By Selma Stern, Independent Advisor, and Pete Doucette, Senior Managing Director, Mather

Mather’s inaugural German News Media Audience Benchmark recorded a staggering result: German news brands grew audience +13% year-over-year in April, while US brands fell more than 17% in the same window. Built on Similarweb, Listener and Sophi data across 44 German news brands, the benchmark found the majority of them posting positive year-over-year growth. The gap between Germany and the US widened through the first quarter of 2026.

Since the report launched, we’ve been analyzing why this is happening. There are a few structural reasons: a different election cycle, a later arrival of AI overviews, more Android phones (and therefore more Google Discover traffic). But these macro trends don’t explain why the recovery is concentrated in regional publishers, why it shows up in engagement and not just reach, or why Germany rebounded inside the same platform environment US media blames for its own decline.

An independent INMA analysis of DACH publishers’ own first-party data points the same direction as ours. INMA’s Grzegorz Piechota put it best when we compared notes: “They are lucky in a way, but they also do something with their luck.”

We have four hypotheses for what’s actually going on. One is sheer luck, one has to do with good choices made in the past, and two might travel.

The post “Do something with your luck”: What German news brands are doing right appeared first on Audiencers.

Selma Stern is a strategic advisor helping media leaders transform their organizations for sustainable growth, drawing on 15+ years of experience in consulting and global news media. In particular, Selma bridges the gap between high-level strategy and the messy reality of execution, helping publishers fix the internal structures that hold them back.

In this article, Selma shares 5 recommendations for surviving in this gap as a subscription leader:
- Accept your real job: consensus builder, not decision maker
- Master internal storytelling
- Build cross-functional infrastructure
- Invest in human chemistry
- Give away the credit

If you are a digital subscriptions leader, you probably face a paradox every day: all the accountability, almost none of the control.

Having led subscription businesses at two US media companies, and now advising publishers on subscription growth in Europe, I see this everywhere, all the time. The head of subscriptions holds the P&L responsibility. But they rarely hold the assets—the CTO controls the dev queue, the Editor-in-Chief controls the headlines, and the CPO controls the UX. If the head of subs is lucky, they control email marketing and customer success.

If that’s you: To get anything done, you cannot just decide—you have to barter.

Because subscriptions sit at the exact intersection of business, product, editorial, and data, you are an elite player in a game of extreme cross-functional collaboration.

Here’s the playbook for surviving in that gap.

The post Alignment as an extreme sport: 5 things effective subscriptions leaders do appeared first on Audiencers.