One of Europe’s largest publishers is bundling hiking apps, e-books and masterclasses alongside its journalism. Matthijs van de Peppel, Group B2C Strategy Director at Mediahuis, explains the strategy — and what the data is showing.

TL;DR
-> Mediahuis has built an 'essential subscription' bundling journalism with hiking apps, e-books, masterclasses and the New York Times

-> The bundle is structured around three layers — Inform, Guide and Enable — tailored by brand rather than by individual subscriber

-> Its 777 strategy aims for 70% of operational margins to be from digital by 2030, using the bundle to drive both volume growth and tier migration

-> 170,000 subscribers activated RouteYou; activated users show 26.5% lower churn, and subscribers log in 2.4–3.0 times per month on average

Key lessons: 
-> Stay within one degree of separation from journalism
-> Services that require a bigger conceptual leap tend not to stick

When Mediahuis added RouteYou, a Belgian hiking and cycling app, to more than a million digital subscriptions, it was a signal that something more fundamental was shifting. The Western European publisher, with titles spanning the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and Germany, had been quietly building what it calls the ‘essential subscription’: a bundle that wraps news, practical service content and standalone apps into a single offering. 

The goal is 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.

Around 60% of Mediahuis subscribers are now digital, but operational margins on those subscriptions remain lower than on print. The essential subscription is the mechanism for closing that gap, by making the digital offering more compelling and driving subscribers towards the fuller, higher-priced tier.

The three-layer framework

The essential subscription is built around three layers:

• Inform covers the journalism itself, shifting towards depth and away from commoditised news, including what Mediahuis calls ‘signature journalism’: research-led, context-driven reporting that is genuinely core to each brand and not easily replicated elsewhere. Mediahuis runs ‘signature journalism weeks’ to identify what each title does best, redirect resources accordingly, and is shifting from text-only to audio and video as standard practice.
• Guide covers service journalism — restaurant recommendations and personal finance advice — which digital surfaces far more effectively than print.
• Enable is the newest territory: services that let subscribers act directly on what they have read. RouteYou was the first enabling service added to the bundle in 2023.

For instance, a subscriber reads about a hiking trail and can now open an app and navigate it. They can read a book review and, as part of their subscription, download it; subscribers in the Netherlands and Belgium receive one e-book per month.

“Stay close to your brand. Stay close to your journalism. Because then it makes sense to the subscriber.”

Brand-by-brand, not subscriber-by-subscriber

Rather than personalising the bundle for individual subscribers, Mediahuis has built different bundles for different brands:

• The New York Times partnership sits alongside the premium titles — NRC in the Netherlands, De Standaard in Belgium, and the Luxembourg brands — where an internationally minded readership sees a natural connection.
• E-books are offered more broadly, with selections varying by brand.
• RouteYou has been rolled out for all titles, but is particularly successful in regional and Belgian brands with strong outdoor and weekend-lifestyle content, where a survey of more than 10,000 subscribers had already shown that 24% wanted a hiking and biking app as part of their bundle.

“Different bundles work better for different brands,’ van de Peppel explains. ‘We try to tailor it really around the brand and make those choices which make sense to the brand.“

The RouteYou acquisition

RouteYou is a Belgian company used by more than 15 million outdoor enthusiasts, with its strongest presence in the Netherlands and Belgium. Since the Mediahuis acquisition in 2023, coverage has expanded into the Irish, Luxembourg, and German markets, where the publisher’s titles already have deep roots. It competes in the same space as Strava, but with a distinctly local character and established relationships with regional tourism boards.

Mediahuis’s regional titles had long published hiking and biking content, especially in weekend editions, 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. ‘It’s a strong connection with the editorial rooms,’ van de Peppel says. “You can really make a direct connection between the content and then going out and doing something with it.’

The acquisition was not conceived purely as a bundle enhancement — Mediahuis bought a standalone business, intending to develop both sides of the business. Since then, investment in a native app and an expanded RouteYou team has driven +98% growth in standalone subscribers in 2025. 

When RouteYou access was extended to over a million Mediahuis subscribers, it immediately dwarfed the app’s existing standalone user base. Those who came through the news bundle were subscribing to journalism; the outdoor features are a welcome addition rather than the draw.

