Lennart Schneider is Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works in this excerpt from the book:

• Reach

Reach includes every interaction with potential subscribers, whether through your own channels or through partners, referrals, paid advertising, or other touchpoints.

a) Anonymous contacts: most of these contacts remain anonymous. They have interacted with your brand, but you cannot identify or contact them directly.

b) Leads: Leads are potential customers whose identity is known and who can ideally be contacted directly. Examples include newsletter subscribers, freemium users, registered accounts, or prospects collected through sales or telephone campaigns.

• Trials

Trial users are people who are testing the subscription through a free or discounted offer while deciding whether the product provides enough value to justify becoming paying subscribers.

• Active subscribers

Active subscribers are customers who have paid at least one regular subscription fee. Later in this article, I’ll explain in more detail where I draw the line between trial users and active subscribers.

Within the subscriber base, customers often move between different pricing tiers through upgrades and downgrades, increasing or decreasing their customer value.

A subset of active subscribers consists of customers with expiring subscriptions. When subscribers cancel, their subscription usually remains active until the end of the current billing period. In other words, the cancellation has been submitted but has not yet taken effect. During this remaining term, there is still an opportunity to persuade customers to reverse their cancellation.

• Former subscribers

Once a subscription has expired, customers become former subscribers. If they have given permission to be contacted, the win-back process begins. Former subscribers effectively become qualified leads again and can be targeted with dedicated retention and reactivation campaigns to encourage them to subscribe again.

Let’s go through these stages in detail:

1. Reach

The first step in any subscription business is making sure that potential customers become aware of your brand, your product, and your subscription offering. To achieve this, you should continuously expand the range of channels through which you reach your target audience. In addition to your own website, these channels may include social media, podcasts, public relations, events, partnerships, and many other customer touchpoints.

However, reach alone is not enough. What matters is reaching the right people. Ten million impressions may sound impressive, but they have little value if the audience has no genuine interest in your product. That’s why every subscription business should define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—a description of the customers who are most likely to become successful, long-term subscribers.

Very few products are truly designed for everyone. Instead, companies should focus on the people or organizations that have a real need for what they offer. If you cannot clearly define your target audience, you risk wasting both time and marketing budget on customers who are unlikely to convert. An ICP therefore defines not only who you want to attract, but also who you deliberately choose not to target.

The best starting point is your existing subscriber base. Analyze your most valuable customers, identify the characteristics they have in common, and use those insights to guide future acquisition efforts. At the same time, you should regularly challenge your assumptions and explore whether there are attractive customer segments beyond your current audience.

For the digital subscription of a regional newspaper, an Ideal Customer Profile might look something like this:

Potential subscribers have lived in the region for several years, feel connected to their local community, and are interested in topics such as local politics, schools, transportation, public safety, sports, real estate, and local events. They are typically between 35 and 64 years old, employed, and have started a family. Many own their homes and expect to remain in the region for years to come. Although this profile is still relatively broad, it also illustrates that younger audiences or digital nomads may currently be much harder to convert into paying subscribers and therefore might not be the primary focus of acquisition efforts.

At the same time, additional customer segments may exist outside this core audience. For example, people who no longer live in the region may still have a strong interest in the local football club. The German newspaper Ruhr Nachrichten identified exactly this opportunity and introduced a separate, lower-priced BVB subscription for Borussia Dortmund fans living outside its core distribution area. This represents a second Ideal Customer Profile that can be targeted independently and generates up to 2,500 additional subscribers during a single football season.

Once you have identified the right audience, the next challenge is to create a positive first impression and spark genuine interest. Or, as Lucas von Gwinner and Dirk von Gehlen would put it, to build a strong brand. In their book Macht Marke, they argue that a brand is far more than a company’s name or logo—it is its reputation.

Before people decide to subscribe, they need to understand what your brand stands for and why it solves their problem better than any competing alternative. Strong brands communicate a clear positioning that differentiates them from competitors. As a result, they not only increase awareness but also improve conversion rates and strengthen long-term customer retention.

2. Leads

Before asking people to commit to a subscription, it is often worth getting to know them first and gradually introducing them to your product. A well-designed lead generation strategy helps build a large pool of potential subscribers whom you can engage with on an ongoing basis.

Compared with anonymous visitors, leads are significantly more likely to become subscribers. Because you know more about them, you can tailor your communication and offers to their individual interests, needs, and stage in the customer journey.

One of the key metrics at this stage is the Lead Rate, which measures the percentage of people reached who are willing to share their contact information and give permission to be contacted.

For example, if 5,000 out of 100,000 people reached provide their email address and marketing consent, the Lead Rate is 5%.

Lead generation serves two important purposes. First, it creates an owned audience that you can contact repeatedly without relying solely on paid advertising or third-party platforms. Second, it allows you to build trust over time before presenting a subscription offer. Especially for products that require a high level of commitment or involve a longer purchasing decision, this gradual relationship-building can significantly improve conversion rates.

3. Trials

In most cases, customers can only determine whether a subscription is worth paying for after they have experienced the product firsthand. Free or discounted trial offers lower the barrier to entry and encourage potential subscribers to give the product a try.

