You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #55 sent out on January 22nd, 2025. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
In today’s newsletter:
- How Duolingo optimizes for retention streaks – a seemingly small feature goes a long way
- EL PAÍS reaches 400,000 subscribers – here’s some things they’ve done to get there
- How to make your hard paywall dynamic – the steps to take and inspiration from across the industry
- Recommendations to add to your reading list
How Duolingo optimizes for retention with streaks
Subscription models live off habits. And hardly anyone is as good at this as Duolingo.
A large part of this success is thanks to streaks, a feature where users are rewarded for completing an exercise a day.
But this strategy wasn’t built overnight – the team have run over 600 tests on optimizing streaks. In Lennart Schneider‘s podcast, Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) reveals what they’ve learned through testing:
🎯 Find a goal that people want to achieve
Streaks don’t work for every digital offering. They’re designed to build habits that users are proud of and that are difficult to achieve.
E.g. at beehiiv: “I would like to write a newsletter every week”
🧠 Remember that streaks rely on two psychological effects:
> Loss aversion: psychologically, it’s worse for people to lose something than never to have had it.
> Sunk costs: the more time, money or work we’ve already invested, the more likely we are to hold on to things.
That’s why the perceived value of your Streak increases with each passing day. And so does the effect on retention.
⚖️ Find the right balance between ambition and flexibility
Jackson sees a great danger in streaks becoming too easily accessible and therefore worthless. At the same time, retention drops abruptly if a streak is lost.
Hence why they introduced “streak freezes”. If you take a day off, you can still continue your streak.
… more lessons, including KPIs & goal-setting, in this LinkedIn carousel from Lennart.
EL PAÍS reaches 400,000 subscribers
After launching a paywall in 2020 and a freemium model in 2022, EL PAÍS has reached 400,000 subscribers, confirming their place as leader of the Spanish press
Some key strategies and features that have helped them reach this milestone:
> To combat information fatigue they launched EL PAÍS Exprés, a feature explaining the daily headlines in a brief and direct format, becoming a daily reference for tens of thousands of people since May
> 50 newsletters, to which 800,000 users are subscribed, helping to engage and connect readers.
> Noting that the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report found audio and video as ways to build loyalty, EL PAÍS has embarked on the production of documentaries, developed their audio model and integrated podcast players into the homepage
> On the topic of AI, EL PAÍS closed the year with the announcement of the AI conversational assistant —in the testing phase— that answers questions using the newspaper’s historical archive as a base.
More info on their website. Congratulations to the team for these impressive results!
How to make your hard paywall dynamic
The days of one-size-fits-all paywalls are over! Dynamic models, that adapt the paywall to a reader’s profile or context, are essential for success in today’s digital subscription market.
Even if you’re firmly set of a hard paywall model (where all readers are blocked by a paywall on all articles) and don’t want to open up your content, there’s room for dynamicity.
What can you adapt to?
> Device type (mobile, desktop) and web vs app
> Level of engagement: at Poool, audiences can be segmented into Volatiles (the least engaged), Occassionals, Regulars and Fans based on a customizable > RFV score (recency, frequency & volume)
> Source of traffic: such as newsletters, social media, Google search, etc.
> User status: anonymous, logged, ex-subscriber, print subscriber
> Content type: politics, lifestyle, etc.
> Location
Jeune Afrique adapts to location (countries grouped according to propensity) and user level of engagement, offering either a monthly, low-cost trial or a discount on the annual subscription depending on these factors which influence propensity.
What can you adapt?
> User journey: number of articles for free before the wall, type of wall presented (newsletter wall, paywall, registration)
> Text: for instance messaging centered around your value proposition or more focused on the benefits of subscription, the length of the text
I really love Medium’s personalization, with my name, author of the article I’m reading and recommended authors according to my reading habits.
> Design: colors, images, inclusion of subscription offers or not, order of elements on the wall, etc.
> Pricing: discounts, forefronting annual vs monthly
> Offers: which subscription product is promoted in the wall
Full article on The Audiencers
Content to add to your reading list
- Build a loyal community, not a big audience: focus on your users’ needs, their problems, their values, their tastes
- User Needs – Beyond Pageviews: Just like user needs, pageviews are not a goal themselves, but a means to reach a goal.
- Case Study: Kathimerini’s Launch of Greece’s First Digital Subscription Model
See you in 2 weeks,
Madeleine