What the numbers show

The activation numbers tell part of the story. The retention numbers tell the more important one. Mediahuis tracks whether subscribers who have activated RouteYou behave differently from those who have not, and they do. 

Over a 12-week period, subscribers who had activated RouteYou were significantly more likely to remain subscribers at the end. For every 100 who had not activated, 4 had churned. For every 100 who had, fewer than 3 had churned. At the scale Mediahuis operates, that difference compounds quickly.

The perception data reinforces this. 

• Among all Mediahuis subscribers, around 52% consider RouteYou a valuable addition. 
• Among those who have actually used it, that figure rises to 82%. 

The gap between the two numbers is the central challenge: the product works, but only once subscribers try it. Getting them to that first experience is where most of the activation effort goes. Mediahuis offered exclusive webinars to help subscribers get started; 12% of readers attended, and 54% of those participants were already Mediahuis readers who engaged with the outdoor content in their titles.

Sustained usage backs up the initial activation picture. Active users log in 2.4 to 3.0 times per month on average, with 15% opening the app at least once a week, numbers that predictably spike in the spring and summer hiking season. In total, 49% of eligible Mediahuis subscribers used RouteYou at least once in the past year.

Mediahuis has been drawing lessons from the New York Times, whose bundle is a well-documented case study in how added services drive both retention and revenue per subscriber. ‘They see strong effects on retention and ARPU when people start using more services, van de Peppel says. “We are seeing the same thing, which is really encouraging.’

The 777 strategy

The essential subscription is the commercial engine behind Mediahuis’s 777 strategy: shifting 70% of operational margins to digital by 2030. Currently, the balance runs roughly the other way, at around 60% print and 40% digital.

Van de Peppel frames the mechanism plainly: it works on both Q and P, quantity and price. A more compelling subscription drives digital subscriber growth. And because most additional services are only available in the full premium subscription — not the basic tier — the bundle creates structural upward pressure on ARPU. The full subscription costs roughly twice as much as the basic tier, and as the bundle becomes more valuable, more subscribers opt for the full tier, either at sign-up or by upgrading.

‘We also see a shift from the basic subscription to the full subscription,’ van de Peppel explains. ‘Which in the end means they pay a higher price. We increase value, but of course, the value coming back is also higher.’ Volume growth and tier migration together are designed to get digital subscriptions generating the margins that print once did, and within a seven-year window.

Advice for publishers considering a similar path

Van de Peppel’s guiding principle is staying within ‘one degree of separation’ from core journalism, adding only services that connect naturally with what the newsroom already produces:

• The New York Times partnership works because Mediahuis titles already cover international affairs.
• E-books work because those titles are already reviewing books.
• RouteYou works because brands have always written about the outdoors — and the data already showed subscribers wanted it.

Where the connection has to be invented, it tends not to stick. Van de Peppel’s advice to other publishers is simple: don’t stray too far from what your newsroom already does well.

The lesson he returns to most on RouteYou is editorial embrace. Newsrooms are independent — there is no guarantee journalists will link content to the app. Where they do, the activation numbers bear it out: Belgium, with the strongest editorial collaboration, hit nearly 30% activation, compared with a portfolio average of 1 in 5. The success of RouteYou’s adoption really depends on editorial collaboration.

Van de Peppel’s target is for at least 70% of digital subscribers to regularly use at least one additional service, weekly or monthly. ‘We launched a lot last year. This year, we won’t launch as much. We will focus on what we have and really make it work.’

The post The essential subscription: how Mediahuis is bundling beyond journalism appeared first on Audiencers.

John Rahim is founder of The Media Stack, a newsletter delivering in-depth analysis of the advertising, media, and marketing technology sectors, with a focus on emerging trends in AI and monetization.

In this article, John shares his interview with Joshi Herrmann, founder of The Mill, a UK-based digital publisher known for its award-winning, high-quality local news newsletters. They discuss what an "overwhelmingly reader-driven" revenue strategy means for their business:
-> Cities are chosen based on having the right person to pioneer the launch. Herrmann looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism
-> Funds, when needed, have been from individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines
-> The company has a model that prioritizes readers over traffic and quality over volume

Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill in 2020 with a simple bet: people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Four years later, he’s got around 13,000 paying subscribers across six cities and is proving that the UK’s regional newspaper groups have been getting it wrong for two decades.