There is no universal formula for determining the ideal trial length or discount level. Companies continue to experiment with different approaches, and in my interviews I have seen everything from one-day trials to introductory offers lasting two years. Some businesses prefer short trials that generate revenue quickly, while others use longer trial periods to help customers build lasting habits, making the subscription an integral part of their daily lives before they begin paying the full price.

One of the most important phases of any subscription begins during the trial: onboarding. Effective onboarding helps new customers discover the value of their subscription as quickly as possible. The sooner they experience meaningful benefits and establish regular usage habits, the more likely they are to become long-term subscribers.

The Trial Start Rate measures the percentage of people reached who begin a trial. For example, if 2,000 out of 100,000 people reached start a trial, the Trial Start Rate is 2%.

The Lead-to-Trial Rate, on the other hand, measures how many known leads convert into trial users. If 500 out of 5,000 leads sign up for a trial, the Lead-to-Trial Rate is 10%.

Not every trial results in a paid subscription. Users who decide not to continue after the trial often return to the lead pool. If they have given permission to be contacted, they can be nurtured through future marketing campaigns and may eventually decide to subscribe.

4. Active subscribers

Active subscribers are the foundation of every subscription business. They generate predictable, recurring revenue and therefore determine the long-term health of the business. At this stage, the primary objective is to retain subscribers for as long as possible while increasing their lifetime value through upgrades and cross-selling where appropriate.

The Conversion Rate measures the percentage of people reached who become paying subscribers. For example, if 1,000 out of 100,000 people reached purchase a subscription, the overall Conversion Rate is 1%.

Like most funnel metrics, this KPI can also be broken down by funnel stage. If 200 of those 1,000 subscriptions originated from 2,000 trial users, the Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate is 10%. Likewise, if 750 out of 5,000 leads purchase a full subscription, the Lead-to-Paid Conversion Rate is 15%.

One important question remains: When does a trial become an active subscription?

In practice, the boundary is not always clear. Many subscription businesses offer heavily discounted introductory pricing before customers begin paying the regular rate. However, not every discounted offer should be classified as a trial. A clear definition is essential because it directly affects the accuracy of key performance indicators such as retention and churn.

Consider the following examples:

1. DIE ZEIT

The German newspaper DIE ZEIT offers a print subscription in which the first 13 issues cost €5 each before increasing to €7.50. Since subscribers pay roughly two-thirds of the regular price from the very first issue and generate at least €65 in revenue, I would classify them as active subscribers from day one.

2. BILDplus

A BILDplus subscription costs €1.99 per month during the first year before increasing to €7.99 and can be cancelled at any time. In this case, I would consider only the first month part of the trial period. Once the subscription renews, customers become active subscribers, even though they continue to receive a substantial introductory discount.

3. The New York Times

The annual All Access subscription is sometimes available for $20 instead of the regular $90. Because these customers pay only around one-fifth of the standard price—and many are likely to cancel before ever paying full price—there are two reasonable approaches. They can either be treated as long-running trial users or as heavily discounted active subscribers.

Why does this distinction matter?

Cancellation rates during trial periods are typically much higher than among established subscribers. For that reason, trial users are generally excluded from core KPIs such as Retention Rate and Churn Rate. An inconsistent or poorly defined distinction between trials and paid subscribers can therefore distort these metrics and make performance comparisons misleading.

The Retention Rate measures the percentage of active subscribers who remain subscribed from one period to the next. If you begin the month with 10,000 subscribers and 9,500 are still active at the end of the month, your monthly Retention Rate is 95%.

The Upgrade Rate and Downgrade Rate measure how frequently subscribers move between pricing tiers. For example, if 200 out of 4,000 subscribers on the Basic or Standard plan upgrade to a higher-tier subscription within a month, the monthly Upgrade Rate is 5%.

4.5 Expiring subscriptions

Expiring subscriptions are subscriptions that have already been cancelled but remain active until the end of the current billing period. Although this stage is often overlooked, it can last for a surprisingly long time.

For example, a customer with an annual subscription may cancel on the very first day simply to avoid missing the cancellation deadline. Even though they have already submitted their cancellation, they remain an active subscriber for another 365 days. That also means you have 365 opportunities to convince them to stay. In many cases, a cancellation is not a final decision against the subscription but simply a precaution to avoid an unwanted renewal.

The Cancellation Rate measures the percentage of subscribers who submit a cancellation request during a given period. If 300 out of 10,000 active subscribers cancel within a month, the monthly Cancellation Rate is 3%.

The Cancellation Rate should not be confused with the Churn Rate. The two metrics often differ because a cancellation usually occurs well before the subscription actually ends.

For example, if a customer cancels in January but still has six months remaining on an annual subscription, they contribute to the Cancellation Rate in January but only enter the Churn Rate in June—provided they do not withdraw their cancellation beforehand.

In addition, the Churn Rate includes not only voluntary cancellations but also involuntary churn, such as failed payments or expired payment methods.

The Reactivation Rate measures how many subscribers reverse their cancellation before their subscription expires. If 30 out of 300 cancelling subscribers decide to stay before the end of their billing period, the Reactivation Rate is 10%.

Finally, the Save Rate measures the percentage of subscribers who begin the cancellation process but never complete it. In other words, it captures the cancellations that were successfully prevented before they were ever submitted.

