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?
> When you start testing value props and benefits, it's easy to mix and match features, and try to cram everything onto one page to make subscription "worth the cost". But research has proven that the biggest driver of loyalty isn't usually price or feature count. It's a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn't get anywhere else > Your team can answer this easily, but the real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you're trying to reach. At a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already > Once you know your differentiation, packaging decisions get easier. Rachel's 3-question test before bundling anything: does it strengthen or dilute each product's identity? Are the audiences actually converging? Can your ops hold it together without the seams showing? > Sometimes the research tells you to do nothing. One of Skift's four products stayed untouched, on purpose, and it's now one of their steadiest, best growing subscriptions
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.