The Manchester Evening News was publishing stories about Piers Morgan. The Liverpool Echo was chasing whatever TV drama was trending that week. Across Britain’s major cities, regional newspapers that once employed hundreds of journalists and broke real stories had become traffic farms covered in programmatic ads, churning out whatever might get clicks.

“The executives in charge of these amazing media companies were trashing these brands so comprehensively and letting down local readers in the process,” Herrmann says. “That annoyed me, but it also felt like an opportunity to prove that they were doing it wrong.”

Trading ads for readers

“In local news in the UK, there had been a focus on advertising revenue rather than subscription revenue for a long time.” “The switch to digital had fundamentally been a switch from making most of your money in print from advertising to making most of your money from advertising in a digital setting. And I was aware that wasn’t working as a model.”

Go to any regional newspaper website, and you’d see the result. Dozens of stories that had nothing to do with the city. Websites plastered with terrible ads. Content designed purely to drive traffic volume rather than serve readers.

“If I thought that was an insane situation for a high-quality local newspaper,” Herrmann says, “then I knew that lots of other people would agree with me.”

Lockdown launch

The timing was accidental. Herrmann had been in the Czech Republic, planning to write a book about his family and the Holocaust. The pandemic killed that plan and he ended up back in the UK helping his sister and spending time in the garden and wondering what to do next.

By 2020, the infrastructure was in place to try something different. Substack had shown individual creators could build businesses charging for content. Tony Mecia was running a successful local business newsletter on the platform in Charlotte, North Carolina called The Charlotte Ledger.

“I thought, well, it is a different market, he’s operating in a much more affluent area than Manchester—but this might be worth a go.”

Herrmann had no money for a big team. That constraint became an advantage. He’d launch a newsletter, keep costs low, and focus on quality over volume. He set the price at roughly double what most Substack newsletters charged, betting readers would value proper local journalism enough to pay for it.

They did.

The numbers

Mill Media now operates in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, London, and Glasgow. About 175,000 people are on free email lists. 13,000 paying subscribers.

The original Mill in Manchester has 4,000 paying subscribers. The Sheffield Tribune has 3,000. Liverpool Post has 2,000. Newer titles are growing.

Revenue is overwhelmingly reader-driven. Advertising accounts for about 5% – high-quality sponsorships with the FT, Royal Horticultural Society, and Manchester Museum. Herrmann wants to grow that to maybe 20% for diversification, but the core model stays reader-funded.

“If you’re reader-funded, your incentive is to give quality to those readers,” he says. “We’ve got to maintain that.”

The company moved from Substack to Ghost, cutting platform costs to less than a fifth of what they had been paying while gaining greater control over design. “It’s a lot cheaper… it allows us to experiment.”

How to pick a city

There’s no spreadsheet. Herrmann doesn’t analyse demographics or run market sizing models. He looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism.

“The most important determinant is the person in the city who wants to do it.”

The Bell in Glasgow happened because Robbie Armstrong got in touch, they met for a drink, and Herrmann recognised someone with encyclopaedic knowledge of the city and genuine passion for quality work. “At the beginning, when it’s difficult, and it’s a real battle, and you have almost no money, and it’s a real risk, you need that first person who is a pioneering person.”

Cities with universities help. Strong local identity distinct from London helps. But the human element matters most. “If someone came along in a city that I really loved, and I had the right person, I’d probably go for that over not the right person in a very large city.”

Individual backers, not VCs

Herrmann raised funding from people, not funds. Mark Thompson, former CEO of the New York Times and current CEO of CNN, Nick Johnston from Axios and Investor Turi Munthe.

They’re individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines.

“The conversations I had with those people were no different from the conversation I’ve had with other journalists”, Herrmann says. “Someone who cares about journalism asks a bunch of questions for 45 minutes, and then I say at the end, would you throw in a bit of cash?”

