The stories newsrooms publish most are, article for article, the least effective, and Dmitry Shishkin thinks the fix starts with how publishers commission. 

Ten years after a piece of BBC audience research turned into the user needs model, its architect used his FIPP Congress slot in Madrid to argue that most publishers still get this the wrong way round. Shishkin, now an independent consultant after senior roles at the BBC, Culture Trip and Ringier, told the audience that topic and format are only two of publishing’s three pillars. The third, the reader’s motivation, drives subscription and loyalty metrics, and most newsrooms still leave it to instinct.

> Article for article, "update me" pieces underperform every other user need, yet newsrooms produce more of them than anything else

> Tag every piece with three things: the subtopic (personal finance, not just finance), the format (Q&A, feature, listicle, data-led) and the single user need it serves. Then commission on all three

> One dominant need per piece. An article that tries to serve every need gets a headline that can only sell one, so most readers never discover the rest

> Don't let the newsroom write its own user needs model: take the needs from audience research. At Ringier, across five countries, conversions, subscriptions and loyalty metrics all increased once teams moved to the model

Measure the angle as well as the story

Shishkin’s opening slide was the same one he showed a decade ago, and he made no apology for it. A red line tracks the number of articles a publication produces under each user need; a blue bar tracks the average effectiveness of a single article in that category. The red line peaks at “update me”. The blue bar for “update me” is the lowest on the chart. “Educate me”, “give me perspective”, “inspire me” and “divert me” all do better per piece, and the newsroom produces far fewer of them.

The point, he said, is that publishers have always measured stories, and occasionally formats, but almost never the angle of the storytelling. Once you make the angle measurable, you can make editorial choices about it. “It’s not about what we’re going to cover. It’s how specifically we’re going to cover the story.”

He said the pattern has held in every piece of research since, and the gains aren’t confined to engagement. At Ringier Media International, where he oversaw five countries, every team moved to the model, and conversions, subscriptions and loyalty all went up.

> To read next: How the user needs model increases engagement

The everything article is the weakest article

A natural reaction to the chart is to write pieces that satisfy several needs at once. Shishkin argued the opposite. A piece that tries to update, explain, inspire, and help in one go might seem comprehensive to the editor, but its headline can only promise one of those things, so most potential readers never discover the rest. His rule is that every piece should be dominated by one need. Content built this way, he said, consistently outperforms the general piece that has “a lot of user needs in mind, but not one is dominant”.

The generic model has four areas (know, understand, feel and do) and eight needs within them. Specialist publishers should not stop there. Sarah Marshall built a fashion version at Vogue; Shishkin built a travel model at Culture Trip; ten months ago he and the analytics firm smartocto published the first sports model. Retail, finance and health, he suggested, are still open. Needs such as “help me advance my career” or “help me find the right product” belong in the publication model that serves them.

Three tags, and a different commissioning meeting

For publishers who want something to implement, Shishkin reduced structured data to three fields. First, the subtopic: “finance” is not enough; the tag has to say personal finance or corporate finance. Second, the format, which he was emphatic is not audio, video or text. Those are content types. Formats are the roughly ten shapes a story can take regardless of medium: Q&A, feature, listicle, data-led piece and so on. Third, the user need.

The commissioning conversation then changes. Using a motoring publisher as a worked example, he listed six ways to cover one car launch: explain it to me, help me decide, protect me, price me, show me how, update me. A publisher might concede “help me decide” to a rival and concentrate on “show me how”.

You can use the same tagging to test a mission statement. Most Chief Executives say their publication exists to explain the world, so the share of output tagged “explain to me” should be high. “If your journalism is only 20% explain to me, then your mission statement is wrong.”

Who owns the model

The most pointed line of the session was that newsrooms should be prohibited from writing their own user needs model. A newsroom that sets its own needs and then maps its own output to them is grading its own work. The needs have to come from audience research.

That matters commercially because the model is, in his phrase, the shortest way to unite an organisation. When product people and journalists call the same thing by different names, each quietly stops believing the other. At Culture Trip, his first act was to put senior editors and product managers in one group and get them to agree on the names of things.

