting? DER SPIEGEL’s mission to reinvent the comments section and maximize the potential of their community
- 5 low-lift ways The Washington Post increased newsletter click-through rates: from The Audiencers’ Workshop New York
- How the Toronto Star gets new subscribers onto newsletters to engage and retain
The content to ace 2025
My prediction (and hope) for 2023 was that registration walls would pop up left right and center to collect first-party data, increase advertising & reader revenue simultaneously, and allow for improved user experiences.
For 2024, we talked a lot about the importance of community-building to create direct relationships with readers and offer something they can’t get elsewhere.
This year, I think we can take both of these a step further and fully embrace the opportunities that digital brings in terms of being able to be audience-first (a word that’s been thrown around a lot, but maybe not maximized to its full potential).
Or, even better, become individual- (or even human-) first.
With as-human-as-possible relationships, personalization that allows readers to consume content ‘their way’, dynamic experiences and communities that fuel journalism that fuel communities that fuel journalism… (you get the point).
3 points to get started:
> Community supports journalism, as we learnt in this interview with Daily Maverick. By answering a few questions in the onboarding journey, Daily Maverick Insiders could be contacted to participate in journalism, provide expertise on a topic or even be invited to join a panel session at one of their events.
“It’s a way of making a member feel like they’re directly supporting journalism, building that all-important sense of belonging whilst also providing a searchable database that’s indispensable to editorial teams, giving them an edge in having access to such a wide variety of experts who are ready to help at any moment.”
The Times & The Telegraph are doing similar reader-led journalism.
> Dynamic paywalls are here to stay, allowing you to adapt design, messaging and experience to a user’s profile. This article helps you make even your hard paywall dynamic and this article shows how Jeune Afrique put it into practice to double conversion rates.
> It’s time to redefine what it means to interact with journalism. TIME’s latest Person of the Year cover reveals a glimpse of the future of media – “one that transforms static content into a dynamic experience” as Ezra Eeman perfectly put it.

“Every piece of content becomes shapeless, ready to transform into text, voice, or dialogue based on your needs. It puts the audience in control of their experience, quietly dissolving the boundaries between creator and consumer.”
More on how TIME made this possible here.
Debating > commenting?
Regular commenting below articles has always been a frequently-used engagement feature on DER SPIEGEL. In fact, Product Manager Laura Badura shared that at the peak 1.7M comments were left in a month… too much for AI and human moderation to manage and too much for users to read.
Not only this, but conversations on a single topic were happening in multiple places across the site, diluting the potential value of this feature. Discussions on the US elections for instance took place in the comments section of several articles covering the topic a day.
Which is where debating came in – a space to discuss two sides of an argument in a single place.

Features I like in particular:
> Debates play a role in their revenue model – you need to register to vote, but in order to actually share your view, react, see the distribution of votes (before the debate has ended) or suggest a debate topic, you need a paid subscription.
> Debates are integrated into editorial content and vice versa to encourage recirculation. Notice the high visibility of premium (S+) content here to promote the value of subscription.
> To reach new users and draw attention to the feature, they sometimes show comments from SPIEGEL Debatte in the print magazine, linking to the Debate Space via a QR code, as well as featuring debates on social media channels such as LinkedIn or Instagram, publishing quotes or voting results, linking to the debate.
Full article on The Audiencers.
5 low-lift ways The Washington Post increased click-through rates
At The Audiencers’ Newsletter Workshop in New York in March 2024, Kelly Poe of The Washington Post shared how they’ve worked to increase click through rates across their newsletter portfolio.
1. Work with writers to use curiosity gaps. A lot of audience engagement professionals are familiar with using curiosity gaps – the idea that you give away enough information to compel people to keep reading, but withholding enough that people will click – but the same concept applies in newsletters that are designed to drive people to your website.
2. Draw from archives. This strategy is valuable for legacy news organizations, especially with recognizable brands or writers and evergreen content.
3. Give habit-forming products a place in the newsletter, even if it’s not super relevant. For instance quizzes, such as WP’s “On the Record” quiz that they promote in most newsletters, even though it has little to do with most of their content.
“We produce it in the newsroom, so it is part of our journalism. In some of our newsletters that are designed to be more of an inbox experience, we’ve actually noticed sustained higher click-through rates since we’ve introduced the quiz.”
4. Solicit 1-click feedback (and monitor it).
“When we built our new feedback system, we didn’t expect it to also raise click-through rates. Initially, we had a small text-only feedback request at the bottom of newsletters but wanted something easier for users. We created a two-click feedback form using Google Forms, allowing us to preload responses. The form featured a smiley face to indicate liking the new design and space for additional feedback. Running this form daily in one newsletter, we received as much feedback in one month as we had in the previous six. This design significantly lowered the mental barrier for taking our survey.”
5. Always be testing. At The Washington Post, they’re almost always running some A/B test in the background. Kelly recommends ensuring you have a clear hypothesis, that you set a time period, that you measure results, see where else you can implement learnings and remember that the same strategy might not work the same in every newsletter.
How the Toronto Star gets new subscribers onto newsletters to engage and retain
It’s not news that pushing newsletters to subscribers is essential to holding on to them: even back in 2021, the data team at the Toronto Star shared that digital subscribers were half as likely to cancel if they received at least one of their email offerings.
Of course, you could surprise new subs by automatically signing them up to your newsletters – but 1) users could consider this as spam, and 2) this is actually illegal in Canada…
So, Director of Newsletters at Toronto Star, David Topping, found another strategy:
“We’d include our flagship morning newsletter, First Up, with every new digital subscription. We’d be upfront — loud, even — before, during, and after someone subscribed that doing so came with it. And we’d be forthcoming — aggressive, even — when it came to inviting unsubscribing at every step we could.
All told, we’ve added 25,000 subscribers to First Up this way. When we first launched our digital subscription program, just one in five subscribers was signed up for any of our newsletters; more than half do now.”
> Full story in David’s piece on The Audiencers
Have a great start to 2025!
See you in 2 weeks,
Madeleine