They provide advice when Herrmann asks for it. They don’t interfere with editorial. “Fundamentally, you can take all the advice you want, but you have to go with your gut. The mistakes are mine, and the decisions are mine.” The investors share Herrmann’s view that journalism must be commercially sustainable.

“The only genuine solution to the journalism problems that we have is via commercial sustainability.”

City by city profitability

Each city aims to break even within two to three years. Manchester and Sheffield are already profitable. Liverpool and Birmingham should hit profitability this year. London by year’s end. Glasgow early next year.

“I don’t expect us to be the most profitable company in the UK, but I expect us to cover our costs in our cities after a couple of years,” Herrmann says. “Otherwise, you’re creating some sort of vanity project. I’m not interested in that.”

When The Bell launched in Glasgow, journalists at traditional Scottish newspapers weren’t thrilled. They felt they were doing quality work but were stuck writing 14 stories a day to feed the traffic machine. Herrmann’s not criticising the journalists.

“It’s not the quality of the journalists. It’s not about their effort. It’s about the fact that the people who make decisions in these newsrooms have made bad strategic business decisions that have led them to a model that means these young journalists have to write 14 stories in a day.”

What works

Mill Media now employs 22 people and is growing. The company has a model that prioritises readers over traffic and quality over volume.

“We’re trying to introduce a way of people valuing high-quality local journalism in a way that hasn’t been there in the culture before,” Herrmann says. It’s not easy. It requires exceptional journalism every day, smart promotion, and relentless focus on basics. But the growth is real. From one person during lockdown to a multi-city operation, backed by media veterans and sustainable economics in each market.

Regional journalism’s problems were never about reader appetite. They focused on business models chasing the wrong revenue. Herrmann’s success is the proof. The question for Britain’s struggling regional newspaper groups isn’t whether this model works. It’s whether they have the appetite to execute it.

The post The Mill Media’s Simple Bet: Readers Pay for Quality appeared first on Audiencers.

This summary from The Audiencers' Festival in London 2025 was originally published in John's The Media Stack newsletter.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, a recurring theme emerged from sessions with executives across leading publishers, audience strategy is undergoing a fundamental redefinition. In an era where platform referral traffic is declining, and digital advertising economics remain volatile, subscription models are under pressure not only to grow but to endure.

Speakers from FT strategies, The Telegraph, Business Insider, the BBC, Mediahuis Belgium, and others offered a common diagnosis, scale alone is no longer a sufficient business objective. Instead, publishers are shifting towards models built around perceived value, user agency, and emotional connection. In this new calculus, belonging is no longer a soft ideal it is fast becoming a core business metric.

From Metrics to Meaning: The Rise of Reader Relationship Models

Madeleine White, VP Marketing at Poool and co-founder of The Audiencers, framed the challenge succinctly: traditional indicators such as pageviews, open rates or app downloads offer little insight into user loyalty or retention. Publishers, she argued, must now focus on fostering durable relationships that can withstand choice fatigue and subscription churn.

This shift is visible in the changing nature of engagement strategies. Personalisation, community interaction, and seamless off boarding options are being tested not merely to optimise the funnel but to maintain trust. Substack’s referral leaderboards, The Washington Post’s extra family accounts, and user rewards for commenting are all examples of value-enhancing initiatives rooted in behavioural economics.

Functional Engagement Over Frequency: Lessons from L’Équipe

Louis Faure, Head of Strategic Marketing at L’Équipe, detailed a pivot away from linear content delivery towards what he termed “functional engagement”. New tools legislation trackers, AI-generated transcripts, and subscription tiers based on service layers were designed not to increase daily visits, but to maximise perceived utility.

Interestingly, uptake of these services was strongest not among long-term subscribers, but newer users, unconstrained by legacy consumption habits. Over 60% of sign-ups opted for the higher-value tiers far surpassing internal forecasts. The implication is clear, relevance, not routine, drives willingness to pay.

Redesigning the Newsletter Lifecycle: Tactics That Work

The BBC’s Zoe Tabary described “The Upbeat” newsletter offers a case study in targeted editorial design. Built to engage so-called “news avoiders” younger, often female, and underserved readers it leverages mood-based segmentation and CRM data to deliver positive stories. The result: high engagement rates and a younger, more diverse audience profile.