4.6 Former subscribers

Once a subscription has expired, the customer becomes a former subscriber and the win-back process begins. Provided you still have permission to contact them, former subscribers can be reached through email, phone calls, push notifications, or other marketing channels with tailored offers and messages designed to encourage them to return.

From the perspective of the subscription funnel, former subscribers effectively become highly qualified leads again. Unlike new prospects, they already know your product, have experienced its value, and have demonstrated a willingness to pay in the past. As a result, win-back campaigns often achieve significantly higher conversion rates than campaigns targeting first-time subscribers.

As a subscription business matures, win-back becomes increasingly important because a growing share of the addressable market has already subscribed at least once. Over time, acquisition efforts naturally shift from attracting entirely new customers to re-engaging former ones.

For that reason, it is useful to measure how many people you are targeting have previously been subscribers. The Former Subscriber Rate measures the percentage of contacts—such as recipients of an email campaign or visitors reaching a paywall—who have held a subscription before.

This metric provides an indication of how frequently you are “fishing in the same pond.” While it is often impossible to identify former subscribers across third-party channels such as social media, logged-in users on your own website can usually be matched to their subscription history.

In some industries, particularly video streaming, customers regularly pause and restart their subscriptions depending on the content available. In these markets, cancellation is often not the end of the customer relationship but simply a temporary break.

The Win-Back Rate measures the percentage of former subscribers who return within a given period. For example, if 1,000 out of 5,000 former subscribers purchase another subscription within one year, the annual Win-Back Rate is 20%.

Viewed as a whole, the subscription funnel is not a linear process but a continuous cycle. Every former subscriber represents a potential future customer, making retention and reactivation just as important as acquiring new subscribers.

Mark Zohar, President and CEO of Viafoura, shares why he believes that Frequency (the F in RFV) is the most important metric to be tracking in an era where content is increasingly a commodity that AI can summarize, paraphrase, and serve without ever sending a click your way.

AI broke the funnel. Community rebuilds it.

The uncomfortable truth is that the open web’s traditional acquisition funnel, SEO at the top, content in the middle, monetization at the bottom, was always borrowed infrastructure. Publishers rented audience from platforms, and now those platforms are keeping the audience for themselves.

The publishers who will win the next decade are the ones who own the relationship, not rent it. And ownership doesn’t come from content alone anymore. Content is increasingly a commodity that AI can summarize, paraphrase, and serve without ever sending a click your way.

What AI cannot replicate is community. It cannot replicate the experience of debating a local election with your neighbors in a comment thread moderated by your newsroom. It cannot replicate a live Q&A with the reporter who broke the story. It cannot replicate the feeling of being recognized, replied to, and known by a brand you trust.

This is where Frequency lives.

The Frequency Loop

When publishers invest in community-building experiences like commenting, Live Q&As, topic-based chats, polls, personalized feeds, and real-time notifications, something powerful happens. Readers stop coming back for the content alone. They start coming back for the conversation.

That shift creates what I call the Frequency Loop

A reader visits for the content. They engage with the community. They get notified when someone replies, when a new live event starts, when a topic they care about is being discussed. They come back. They engage again. They register to keep participating. They subscribe to deepen the relationship. Every loop tightens the bond, increases the visit count, and unlocks more revenue per user.

The economics of this loop are not theoretical. Viafoura‘s data shows that engaged community members visit at a rate that is 6-8 times higher than fly-by users. And the downstream impact is well documented across the industry. Piano’s Subscription Performance Benchmark has found that registered users convert to paid subscriptions at roughly 45 times the rate of anonymous visitors. Frequency is what closes the gap between the two.

More frequency means more ad impressions. More frequency means higher page RPM, because engaged sessions monetize at premium rates. More frequency means a registered-user base that’s actually worth registering. More frequency means subscription offers that land, because the reader has already demonstrated, behaviourally, that they value what you do.

What the F should you actually do?

If Frequency is the metric, here’s the honest diagnostic every publisher should run:

Do you give your audience a reason to come back tomorrow that isn’t a new article? Do you have a place on your property where readers talk to each other and to your journalists? Do you notify them when their participation matters? Do you personalize what they see based on what they engage with, not just what they read? Do you treat your registered users like a community, or like a CRM list?

If the answer to most of those is no, you don’t have a Frequency problem. You have a community infrastructure problem. And in an AI era where every other lever (search traffic, social referral, content differentiation) is getting harder to pull, community infrastructure is the lever that’s getting more valuable, not less.

The bottom line

AI is going to keep getting better at answering questions. It’s not going to get better at being a community. That asymmetry is the single largest strategic opening publishers have right now, and Frequency is the metric that tells you whether you’re walking through it.

So the next time your board asks how you’re future-proofing the business against AI disruption, don’t show them a traffic chart. Show them your Frequency curve.

And if you don’t have one, well, you know what to ask yourself.

What the F are you doing?

> Publishers have long treated one reader as two entities: the ads team chasing reach, the subs team chasing exclusivity. Ringier built a single Customer Lifetime Value combining both, and found the conflict doesn't exist

> Subscribers keep generating strong advertising value precisely because they're the most engaged. Exclusivity doesn't cost you ad revenue the way the org chart assumes

> On Blick.ch, a logged-in user is worth well over 30 times a consent-only one, and a Brand Lover over 50 times a casual reader

> But logging in isn't the magic. The value comes from what follows: more page views, and an email address that cuts churn. Ringier built "Follow My Team" so registering buys something, and doubled daily logged-in users in a year

To break this down:

• Reader Revenue CLV is calculated by multiplying the Average Revenue Per User by the subscription lifetime.
• Advertising CLV is calculated by multiplying the Average Revenue Per User by the readership lifetime.