Once the vocabulary is shared, product can act on it. If every vertical is producing “inspire me” content, a product manager can bundle it across sport, news and food into one proposition and sell it differently. The harder prerequisite is normalising data across the CMS, email, CRM and video tools; without a single source of truth, any editorial argument can be rebutted with a different dashboard within five minutes.

Beyond content

Two closing arguments bear on retention. First, “commodity content”, the material everyone has and nobody enjoys making, should be automated so that human time goes on original work; most publishers have that balance the wrong way round. Second, content alone will not sustain a relationship. “You need to be helpful to people.” His example was a two-person cycling title that maps Tour de France climbs so readers can plan their own rides. Every niche, he argued, needs a utility like that.

He expects AI agents to do the retrospective analysis, scanning a year of output for underserved combinations of need, subtopic, and format.

How to try it

Shishkin’s advice is to start small: pick one title, section or subsection, and work through four steps.

• Ask what needs your audience has. Take them from audience research, not from the newsroom.
• Check whether your content reflects those needs.
• Check whether your taxonomy captures it. A tag that says only “finance” cannot show which kind of finance story is working.
• Analyse your existing content retrospectively against those needs, then start optimising.

For a large portfolio, the prize is cross-vertical bundling that product teams cannot build today. For a single specialist title, it is a defensible position on one or two needs a competitor has left open. His closing question applies to both: if you disappeared tomorrow, what would change in your audience’s life?

The post Why your newsroom shouldn’t write its own user needs model, and what to do instead appeared first on Audiencers.

Every year, INNOVATION Media Consulting’s Innovation in Media report, published for WAN-IFRA and FIPP, takes stock of trends in the industry and, in particular, how publishers are making money. The 2026/27 edition’s theme is that the model hasn’t broken, but it has matured.

Reader revenue is now the main source of income for many news businesses, making up 46% of total revenue for the median news business unit, overtaking advertising. The Reuters Institute adds that the share of people paying for (or using) paid online news has nearly doubled over the past decade, to almost one in five adults across 20 markets.

But the report is clear that the most engaged readers have largely already converted, acquisition is slowing and fewer new users are entering subscription funnels. So what comes next? We’ve pulled out the trends and case studies that matter most for reader revenue teams to share 7 lessons to help overcome this challenge.

> Subscribers keep growing while traffic falls. At the NYT, WSJ and The Guardian, growth now comes from higher prices (up 5% on average in 2025), upgrades and bundles, not bigger audiences

> With monthly churn often below 5%, small retention gains have an outsized revenue impact. Leading publishers treat pricing as a variable and the cancellation journey as a moment to reinforce value

> Bundles pay off through retention, not price. NYT bundle subscribers pay slightly less per user but churn significantly less. At Mediahuis, subscribers who activated the RouteYou app churned around 26.5% less

> Build outward from your journalism. Bundle additions closely tied to editorial content stick, bigger leaps don't. For membership, spell out whether readers pay for access, a cause or a community

1. Subscriber growth has decoupled from traffic growth

Digiday’s reporting, cited in the report, shows that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian have continued to grow their subscriber bases (in some cases, faster than before) while their overall traffic declined over a 12-month period.

That growth isn’t coming from bigger audiences. It’s coming from getting more value out of existing ones:

• Subscription prices rose by an average of 5% year over year in 2025
• Publishers pushed subscribers towards higher-value tiers and bundles
• Meanwhile, median audience reach across the hundreds of publishers tracked by INMA fell by double digits year over year, driven by weaker news cycles, falling platform referrals and competition from creators

The post Subscriptions grow up: 7 reader revenue lessons from Innovation in Media report 2026/27 appeared first on Audiencers.

Building a sustainable digital reader revenue strategy requires a careful balance between user experience, advertising revenue, and subscriber acquisition. For Grupo Joly, Andalusia’s leading regional media group spanning 11 publications, including Diario de Sevilla and Diario de Cádiz, navigating this transition meant laying strategic groundwork years before launching paid subscriptions.