At the Toronto Star, former newsletter editor David Topping found that clarity consistently outperformed curiosity. Links that clearly stated what readers would find (“Here’s how…”, “Here’s what…”) drove significantly more clicks than vague alternatives. The most effective feature? A visually dominant call-to-action labelled the “big stupid button”, which generated record-breaking click-through rates in the Star’s seasonal campaigns.

Product Thinking and Subscriber Experience

The Telegraph’s approach, outlined by product manager Dean Attil, reveals a strategic emphasis on feature discovery and early engagement. During the first 100 days of a subscription, users are exposed to contextual prompts, interface tours, and onboarding content that aim to build habit. The goal is not simply to reduce churn but to embed the product into daily routines.

Metrics such as comment time (17 minutes per user on average) and article gifting behaviour inform roadmap decisions. A lack of recipient data capture for gifted articles was identified as a missed opportunity underscoring that retention, acquisition, and product design must be treated as parts of a unified system.

-> Developing community beyond commenting, with The Telegraph and The Times

Reducing Friction, Increasing Control

At Business Insider, Sabrina Cesar Tolomei presented a retention model grounded in behavioural data and operational control. Simplifying the cancellation journey while counterintuitive reduced service enquiries by half and recovered 6% of would-be cancellations. Dynamic pricing, tailored to cohort tenure and sensitivity, outperformed flat-rate offers.

Crucially, Tolomei stressed the value of early intervention. Onboarding emails, plan explanations and usage nudges are now seen as preventive medicine making churn mitigation at exit less necessary.

Segmenting the Funnel: Condé Nast and the Decline of Platform Dependence

With search visibility declining and Facebook’s distribution influence waning, Sarah Marshall of Condé Nast outlined a shift away from top-of-funnel acquisition towards nurturing “the happy middle”: repeat users not yet converted. Vanity Fair’s renaming of a newsletter from “Cocktail Hour” to “Financial Fair Daily” yielded a tenfold increase in paid conversions.

Content now serves dual roles. Shopping verticals and travel guides attract consistent traffic while feeding affiliate commerce. Meanwhile, newsletter redesigns and evergreen strategies aim to create habitual, direct audiences untethered from platform algorithms.

Utility as Strategy: The Mediahuis Belgium Approach

Katia Bebusschere, Manager of Acquisition and Conversion at Mediahuis Belgium, offered a restrained but effective model. The team focuses on the conversion journey between registration and payment arguably the most neglected segment of many publisher funnels.

Bebusschere introduced the idea of “average intervention time” the typical delay between registration and conversion as a crucial indicator. Small, testable experiments are favoured over sweeping initiatives. Their strategy hinges not on invention, but on improving service clarity and removing user friction especially during onboarding and paywall interactions.

Direct-to-Audience Journalism: The Bureau’s Transformation

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s pivot toward direct audience engagement reflects deeper structural changes in media. Previously focused on syndication, The Bureau has introduced user needs mapping to tailor content formats from explainers to first-person narratives—to different engagement motives: to know, understand, feel or act.

Internal buy-in has been central to this evolution. Journalists were encouraged, not instructed, to adapt formats preserving editorial autonomy while improving accessibility. The redesigned newsletter Uncovered now reports significantly higher open rates and feedback loops between audience data and editorial teams have become a fixture of the workflow.

Conclusion: Towards Sustainable Attention

Across markets and models, a clear pattern is emerging. The next phase of digital publishing is not about the largest audience, but the most resilient relationship. Subscription businesses will rise or fall not on acquisition alone, but on retention, functionality, and user trust.

Belonging, once relegated to the margins of editorial strategy, is now being reinterpreted as core business value. As recurring revenue replaces pageview advertising, and as readers demand more relevance, usability and agency, the industry must recalibrate accordingly.

What binds the success stories shared at the Audiencers Festival is not technology or scale it is clarity of purpose. The publishers moving fastest are not chasing novelty, but rediscovering something more enduring, audience as relationship, not reach.

Follow John on The Media Stack.

The post Post-Paywall Thinking, Publisher Perspectives from The Audiencers’ Festival appeared first on Audiencers.