Measuring users on two dimensions

Testing this new metric out, the team started with Ringier’s digital-only, German-speaking reach brand in Switzerland, Blick.ch.

While the project started as a complex manual spreadsheet exercise, the team is currently working on automating the process directly within their data lake. Patrick emphasized that these preliminary results are meant to show “t-shirt sizes” (relative proportions) rather than precise, absolute financial figures, the main goal being to prove that the ads vs subs conflict doesn’t exist.

The Blick user base was analysed across 2 distinct dimensions: funnel depth and loyalty.

Dimension 1: Funnel Depth

Dimension 2: Loyalty

What the data revealed

1. Funnel depth unlocks LTV

The data clearly proved that moving a user deeper into the funnel unlocks exponential lifetime value. Preliminary results suggest:

• Giving consent increases the value compared to “No Consent”.
• A logged-in user delivers a significantly higher CLV, well over 30 times that of a “Consent Only” user
• Moving from a login to a monthly subscription doubles the value, and a yearly subscription multiplies that even further

2. Subscribed users still drive ad value

The results exploded the myth of the ads vs subs conflict: subscribed users continue to generate strong advertising value. When looking at monthly and yearly subscribers, their advertising value remains high because they are highly engaged with the platform. 

This was also something shared by Bonnier Media at WAN-IFRA’s World Congress in Marseille: subscribers not only have a subscription ARPU of €300, but an advertising ARPU of €75.

3. The more loyal, the higher the LTV

When analysing the loyalty dimension, the lifetime value growth was even more staggering. A Brand Lover has a total CLV well over 50 times higher than that of a casual or one-time reader.

The final monetisation matrix

When combining these dimensions into a heat map, the value disparity becomes clear. In short, a high CLV directly correlates with high loyalty and a deep funnel stage.

While the high-value buckets are incredibly lucrative, the core issue for Blick.ch, and most reach publishers, is that the vast majority of the audience currently sits in the “Consent Only” bucket, which yields relatively low monetisation per user.

Speaking on a panel about registration as a solution to this challenge, Patrick highlighted how this data provides a clear financial incentive to log audiences, guiding users deeper into the funnel. 

However, Patrick clarified that registration isn’t a magic wand – the value does not come from the act of logging in itself. Rather, it comes from two secondary effects:

1. Engagement: Logged-in users consume more page views, creating more ad impressions and higher ad revenue.
2. Lifetime: Having a user’s email address establishes a direct relationship, reducing churn and making it far easier to eventually convert them into monthly or yearly subscribers.

Putting CLV into practice

To put these CLV insights into practice, Ringier Media Switzerland has shifted from just gating content to building features designed to deepen user relationships.

Because Blick.ch is well-known for its sports coverage, they launched a feature called “Follow My Team.” Sports fans can select and follow their favorite local clubs, national teams, or specific sports, creating a highly personalized feed and specialized team detail views. Of course though, if a user wants to save these preferences and access this tailored experience, they must register and log in.

By building a product that naturally incentivises identity over anonymity, they are successfully guiding casual users into the logged-in ecosystem.

Patrick highlights that understanding user value is becoming yet more critical with the rise of AI search and AI browsing modes. In an AI-driven ecosystem, publishers are most likely to lose the traffic of users with low loyalty who visit anonymously without a login or subscription. Building a walled garden of logged-in, loyal users is no longer just a revenue optimisation strategy, but a survival mechanism.

By aligning their teams and product strategy with a holistic Customer Lifetime Value, Ringier Media Switzerland doubled their number of daily logged-in users over the last year.

For the first time, the publisher has the hard data to prove that investing heavily in deep, direct user relationships is entirely worth the effort.

1. The strategy gap: moving engagement to the heart of the business

Newsrooms are recognizing that deep audience engagement is the primary lever to unlock long-term financial sustainability. In fact, audience engagement was the most frequently selected top-three goal for 2026.

However, a significant execution gap remains: 25% of newsrooms still make daily editorial decisions purely on instinct or reactivity, and 42% operate with only loose structural alignment.

Furthermore, the data proves that editorial growth stems directly from operational discipline. Newsrooms that systematically review and discontinue low-impact initiatives are nearly twice as likely to experience budget growth compared to those that manage portfolios on an ad hoc basis (50% vs. 28%).

What your team can do:

• Diversify the strategy table: Break down the church-and-state silos. Include audience engagement and platform leaders directly in your long-term strategy and investment conversations. Structurally aligned newsrooms over-index significantly on bringing these non-traditional roles to the table.
• Implement “portfolio discipline”: Set up a formal quarterly review to audit your newsletters, verticals, and content formats. Be ruthless about killing initiatives that fail to build a loyal public so you can redirect scarce editorial resources toward high-impact journalism.
• Shift from destination-first to audience-led commissioning: Currently, 64% of newsrooms still design stories for a single primary legacy channel (like print or a homepage template) and adapt them later. Instead, adopt commissioning frameworks—potentially assisted by internal AI tools—that force editors to identify a defined user need or specific audience group before a story is assigned.