We spoke to Ana María Ferrand, Head of Data Analytics & Project Manager, Pedro Moreno, Product Manager, and Laura Grimaldi, Head of Engagement & Retention, about this strategy. 

> Grupo Joly, Andalusia's leading regional group with 11 titles including Diario de Sevilla and Diario de Cadiz, spent years on groundwork before charging for anything. A free registration wall launched in 2021 turned anonymous readers into known ones, and registered users spent longer on site and read more pages per session than anonymous ones

> Simpler won twice. A/B testing found clean, text-focused paywalls converted better than elaborate visual designs. And a single high-value annual offer beat showing monthly and annual side by side, lifting click-through across every reader segment. Over 92% of subscribers now take the annual plan

> Paywall visibility sits at around 34%, rising slowly. Fast-breaking general news stays open under a high metered threshold to protect traffic and programmatic revenue, while opinion columns, local analysis and regional sport go behind the wall

> Calls to action are embedded natively between paragraphs and in inline cards as readers scroll, rather than as pop-ups, to avoid ad-blocker and intrusive-interstitial penalties. The whole programme is run by a four-person core team, rolled out brand by brand rather than across all 11 at once

1. The pre-subscription phase: building an engaged database

Before introducing paid access, Grupo Joly focused on cultivating reader loyalty and collecting valuable audience data.

• The registration wall as a stepping stone: In 2021, the group launched a free registration strategy. By requiring users to create an account to access key benefits, such as tailored newsletters or exclusive reader contests, they transformed anonymous visitors into known, registered users.
• Habit-building value proposition: Free registration was presented as a premium service, helping readers build strong habits prior to any payment requirement.
• Increased engagement: Registered users demonstrated significantly higher engagement metrics, spending more time on site and consuming more page views per session compared to anonymous visitors. This registered pool established the ideal target audience for eventual paid conversions.

2. Launching subscriptions

When Grupo Joly launched paid subscriptions, they integrated Poool to manage paywalls, content access, and user journey optimization.

• Phased brand rollout: Rather than implementing paid models across all 11 brands simultaneously, the small 4-person core team opted for a progressive rollout. They began with flagship publications like Diario de Sevilla before expanding to title brands like Diario de Cádiz.
• Testing and simplifying design: The group initially tested elaborate visual paywall designs, but discovered through A/B testing that clean, text-focused, straightforward designs led to higher conversion rates.
• Single vs. dual offer messaging: While paywalls showing both monthly and annual plans were tested, presenting a single, high-value annual offer drove significantly higher click-through rates (CTR) across all reader segments. Over 92% of subscribers ultimately opted for the annual subscription.

3. Revenue balancing & paywall visibility

A primary challenge for regional publishers is safeguarding existing programmatic and advertising revenues while scaling subscription income.

• Targeted paywall visibility: Grupo Joly maintains an overall paywall visibility rate of approximately 34%, a figure they’re going to slowly increase over time.
• Hybrid access model: Fast-breaking general news is kept accessible under a high metered threshold to preserve traffic and programmatic ad revenue. High-value, unique content, such as opinion columns, local analysis, and regional sports coverage, is placed behind paywalls.
• Non-disruptive messaging: To prevent intrusive ad blockers or pop-up penalties, calls-to-action are embedded natively between article paragraphs or featured in inline content cards as users scroll.

4. Key metrics and future focus

Grupo Joly continues to refine its reader revenue strategy based on direct audience metrics.

Thank you to Ana, Pedro and Laura for their help with this article!

The post Inside Grupo Joly’s subscription strategy: How Spain’s regional giant leverages registration and dynamic paywalls appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #99 sent out on September 30th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

We held our Festival in Paris yesterday with over 400 professionals coming from across the French-speaking world. This slide pretty much speaks for itself

I am however writing this newsletter before the Festival, given that my Tuesday will be a little busy, so a full résumé of the event to follow!

