You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #85 sent out on March 18th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
2 weeks already since Hamburg and the article summaries are coming in hot!
The topic of the day was relationship-building in its two forms – ensuring readers feel valued as individuals (through dynamic strategies, targeted offers and personalization) and helping them feel part of something bigger (with communities and conversation elements). By combining the two, publishers can combat many of the challenges being faced by the industry today, including falling traffic, threats of AI and subscription saturation.
For Festival attendees, Audiencers’ Subscribers and Poool clients, you can catch up with the slides here.
In today’s newsletter:
- (from Hamburg) Behind The Kyiv Independent’s 20K community success
- Bundling beyond journalism: interview with Mediahuis’ Group B2C Strategy Directorabout their “essential” subscription, bundling hiking apps, e-books and masterclasses alongside its journalism
- (from Hamburg) How Sweden’s NTM Media has grown their young subscriber base: 500% increase in the past year!
- Links to add to your reading list
Behind The Kyiv Independent’s 20K community success
The Kyiv Independent has grown to over 20,000 members and achieved a churn rate of just 1.64%, all without using a paywall…
Membership Growth Manager, Yana Zhuryk, shared the “how” at Audiencers’ Festival in Hamburg last week:
1. A community philosophy
The core hook is that their journalism is free for everyone. Instead of selling access to content, they sell belonging. Membership is framed as a ‘way in’ to a mission-driven community, which has proven far more powerful for loyalty than a transactional subscription.
2. Human connection
The newsroom prioritises direct communication with individual audience members.
> The team maintains a Discord community for real-time engagement and commits to answering member emails within 24 hours
> Visible experts: field reporters like Francis Farrell are the “faces” of the brand, appearing in trench-side YouTube videos and personal newsletters that provide a “behind the scenes” look at reporting under fire
> A polished, promotional email marketing campaign was pitted against a personal, storytelling email written by a team member. The personal version drove 3x more conversions and saw significantly higher open and click-through rates
3. Innovative engagement tools
> The community map: members can literally place themselves on a global map, seeing the connection to like-minded supporters worldwide
> Participatory content: through their “Our readers’ questions” series, members can submit questions that the editorial team then answers in dedicated articles.
This continued focus on trust and relationships is paying off!
> A churn rate of 1.8% (compared to an industry average of ~3.6%)
> LTV: members stay for years, not months, because the relationship is emotional, not transactional
> Global reach: 95% of their paying members live outside Ukraine, proving that niche local stories can have massive global revenue potential if the relationship building is right
Mediahuis is bundling beyond news
Mediahuis has built an ‘essential subscription’, bundling journalism with apps, e-books, masterclasses, the New York Times and… hiking!
The goal: to solve a genuine consumer problem, making a digital subscription valuable enough that subscribers use it daily, not just when news breaks.
Journalism remains the core, but the strategy rests on the belief that Mediahuis can offer subscribers more value beyond it.
-> The bundle is structured around three layers:
Inform: covers the journalism itself, shifting towards depth and away from commoditized news
Guide: covers service journalism, such as restaurant recommendations and personal finance advice
Enable: services that let subscribers act directly on what they have read. RouteYou, a service for outdoor enthusiasts that competes in the same space as Strava, was the first enabling service added to the bundle in 2023.
-> The addition of RouteYou has been a game changer in making the brand’s bundle usable. Mediahuis had long published hiking and biking content, but the next step was always missing: readers could learn about a trail, but had nowhere to go from there. Now, a QR code in the article links directly to the route in the RouteYou app.
-> This focus on usability pays off. Subscribers who activated RouteYou show 26.5% lower churn.
For Matthijs van de Peppel, Group B2C Strategy Director, the guiding principle for this kind of diverse bundle is to stay within‘one degree of separation’ from your core journalism, adding only services that connect naturally with what the newsroom already produces
> Read our full interview with Matthijs on Audiencers
How Sweden’s NTM Media has grown their young subscriber base by 500%
TLDR: They made it free! (but of course, it’s more strategic than just that!)
🧰 First, before even thinking about pricing, a total shift in editorial focus, relationship-building, and commercial offering.
Reporters were encouraged to write specifically for a 30-year-old target audience and provided with the tools to track this, and reporters were turned into local “influencers” on Instagram and TikTok
3️⃣ clear offerings were developed based on age group:
-> 18-25 year olds: Free, including access to the website and app, with one session per user
-> 25-29 year olds: 50% off, including access to the website and app, with one session per user, plus membership discounts
-> 30 year olds: Full price, all of the above plus multiple sessions per user
🕵 A “foolproof” age verification system
The signup process was designed to be rigorous enough to ensure data integrity while providing a smooth transition to paid status. Although NTM acknowledged the six-step process was longer than they ideally liked, it served two critical strategic functions: foolproof age verification (through social security number collection) and long-term billing preparation (users are required to provide credit card or billing information upfront).
This “opt-out” model allows for a frictionless transition to a paid tier once the user turns 25 (30% opt-in conversion rate so far)
🆕 The most surprising outcome from this strategy was how easily and rapidly this attracted completely new readers. 88% of the new readers had no earlier customer relationship with NTM’s brands.
> Full article on Audiencers from our recent Hamburg Festival
> And the brilliant Thomas Baekdal made a free-to-paid projection calculator based on the NTM data that you can play around with to see how this strategy will pay off (🤯🤯)
Links to add to your reading list
- Big moves in the UK media industry
- dmg media has launched UK’s first-of-its-kind subscription bundle, bringing together Daily Mail+, The i Paper, and New Scientist
- Axel Springer announces agreement to acquire Telegraph Media Group
- Reach announces 15,000 subscribers months after launching premium tier for readers
- How the Financial Times’ registration strategy transformed anonymous reach into recurring revenue
See you in 2 weeks for the next newsletter,
Madeleine