2. The audience trust gap: rethinking participation and storytelling

Trust has evolved from rigid, institutional authority into relatable, relational signals. While newsroom leaders heavily prioritize audience relationship building, their workflows tell a different story: reporters spend a staggering 38% of their week on technical production drag, but a meager 11% on post-publication work like community building and responding to reader feedback.

When it comes to distinctiveness in an abundant content ecosystem, the ‘evergreen explainer’ of the past is being disrupted. Publishing teams are pivoting toward deep background reporting (+6pp in structurally aligned newsrooms) while actively steering away from low-margin daily breaking news (-10pp).

What your team can do:

• Bring community in-house: Stop relying on volatile, algorithmic social media comment sections to house your audience network. Take inspiration from pioneers like Newpress (building algorithm-free spaces for co-creation) or the Financial Times (leveraging interactive digital forums like “Ask an Expert”) to turn passive readers into highly engaged, recurring subscribers.

• Lean into service-oriented co-creation: Consider launching a reader-initiated reporting vertical. New Zealand’s Stuff Digital launched “Solving Stuff,” an interactive project prompting readers to submit local problems for journalists to actively investigate. This approach generated massive reader investment, with average time-on-page and completion rates soaring well above site averages.
• Be candid and transparent: Build ‘Behind the Story’ formats into your editorial mix to pull back the curtain on how your journalism is sourced and verified. Relational trust relies on showing your audience your journalistic motivations and methods.

3. The capability gap: shifting AI from efficiency to strategic maturity

Publishers are widely trapped in a Level 1 AI maturity mindset: 42% use time savings as their primary KPI for AI success, focusing strictly on automating existing administrative tasks like transcription or copyediting.

However, the biggest barriers holding back AI integration are people-based rather than technical, namely skills gaps (61%) and cultural skepticism (52%). Crucially, the study found that 57% of organizations do not have explicit AI representation in the newsroom, which directly correlates to the lowest literacy and adoption rates.

What your team can do:

• Embed AI roles directly in editorial: Do not leave technology procurement solely to isolated corporate IT or CTO functions. Move your tech budget closer to production by placing editor-coders, hybrid technologists, or dedicated newsroom engineers directly within your reporting desks. High AI usage and literacy jump dramatically (to 46%) when technical leads are embedded in the newsroom.
• Modernize backend metadata: Your AI tools are only as powerful as your archive. Publishing teams that systematically structure and tag their content assets with robust metadata report exponentially higher levels of successful AI integration and content retrievability.
• Reframe the AI conversation: Move beyond generic, mandatory tool-click training. Adopt a strategy like Bonnier News, which ran voluntary, playful workshops focusing on demystifying what AI fundamentally is and cannot do. This organically transforms open-minded early adopters into internal ambassadors who win over newsroom skeptics by proving how technology frees up capacity to do more investigative work.

4. The skills gap: transitioning from generalists to sharper specialists

Confidence in the future readiness of editorial talent drops sharply when media leaders look three years ahead. To thrive in a visually and technically demanding landscape, the industry is transitioning from broad generalism to a tightly bundled set of hybrid skills.

The primary skills priorities identified for future readiness include tech-enabled journalism (e.g., open-source intelligence, AI prompting), audience data fluency, and production expertise (short-form video editing, visual design). Yet, 61% of newsrooms still provide no formal training for these vital new competencies.

What your team can do:

• Formally define hybrid reporting profiles: Modern reporting roles require a multi-disciplinary approach. Audit your hiring pipeline to look for cross-functional profiles, such as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) reporters who combine coding with investigative craft, or “Podcast Correspondents” capable of owning a niche category across written text, audio recording, and visual presentation end-to-end.
• Invest heavily in creator-like on-camera training: 41% of newsrooms want to upskill existing staff into multi-platform visual creators, yet 68% of them offer no formal video or presentation coaching. If your strategy relies on launching visual content on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, you must systematically allocate budget to presentation, vocal coaching, and platform algorithm fluency.
• Evolve compensation models to retain niche talent: Because audience affinity is increasingly shifting from legacy institutional corporate brands to recognizable individual personalities, media companies must rethink retention. A dominant 78% of media executives agree that alternative payment structures, such as bespoke revenue shares, hybrid contracts, or performance-linked bonuses, are becoming essential to protect and incentivize your most prominent, community-driving journalists.

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Download the full Future Newsrooms Study 2026 report from FT Strategies here.

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

Hypothesis 1: Structural tailwinds

First, Google’s AI Overviews reached US audiences at scale well before it landed on European ones. German publishers simply had more runway. Second, Android’s share of the German mobile market is high, and Android means more Google Discover. That traffic converts less reliably than search, but it feeds reach, programmatic inventory and brand.

More broadly, US and German markets are arguably at different points on the digital disruption maturity curve — every new wave of digital disruption has hit the US sooner and often harder. However, this does not explain the relative strength of German regionals.

Hypothesis 2: Spending from strength, not desperation

German legacy businesses are still somewhat healthy, allowing sustained investment in digital products. “German publishers still continue to have a very good print business when compared to the United States,” Piechota observes. “They have a war chest.” That buys the ability to invest in new models while the old one is still paying the bills, rather than aggressively cutting costs.

