If you’re trying to scale a subscription or membership program, look at your current structure. Are you offering a clean, high-signal experience, or are you serving your readers "feature soup"?
At the Audiencers Festival in Montreal on June 25th, audience research leader Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines, Director of Subscriptions at Skift, took the stage to break down a critical digital publishing dilemma: How do you package subscriptions to drive business growth without alienating the very audience that keeps you alive?
Subscription fatigue is real. Reuters Institute research from earlier this year found that nearly half of people say they’re extremely interested in news, but less than one in five pay for any of it online. Those numbers don’t match — and if you’ve ever tried to count how many recurring charges are on your own credit card, you already know why. Streaming services, meal kits, toilet paper, fitness trackers, “subscriptions to manage your subscriptions.” People are tired.
That’s not entirely bad news for publishers. It’s an opening. Goligoski spent years running the research practice at NYU’s Membership Puzzle Project, interviewing supporters of news organizations — subscribers, members, donors — across roughly 500 news organizations worldwide. Her research question was almost embarrassingly simple: what frustrates you about mainstream media? People could talk for an hour.
What consistently came out of those conversations was that the single biggest driver of loyalty wasn’t price or feature count. It was a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn’t get anywhere else, followed by a calming, low-friction user experience that let them do what they came to do and get out.
The exercise: fill in the blank
To find that sense of uniqueness, Goligoski runs newsroom leaders through simple prompts about their organizations:
- First in the subject, region, or world to ___
- Best compared to competitors in ___
- Only organization to ___
The exercise surfaces an origin story fast. But it’s only half the picture, and it’s the easy half — anyone can answer these questions for themselves around a conference table. The real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you’re trying to reach, who often can’t name your staff or your specific value prop but can place you loosely (“oh, that’s the one about the business of fashion”). The gap between the two answer sets is the actual work. It tells you what you think differentiates you and what has actually landed.
Her rule of thumb for this kind of testing: n+1 is better than n. At a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already. You’ll walk away smarter from even one conversation, and Goligoski says fifteen years into doing this work, people still thank her for simply being asked for their perspectives.
But watch out for “feature soup.” When you start testing value props and benefits, it’s easy to try to cram everything onto one page or into one pitch. If a first-time visitor needs a magnifying glass to understand what they’re being offered, you’ve already lost the differentiation you were trying to build.
A few examples she pointed to of publishers getting specificity right:
- Caper, a New York food media outlet, prices its annual subscription against hyper-local reference points: “less than a burrata pizza slice at L’Industrie, a potato pancake at Veselka” instead of the generic “less than a cup of coffee a day.” It grounds the price and quietly reminds readers how many small recurring charges they’re already carrying.
- The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review have a once-a-year summer bundle offer for two publications with possible audience overlap and growth potential, a financially compelling deal rather than a permanent merge.
- Capital B, a Black-media outlet in the US, sent an anniversary email that included an actual screenshot of the text exchange between its two co-founders deciding to launch. It reads as human in a way most subscription marketing doesn’t.
Goligoski’s closing asks for anyone doing this work:
- Limit friction wherever you find it
- Take a less-is-more approach to any data you collect (only ask what you’ll actually act on)
- Keep a running, visible wishlist of the features and coverage areas you hear people ask for. That list becomes a genuine insight bank over time.
The Skift case study: is your product an audience or a feature?
Mines joined Skift, a B2B travel media and events company, two years ago and inherited what she called “a family I didn’t plan for”: four separate subscription products, none designed to sit together.
- Skift Pro: always-on travel news, home-grown, positioned as “the Bloomberg of travel”
- Skift Research: long-form, data-driven reports, also home-grown, aimed at strategy and analytics buyers making a major decision rather than staying informed daily
- Airline Weekly: a roughly 20-year-old acquired product, once faxed, now a newsletter with its own site, read closely by aviation executives (Delta CEO Ed Bastian has called it “the only thing I read every week”)
- Daily Lodging Report: a similarly old acquisition, a daily digest for hospitality and real-estate operators
Three questions before you package anything
- Identity: does combining these products strengthen each one’s core value, or dilute it?
- Audience: are these audiences actually growing toward each other, or are they deliberately separate?
- Operations: can your UX, billing, and support genuinely hold a bundle together, or will the seams show? Mines runs subscriptions with a five-person team, a small product team, and a small design team, capacity is a real constraint.
Applying these questions to the Skift context
Airline Weekly: bundled the content, not the experience. Skift already had aviation coverage in both Pro and Research, plus an aviation conference. The instinct was to fold Airline Weekly’s coverage into all of it. But the products stayed on separate platforms — readers had to hop between a newsletter, a website, and (for a much smaller group) a conference ticket. Layering content across products without integrating the actual user experience just produced a disjointed one. Nobody complained loudly about it; it showed up quietly instead, in renewal numbers drifting down.
Mines’ takeaway: audit the identity of what you’re bundling before you bundle it. Packaging without UX clarity is just confusion with a price tag.
Daily Lodging Report: the right move was nothing. This subscriber base — Mines described them candidly as mostly finance and real-estate professionals — wanted exactly one thing: the digest, in their inbox, undisturbed. Skift gave the product a new site and new data tools anyway. The response was, in effect, I don’t care, just give me the newsletter.
So, they left it alone, and it’s remained one of their steadiest, best-growing products. Leaving a product untouched is a strategic decision, not a lack of ambition. Some products’ value comes directly from their constraints.
Pro + Research: complementary, not interchangeable. These two live in the same sales conversation but serve different budgets and different personas — daily information versus decision-support research. Combining them into one package would have devalued Research and bloated Pro. Skift’s framing: they don’t need the same package, they need the same conversation.
Mines’ shorthand for thinking about all of this is a marriage metaphor: some products should merge households (full integration makes both better); some should keep separate addresses (related, committed, but each keeps its own front door); some need couples therapy first (real potential, but only after the UX and integration work happens); and some are simply happy as they are, and the kindest, smartest move is to leave them alone.
From the Q&A: a few things worth stealing
Don’t let a new feature justify a price increase — check whether anyone asked for it first. When Skift acquired the Women Leading Travel membership group, the team raised prices and then went looking for features to justify the increase — a research report, an add-on. Mines stopped that process to ask a more basic question: did any of these members actually want the research report? They hadn’t. What they wanted was networking and job connections, and that’s where Skift redirected. Goligoski added a comparable example: ProPublica offers a branded t-shirt only after someone donates, framed as a thank-you rather than a subscription perk — about 17% of donors take it, self-selecting into people who’ll actually wear it and become visible advocates, rather than shipping merchandise nobody asked for.
Test new features free before you charge for them. Goligoski’s suggestion for the free-versus-paid feature question: launch new features free first, watch uptake, get people to describe the value in their own words, and work out the rough edges before you decide whether it becomes a paid add-on or a built-in part of the product.
When you research your gap between positioning and perceived value, don’t blend your audiences. Talk to loyal long-term subscribers, low-frequency readers, and non-subscribers separately, and be explicit — internally — about exactly who any given finding came from. Self-reported research also goes stale fast, so treat it as something to refresh regularly rather than a one-time study you cite for years.
The takeaway to carry into your next packaging conversation: don’t start with pricing, and don’t start with the bundle itself. Start with audience needs and wants, including the friction points people tell you about. The best package isn’t the one with the most crammed into it — it’s the one your subscriber would actually notice if it disappeared.