In today’s newsletter:

• The trend is leaning towards smaller, more loyal audiences
• The Economist’s onboarding journey shows exactly where their strategic priorities lie
• How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public
• Links to add to your reading list

The trend is leaning towards smaller, more loyal audiences

For years, publisher growth strategies were governed by mass reach. But with search engine referrals collapsing under the weight of AI overviews and 40% of desktop visitors no longer scrolling past the fold, the vanity-metric era has officially hit a wall. The reality of modern media consumption is that volume no longer guarantees sustainability. Instead, true financial sustainability rests on a power law: a tiny fraction of highly engaged readers drives a quarter of all pageviews and up to 75% of digital revenue. The strategy needs to shift from chasing passive scrollers to cultivating lasting relationships with active, returning community members.

This transition requires a complete overhaul of how newsrooms define success, shifting focus from raw pageviews to depth of engagement, multi-format consumption, and long-term retention, even if that is from a smaller number of readers. As Wired editor Katie Drummond recently put it: “Ultimately, I am very comfortable with the idea that Wired’s audience in the future is a smaller audience, but we want that audience to be loyal.”

This sentiment is echoed across the industry, with publishers moving beyond simple community features to building habit-forming product ecosystems.

The commercial payback of this shift is already proving itself, with The Economist being a brilliant case in point. By expanding into exclusive Insider videos led by journalists, audio formats, personalisation & more, they’ve driven subscriber retention to industry-leading levels.

Nada Arnot, EVP of Marketing at The Economist, shared that “just getting someone to consume 50 pieces of content of whatever format might not actually be useful. What’s more useful is the depth of that engagement and how many different formats they are engaging with, even if it means a fraction of that volume.”

And we can see this strategic move playing out in their onboarding journey alone…

The Economist’s subscriber onboarding journey shows exactly where their strategic priorities lie

Late 2025, The Economist launched Insider, a premium feature that brings subscribers into the newsroom through editor-led shows, biweekly newsletters, and news-making interviews with global leaders.

At Audiencers’ Festival in London, Principal Product Manager Diana Babei shared that insider is already proving to build loyalty and trust in ways that article text doesn’t, including high engagement with this product (75% of subscribers) and lower churn among Insider viewers.

In June of this year, the brand launched Play, a separate subscription offer that uses the same human-first AV formats that drive Insider’s loyalty, but packages them at a lower price point to build habits and acquire audiences who haven’t yet subscribed (interview with Nada Arnot here).

This pivot to relationship-building, with formats bringing audiences closer to journalists, is clear in their subscriber onboarding journey (I’ve found that you can tell a lot from a publisher’s onboarding journey!)

> New subscribers are asked about their interests, preferred format & when they usually consume content, with a final screen pushing the app

> This ticks off a variety of requirements for encouraging return visits. Holly Johnson of Condé Nast put this perfectly into a 5-part return trigger loop.

Importantly though, successfully encouraging audiences to return and build deeper relationships requires more than a single community product, such as comments. It should be the entire infarstructure of your product.

FIPP World Media Congress is back in Madrid!

In its 101st year (!!) the FIPP team are back in Madrid this October 13-15th with an impressive 500+ senior media executives from around the world for three days of insights, innovation, and networking. Some of the sessions I’m looking forward to in particular: 

• Getting Paid in the Age of Answer Engines: People Inc.’s AI Model
• From the BBC to Specialist Media: The Next Evolution of the User Needs Model
• How HBR Is Turning Audience Focus into Growth
• Pivot to Premium: Taking Subscriptions Upmarket with The Economist

Use the code AUDIENCERS! for 15% off at checkout here

See you there? 

How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public

Journalism has to be right the first time. Product work learns more from what doesn’t work.

Frank Bi, AI Strategy and Product Advisor at Hacks/Hackers, argues that when products are held to the journalistic bar, nothing half-baked ever launches, so nothing ever teaches you anything…

So how do you hold the line on credibility while building products you’re willing to let fail?