The result is newsroom scale — bigger teams, more original reporting, deeper local coverage, the inputs that make a brand worth returning to. Many US publishers, further into the contraction, are increasingly forced to choose survival over reinvention. German publishers, for now, don’t have to. The key differentiator here might be ownership structure. While financial investors drove consolidation in the US market, private and strategic ownership is much more common in Germany, especially on the regional level.

Hypothesis 3: Collaboration over consolidation

This is a playbook that could be adapted to other markets.

Consolidation happened in both markets we analyzed, but for different reasons and in different ways. In the US, large groups acquired local titles, often through debt, to extract short-term financial gains without making long-term investments. In Germany, publishers are pooling resources to invest, not just to economize. German publishers acquire one another too — Madsack, for instance, has made several acquisitions in recent years — but consolidation here tends to fund investment rather than strip costs, and on the technology layer the instinct is to collaborate rather than buy.

As Alexandra Borchardt, one of the sharpest observers of the German market, told us, regional publishers in Germany have “allied with one another to wrestle collectively with the future of the industry” — joining media groups to create synergies rather than simply to cut costs.

You can see the machinery behind that: Madsack’s shared RND content network, Ippen’s central editorial network, dpa’s DRIVE data collaboration, the agile newsroom muscle built across WAN-IFRA’s Table Stakes Europe, where, in Borchardt’s words, regional publishers “learned together how to identify and serve their audiences.”

“They collaborate on technology projects,” says Piechota — “a very innovative way to solve a common problem: how to invest in new technology while the old business is contracting.” German regionals compete on the newsstand and collaborate on the platform layer.

Hypothesis 4: Trust and depth beat reach

German audience numbers recovered inside the same platform and AI environment the US operates in. When two markets share the conditions and diverge this sharply, the variable isn’t the platform, but the audience relationship.

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, 45% of Germans trust “most news, most of the time,” while in the US this measure sits at 30%. The same report finds Germans still rely on local newspapers as their main source for the major categories of local news, where in the US those have largely shifted to local TV and social platforms.

Our benchmark’s engagement data backs this up. German growth looks like it’s driven by habit, not news spikes: repeat visitation, depth, loyalty. The German story, therefore, isn’t so much about winning new users as it is about getting more from the users you already have. That’s a function of product and trust — what Borchardt calls journalism’s “strong anchoring in society.”

German publishers, Piechota argues, “can do things American publishers no longer can,” with local coverage often more in-depth than its US equivalent. Growth is concentrating among differentiated, high-loyalty brands — which is exactly why independent regionals, the most distinctive of the lot, are leading the recovery.

So what (for everyone else)?

Strip out the “luck” and the German playbook is portable. The luck was in timing, devices and ownership structures. The rest was and, importantly, still is down to choices: invest while you can, collaborate on expensive, undifferentiated back-end solutions and compete on the rest, and build the kind of trusted, in-depth product that turns a visit into a habit.

Borchardt encourages German publishers to stop “looking to America in awe and anxiety,” and instead “lean on their own strengths.” The US decline is real, but it is not a forecast for everyone. German publishers looked at the same disruption and handled it successfully.

Germany did get lucky: later AI search, more Discover, healthier balance sheets. But that’s not all. German regional publishers chose collaboration and a relentless focus on quality. They indeed did something with their luck.

FIPP's latest data shows a digital subscription market growing 24.7% and concentrating fast. The winners are bundling, embedding, and reducing their dependence on search. The losers are still renting their audiences from Google.

The Nordics settled this argument years ago

While publishers in the US and UK are still debating the merits of bundling, Norway’s Amedia has been running the experiment since 2020, and the results are stark.

Its +Alt bundle, which gives subscribers access to all 127 of Amedia’s local newspapers plus a sports streaming service, now has 433,000 digital-only subscribers. Churn on the bundle runs at 0.7%. Churn for a single-title subscription is 16.4%. That difference translates into a subscriber lifetime value that is 26 times higher for the bundled product.

Norway, as a subscription market, grew 55.56% in the period, a function of a deliberate structural choice. Publishers there decided early that local relevance and shared digital infrastructure were not in tension; they were complementary.

In Sweden, Bonnier News reached the same conclusion. Its +Allt bundle, combining national titles (Dagens Nyheter, Expressen), more than 40 local newspapers and magazine content into a single subscription, reached nearly 500,000 digital subscribers by the end of 2025, up from around 270,000 in mid-2024. Including print subscribers with bundled access, total reach is over 1.1 million.

Germany and France are also moving. Germany’s subscription market grew 35.83% in the period, the fastest of any major European market. France grew 31.21%. Both reflect the same underlying pattern: publishers deepening their product propositions and reducing their exposure to external distribution.

The UK is following. FIPP’s data shows the market up 22.61%, with Newsquest, DC Thomson and Mail+ among the standout performers on percentage growth. Mail+ grew 177.8% in the period, from a low base, but the direction is clear.

AI search didn’t break the business model. It revealed which models were already broken

The useful question is not whether AI search hurts publishers. It is which publishers. The FIPP data, read against recent industry reporting, makes the divide specific.

