You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #70 sent out on August 20th, 2025. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
As the final newsletter of summer, we’re rounding up the year so far by featuring the not-to-miss top articles as voted for by you (well, voted by reading the article…)
What I love: they’re all about building lasting relationships by prioritizing belonging, user-first models & diversification.
Adapting user needs to your audience: what are other publishers doing?
“User Needs models always come from your audience” – words spoken by the User Needs man himself, Dmitry Shishkin, are definitely worth bearing in mind.
Given that each publishers’ audience is unique, this suggests the model should be adapted to ensure content matches and satisfies your user’s needs, not the other way round.
So, how have other publishers adapted the User Needs model to their audience? Well, we can divide the variations into know, understand, feel & do.
In this article (perhaps one of my favorites on The Audiencers to date!) we look at the User Needs model of a variety of publishers from around to world to help you be inspired to build your own version
Why the most valuable newsroom KPI is no longer reach but belonging
While reach is still fundamental for visibility, the most valuable newsroom KPI has evolved past engagement to belonging. In today’s saturated content landscape, it’s not just about being seen, but about building loyalty, habit, and ultimately, value.
Belonging describes the reader who returns regularly, has established a habit around your content, participates thoughtfully, and actively chooses your publication.
How can newsrooms design for belonging?
> Building habits through consistency: Recurring formats, daily newsletters and regular voices help readers establish routines.
> Creating opportunities for participation: Comments, surveys and live discussions encourage users to contribute and shape the conversation.
> Offering personalisation: Tools that let users follow topics or curate feeds reinforce the sense that the product reflects their interests.
> Establishing editorial identity: Publications that take clear positions and develop strong voices foster emotional alignment.
How do you measure belonging?
> Frequency and regularity of visits
> Retention rates across time periods
> Direct traffic and app opens
> Participation in community features
> Subscription tenure and renewal rates
> Referral and recommendation behavior
A brilliant article by Heiko Scherer about this shift and the importance of belonging
How Duolingo builds habits for retention
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 Lenny Rachitsky’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 carousel on LinkedIn (thanks Lennart Schneider for the summary! As insightful as always!)
North Stars for publishers and the example of Financial Times
Tracking the right metrics, alignment across the organization and ensuring your end user is always put first are essential factors in successful reader revenue products. And for many, including Financial Times, establishing a North Star has been the secret to achieving this.
When defining this first North Star back in 2016, the team considered the biggest factor that determined whether an FT subscriber would continue to use their subscription. The answer was determined as their level of engagement with content and amount of value they’re getting out of it.
Thus, FT’s first North Star: RFV (recency, frequency and volume)
As the business grew, they developed from a focus on volume-based to more sophisticated value-based metrics, building on RFV to track lifetime value with the goal of supporting better decision making when assigning resources or prioritizing tasks for acquisition vs retention, or B2B vs B2C for instance.
Finally, in 2023, the North Star was developed to Global Paying Audience, designed to help grow audience revenue beyond its core journalism offerings and across its broader portfolio of products and services, aiming for 3 million by 2028.
The challenge, however:
> Not all departments are represented in Global Paying Audience
> The North Star can feel removed from day-to-day activities
> No one metric can do everything for everyone
The solution: Metrics that Matter
A framework outlining a range of metrics that sit underneath GPA and can be used more regularly by different teams across the organization.
In short, Metrics That Matter (MTM) gives all departments at FT a shared framework & common language so everybody in the company can see how their day-to-day work impacts GPA.
> Reduces focus & pressure on the North Star
> Mirrors a simplified customer lifecycle
> Put more focus on retention
> Encourages evaluation of costs
> Links volume and value in all pursuits
> Uses existing metrics where possible
Full article definitely worth diving into here.
In other news:
- Relaunching The Guardian app: changing reader habits means we must also evolve
- The 11 types of relationships that journalists have with audiences
- Change-Centric Journalism: reframing the value proposition of news for the AI age (A MUST READ!!)
- Group meetings are terrible for decision making. Here’s how to work smarter
See you in 2 weeks for the next newsletter,
Madeleine