> Build a public sandbox. A labelled subdomain (beta, labs) resets the expectations readers bring to the homepage while still producing real behaviour data. Frank launched the Minnesota Star Tribune’s AI restaurant guide Culinary Compass on the main domain instead, where readers judged a four-week experiment as a Star Tribune guide

> Set the end date before launch, ideally by picking something with a natural start & end. Frank’s Fair Bot ran only the 12 days of the Minnesota State Fair, so nobody ever had to make the call to shut it down

> Show your work. Newsrooms already have a practice for issuing corrections, so extend a version of it to experimental products and publish what the team believed and why, before that thinking disappears at launch

“We work in an industry that expects transparency from the people and institutions we cover. Holding the products we build to some version of that standard is a reasonable place to start, and it’s the part of the journalistic mental model that experimental products should look to keep.”

> Full article from Frank on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• What publishers can learn from creators: be audience, not platform, obsessed
• Steal this strategy: paywall and subscription trends to test to increase conversion rates
• Wired launches new global app

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #99. The Economist’s onboarding reveals their strategic priorities appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #98 sent out on September 16th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter: 

• Do you have enough recurring value for subscriptions? The questions to ask yourself
• Immediate Media: growing to 1.2 million paid subscribers without cannibalising their core print business
• Paywall trends spotted whilst benchmarking: countdowns, signalling free content & personalised text
• Links to add to your reading list

Do you have enough recurring value for subscriptions?

Before locking content or products behind a paywall, every digital publisher should stop and ask whether you actually have enough recurring value for a recurring charge…

> Start with frequency: what do people already come back for? Then use registration as the halfway test, because if your most engaged readers won’t create an account, a payment step will not fare better. It’s a strategy used by Broadsheet Media to prove assumptions 

> Build the paid tier around a behaviour that already exists, giving people materially more of it. If the pricing page needs six unrelated benefits to feel substantial, no single benefit is strong enough

> Be deliberate about what stays free. A story that brings in thousands of first-time visitors has a different job from a specialist product consumed repeatedly by known users, and should be treated differently

> Forecast before you keep building. Apply realistic registration, free-to-paid and retention rates to your own segments, and if the range falls short of what the business needs, stop before the pricing conversation starts

A brilliant article by Jonathan Gupta-Buckley on Audiencers

How do you grow to 1.2 million paid subscribers without cannibalising your core print business?

Instead of forcing print readers onto digital, UK publisher Immediate Media (Good Food, Radio Times, HistoryExtra) built standalone digital utility products that target completely new audiences.

> Print subscribers were never migrated. Immediate built and bought digital products for people who had never bought a magazine: the Good Food app is at just under 200,000 from a 2022 standing start, Nutracheck at 580,000 since its 2023 acquisition

> Paywalled articles only sell if the content is genuinely must-read, and evergreen lifestyle content isn’t. Good Food charges for utility instead: cook mode, planning tools, and app takeovers exclusive to subscribers

> There’s no single Immediate paywall. Stickiness, response rates and build costs differ by brand, so each gets its own model, and Immediate only builds where it leads the category

> A separate commercial team holds the budget and funds products against fixed thresholds: 40-55% trial-to-paid conversion, 65-80% at the next renewal, monthly retention above 90%, and 3:1 lifetime value to acquisition cost within two years

Full interview with Managing Director of Customer Marketing and Subscriptions, Jess Burney, on Audiencers

Paywall trends: spotted whilst benchmarking

Personalising based on the article being read

Like The Cut and SCMP where the text on the paywall includes the title of the article that I was trying to access.

Highlighting content available for free

Like The Verge and NYT who have a dedicated section of their website for this content, and The Independent who tagged a newsletter on the homepage to signal a free month trial.

Countdowns, everywhere!

The number of countdowns that I’ve seen… But I really like Vogue’s version, with a side banner displaying after X amount of time on the subs offer page.

Links to add to your reading list

 Discount for WAN-IFRA Digital Media Europe in London, 22-23 Oct

Digital Media Europe invites product & revenue professionals to come together this 22-23rd October in London, this year focusing on reader revenue strategies on day one, and revenue diversification on day two.