The content most exposed to AI overviews is the content most easily summarised in a sentence: car specifications, factual service journalism, commodity news. Bauer Media Group has said as much directly. When the overview answers the question, the click never happens, and the publisher’s role in the value chain ends with the model’s training set.

The content least exposed is reporting that does not compress. Analysis, investigation, distinctive voice, and depth all convey information that survives summarisation, because the value lies in the framing rather than the facts. The Telegraph’s SEO director has described search as being in “managed decline” rather than collapse, on the grounds that subscribers return for reporting summaries that cannot be replicated elsewhere. The framing fits the data.

The more interesting signal sits in the other direction. The Washington Post reports that readers arriving via large language models spend longer on the site and convert to subscriptions at higher rates than traditional search visitors. The volumes are small, but conversion quality matters: AI search may be filtering out low-intent traffic that inflated publisher metrics without ever converting into subscribers.

As Colin Nagy argued recently in Monocle, AI hasn’t created a new problem for publishing; it has clarified an old one. Publishers built around search traffic were never really building audiences; they were borrowing them, and the loan is now being called in. The publishers losing ground are not victims of a new technology. They are tenants whose landlord has changed the terms.

US local publishers are paying it

Lee Enterprises reported that its digital subscriber base fell from 728,000 in March 2025 to 609,000 by December: a loss of 119,000 in nine months. The USA Today Co, formerly Gannett, saw a 26% decline year-on-year, dropping from 1.95 million subscribers to 1.45 million.

Both companies attribute the declines to deliberate strategies focused on price optimisation and improving average revenue per user. That may be true. It also describes companies managing contraction rather than building growth.

The sharpest contrast sits within the same corporate structure. Newsquest, the USA Today Co’s UK division, grew digital subscribers 35% year-on-year to 139,000 over the same period. Same parent company, opposite trajectory.

What the winners have in common

Bloomberg grew subscription revenue 10% in 2025, taking paying subscribers beyond 707,000. It now produces 800 hours of video each month. Subscriber-only newsletters grew 20% year-on-year. Podcast downloads rose 26%. The pattern is consistent: more reasons to open the product, more often.

Substack, with five million paying subscribers, has built its growth engine around internal recommendations that move readers between newsletters inside the platform. It is less a publishing platform than a subscription marketplace, one that reduces its dependence on external traffic by creating its own internal referral economy.

Immediate Media, with 767,000 digital app subscriptions now accounting for 64% of group subscriptions, is using AI to identify which audiences are most likely to subscribe and when engagement signals are strongest. The objective is habitual use and longer subscriber lifetime value.

The thread connecting all of them is the same one running through the Nordic data, the NYT bundle strategy, and the divergence between US and European local publishers. Subscriptions built on borrowed traffic are fragile in ways that subscriptions built on daily habit, multiple products and direct relationships are not.

Growth in the market is concentrating around publishers who solved for retention before they needed to.

Hi, I'm Lennart Schneider, Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

When I talk to newsletter creators, it usually doesn't take long before one of two questions comes up:

1) What actually constitutes a good open rate?

2) My newsletter has an open rate of 40%. That's great, isn't it?

The honest answer is: There is no such thing as a "good" open rate, and the open rate really says nothing about the quality of your newsletter. 

In this article, I want to clear up this misconception and explain when you should still pay attention to it.

P.S. I've written a book! The playbook for successful subscription models: With growth strategies and best practices from 50 leading companies. You can pre-order here (or on Amazon).

I completely understand the need for benchmarking and comparability. With newsletters, you have relatively few metrics, so you try to draw as many conclusions as possible from what you do have. Often, however, you draw more conclusions than are actually useful.

Let’s start with the basics: open rate is a fraction. You calculate it by dividing the number of unique opens by the total number of recipients. So far, so simple.

However, this leads to a small detail that is often overlooked. You can increase the open rate in two ways: more openers, or fewer recipients.

The latter point is often overlooked, but it’s crucial. People who don’t open your newsletter are often the same ones. And especially with older mailing lists, you often have a large proportion of inactive subscribers who have lost all interest.

So, if you have a 50% open rate with 10,000 recipients, then there are probably several thousand among them who haven’t opened a single email in six months. Let’s say there are 3,000 of them. If you remove them from the mailing list, your open rate immediately jumps from 50% to 71.4% (5,000 opens/7,000 active recipients).

Has this improved the quality of your newsletter? Are your readers more satisfied? No!

Has the quality of your distribution system improved as a result? Absolutely!

Why would you delete valuable leads?

Admittedly, I’ve recommended this to many newsletter creators, but the enthusiasm is usually lukewarm. They’ve put a lot of money and effort into acquiring these subscribers, so why would they just delete the addresses? Perhaps the reach is even important for advertising sales (even if nobody sees the ads).

But here are a few reasons why it’s worth it:

1. If someone hasn’t opened your emails for a long time, the likelihood of them returning is relatively low
2. You increase the risk of being perceived as spam
3. Depending on the newsletter tool and contract, costs increase as you send more emails
4. Your brand suffers when customers perceive you as pushy
5. Your advertisers are surprised when clicks fail to materialize on a supposedly large distribution list, and become suspicious
6. …

Many of the world’s leading newsletters therefore place great importance on the quality of their mailing lists and remove users after a long period of inactivity. The New York Times even discloses this quite transparently:

How can I find out who is inactive?

