At the Audiencers’ Festival in London 2026, Patrick Rademacher, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Ringier Media Switzerland, shared how breaking down internal silos and calculating holistic Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is transforming their revenue model, and informing decision making across the entire organisation. 

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.

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.

The Norwegian group Amedia started with a troubling observation: its publications had more subscribers over the age of 80 than under the age of 40. To break this deadlock, their team tested a radical approach in two local newsrooms: tailoring editorial content exclusively to the behaviors of readers under 40. The result: a product deemed more relevant for all generations and, at one of its publications, Romerikes Blad, a 30% increase in the under-40 demographic over nine months.

Why prioritize segmentation?

Segmentation can be mind-bogglingly complex and wildly impactful.

The word comes from biology, where it refers to the process of cell division from a fertilized egg to a full organism. In business, it refers to identifying the constituent parts of a whole – ideally, a set of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groups of customers. It can’t be perfect by definition, but even an imperfect segmentation can massively improve your bottom line.

At its core, segmentation addresses three fundamental business needs:

• Stickier content: By clearly defining  Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), newsrooms learn not just what to write about, but how to speak to their readers so the content truly resonates. If you replicate your ICPs as agents and train your newsroom to use them, you can get endless customer feedback at any time of the day.
• Smarter monetisation: Without segmentation, a dynamic paywall is only based on recency and frequency – which is fine, but does not capture your full market potential. . With it, you are “fishing where the fish are,” targeting the right users at the right time.
• Better marketing: Different segments live on different channels and respond to unique triggers. Segmentation tells you exactly where to find your users and helps advertising brands connect with theirs.

Choose your lens:

To build a complete picture of a user, like “Amanda, 40, VP of Marketing,” organizations can look through several analytical lenses:

Segmentation type	Focus/use case	Signal examples
Behavioral	UX Optimization	>5 visits per month, scroll depth, newsletter opens
Needs-based	Product Development	Prefers summaries, explainers, or opinion pieces
Value-based	Revenue Optimization	LTV, subscription tier, payment history
Technographic	Paywall Optimization	Device type (Mobile vs. Desktop), OS, Referral (LinkedIn vs. Facebook)
Demographic	Ad Sales / Strategy	Age cohort, geography, seniority

> Spektrum’s evolution of audience segmentation and testing

Five tips for succeeding in segmentation

1 – Hire strong analytics: This is the “single most important lever.” You need talent that can bridge the gap between high-level business strategy and deep data modeling.

2 – Make it cross-functional: Segmentation is a “Left Brain + Right Brain” exercise. Editorial, product, marketing, and data teams must own the model together; no single department can succeed in a silo.

3 – Quantify benefits early: You must build a business case or risk losing organizational priority. Use “Napkin Math” to show the potential uplift: for example, if a newsletter with a defined audience grows twice as fast as a vague one, what could the vague one be worth with a properly defined audience?

4 – Remember the customer: Segments should feel like people, not rows in a spreadsheet. Give them names like “Jane, the CMO” or “Joe, the Sales Lead.” Talk to them, build agents around their profiles, and ask, “Would Jane actually read this?”.

5 – Keep it simple (but useful): Aim for 4–6 mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) segments. If your team can’t name the segments from memory, your model is too complex and will fail to be actionable. Even if your goal is to build a dynamic paywall algo – lose (human) control of complexity, and you won’t know what’s working, which means you won’t be able to adjust next time the world changes.

Real-world impact: fewer paywalls, more subscription revenue

A US publisher’s journey from a rigid freemium model to smart segmentation highlights the power of behavioral data. They discovered that just 1% of traffic drove 25% of conversions.

By analyzing attributes, they found that newsletter click-throughs and direct repeat traffic were high-value, while Facebook and Android traffic converted at near-zero rates. By stopping the paywall for near-zero segments and doubling down on high-value behavioral and technographic signals, they achieved:

• A 2x increase in conversion rate.
• 50% fewer paywall exposures, leading to a better user experience for the same number of new subscribers.

Did this publisher get it completely, fully right? Absolutely not. But the model was a dramatic improvement over the simplistic frequency and recency model they were using before.

As statistician George Box famously said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Be pragmatic—start with the data you have, build empathy for your readers, and iterate until your segments drive measurable growth.

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

• 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.’