Good question! And not so easy to answer. Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, it’s often difficult to track who actually opens an email – Apple automatically opens emails before they reach the recipient, and therefore your email program thinks these users are active. Other users block tracking and are registered as inactive, even though they enthusiastically read every issue. So if you’re unsure: just ask the users.

Clicks can be tracked more reliably than opens, and if readers don’t click after (repeated) requests, you can remove them from the mailing list with a clear conscience.

Do I really need to delete them?

No. You can also pause them for now, or reduce the frequency. A good example is the sports newsletter “The Gist”. They temporarily pause inactive subscribers, and then when a major event is coming up (for example, the Olympics), they try to reactivate them.

However, you shouldn’t overdo it. If you haven’t contacted them for 1.5 years, you should continue to refrain from doing so. After that time, their consent to contact them also expires.

Even more reasons why open rate is misunderstood

Your open rate depends on numerous factors, and the quality of your content is just one of them. Here’s a (likely incomplete) list of factors that affect open rates:

Mailbox display:

• Subject lines (Do they encourage clicks?)
• Pre-header (Do you tease the content well?)
• Sender’s name (Do they trust you and look forward to your emails?)
• Sender images (Will they stand out in the inbox? Only works with certain clients)

The quality of your distribution:

• Cleanup of inactive users (Are non-openers regularly removed?)
• Segmentation (Do you always send emails to the entire mailing list or do you select recipients based on interests?)
• Preference Center (Can users configure which emails they receive and how frequently?)
• Age of the addresses (How long ago did someone sign up?)
• Lead campaigns/address origin (On which channels and with which promises were the users acquired? Did they want the newsletter, or did they just share their email to participate in a competition, for example?)

Deliverability

• Advertising tab in Gmail (Are emails from Gmail classified as advertising and not delivered to the main mailbox?)
• Spam (Do the emails often end up in the spam folder?)
• Bounces (Can the emails not be delivered? What are the different types of bounces, hard and soft?)
• Image sizes (are the images too large?)
• Email size (Will the email be truncated, for example, by Gmail, which happens from 102 kb upwards?)
• Shipping time (Is the shipping time chosen?)

Contents

• Good quality & relevance
• Diversity (do you cover different needs so that every issue contains an “aha” moment?)
• Continuity & predictability (Do readers know what to expect and why each issue is worthwhile?)

Technology

• Email tool or measurement technology (each mailing tool measures opens slightly differently, which affects the KPIs)
• Tracking Opt Out (Have users disabled tracking of clicks and opens?)
• Auto Opens on iOS (Are open rates inflated because emails are automatically opened due to privacy settings?)

So I can ignore the open rate?

Not quite. Since we don’t have many metrics, it’s still a valuable signal, as long as you’re aware of what it tells you, and what it doesn’t.

What you shouldn’t do is compare your absolute open rate with competitors who use completely different tools and whose lead generation works differently. This apples-to-oranges comparison is completely pointless.

What you can do instead:

• Observe long-term trends: Is my own open rate constant? Have there been any sudden changes I should understand? (But keep in mind that these changes could be due to technical reasons, e.g., more users with tracking protection.)
• Optimize your open rate with A/B testing: e.g., send each email with 3 different subject lines to a sample group beforehand and send the best version to the rest of the distribution list.
• Examine outliers: Were there any particular issues that were opened more or less frequently than average? What can I learn from them?
• Re-contacting those who didn’t open the email: Some companies send a newsletter a second time if it wasn’t opened the first time. I find it a bit spammy, but it seems to work.
• Use net reach (recipients x open rate) as the basis for advertising deals: This is fair to your advertising clients and you can also justify why the CPM (cost per thousand contacts) is higher if you are contacting a cleaned distribution list.
• Comparing segments: When running different lead generation campaigns, you shouldn’t just focus on the short-term cost per lead (CPL), but also consider whether the campaigns generate active recipients in the long run. A sweepstakes often generates a large number of addresses cheaply, but the open rate drops significantly after just a few campaigns.
  For better comparability, you can calculate a cost per lead after, for example, 10 campaigns. If you generate 1,000 leads per campaign for €1,000 in each of two campaigns, the short-term CPL is €1. If, after 10 campaigns, 70% of the leads in campaign A are still active, while only 30% remain active in campaign B, you get a clear picture: In campaign A, an active lead cost €1.43, while in campaign B it cost €3.33.
• …

PS: My newsletter has an open rate of 51-58%. That’s great, isn’t it?…

PPS: To hear more from me about subscription and newsletters, sign up to my own newsletter, Subscribe Now, here

This article was originally published in German on the Subscribe Now website, translated and republished with permission.

> You become what you measure. At Amedia, older subscribers were the majority, so they dominated the dashboards and quietly defined what counted as high-performing content

> The fix was blunt: filter analytics to readers under 40 only, making 90% of subscribers invisible to the newsroom. What the team optimised for changed as soon as what it could see changed

> This wasn't a matter of adding a few pieces "for young people". At Romerikes Blad the editorial team overhauled its working methods and which topics it treated as priorities

> It didn't cost them older readers. The sharper focus made the journalism more relevant overall: at Romerikes Blad, under-40 subscribers grew 30% in nine months and total readership and subscriptions rose too