Audiencers benefit from a 20% discount using the code: Audiencers20DME

• The User Ladder: Why Knowing More About Your Readers is Your Newsletter’s Next Unfair Advantage
• Lessons from music industry: how to monetise super users
• How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #98. Do you have enough recurring value for subscriptions? appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #97 sent out on September 2nd, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

It’s September!? Hope you had a great summer and are surviving the return to work ok!

In today’s newsletter: 

• The next engagement shift: from strong products to experience systems
• Why Hearst-owned SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall, and called it “Friends”
• Findings from the 2026 Media App report: super users, non-text formats and measuring the value of your app
• Links to add to your reading list

The next engagement shift: From strong products to experience systems

The bridge connecting audience value to commercial value is experience, and many publishers are skipping it according to Dina Shatner, co-author of The Age of News Experience.

> A crossword, newsletter, live blog, or short-form video series can each create a strong experience. But strong product-level experiences don’t automatically add up to a strong outlet-level experience. Each may work well on its own while the audience still encounters the publisher as a fragmented collection of products

> Social platforms do this well: experience isn’t a feature added to the product. Experience is the product

What are publishers doing wrong then? 

Publishers often move quickly from an audience goal to an output.

“We need to reach younger audiences” becomes “we need more vertical video.”

“We need stronger habits” becomes “we need a daily newsletter.”

What’s the solution? 

The book introduces the AXR framework: audience > experience > revenue

AXR connects audience strategy to revenue through the experience layer. That layer defines the audience moment, the promise, how the product fits into a routine, and the behaviour it should create.

For example, “a daily video briefing for younger audiences” is still mainly a format description.

A stronger definition would describe the audience moment, why the briefing is worth returning to, what should follow it, and which elements, such as the host, pace, promise, or format, must remain recognisable across the sequence, beyond this particular item.

What’s different? Formats produce outputs. Experiences create behaviours. Repeatable behaviours (staying longer, returning more often, and moving to the next item) connect audience value to commercial value.

For Dina, the shift from strong standalone products to interconnected experience systems will mark a critical evolution in reader engagement and retention for media organisations.

> An article that will definitely get you thinking about how to hit the ground running after summer! From Dina Shatner on Audiencers

Why SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall, and called it “Friends”

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. Hearst-owned SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. Instead, the website stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been, whilst their new app, focused heavily on relationship-building, is paid.

Introducing, “Friends of SFGATE”

> The name “Friends of SFGATE” beat “subscription” and “membership” in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund

> The offer includes pop-up newsrooms, live journalism events, California-themed mini crosswords, audio content and personalization options to match the app to a user’s interests

> Nearly 90% of readers who have taken the 7-day free trial so far have converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it’s still early days

> The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time

> Of course, the move to subscriptions and relationship-building has required org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming

Full interview with Grant Marek, Editor-in-Chief of SFGATE, and Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer across Hearst Newspapers, on Audiencers

Findings from the 2026 Media App report

Drawing on 440 apps and 140 publishers, The Pugpig Media App Report finds engagement is wildly concentrated. 15% of monthly users generate 75% of all sessions, and 6% account for 75% of screen views…

> Games, audio and video are the engagement multipliers. Game players open the app 2.7 times more often, video watchers spend 3.3 times longer in it, and audio listeners 2.5 times longer

Search, save and share tell a similar story.

> Between 11% and 94% of a news publisher’s subscribers open its app in a month. Yet only 26% of publishers say the app’s main job is acquiring subscribers

> Publishers agree on what matters: retention, acquisition, time spent. Far fewer can measure it consistently, which makes it easy for the app’s contribution to be undervalued internally

> The biggest blocker is not budget or technology. Half of publishers name product team capacity

But the best-performing apps are usually the ones publishers have consistently given time, resources and attention to, rather than those with technical sophistication.

Full article summary from the Pugpig team on Audiencers.

Links to add to your reading list

• One model proposes using three audience signals to decide which stories deserve more investment
• Beyond Reader Revenue: Interview with Aled John, Group Strategy Director at the Financial Times
• Your industry event calendar (that we’ll keep updating as more dates get announced)

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #97. Why Hearst-owned SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #96 sent out on August 19th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter: 

• The Economist launches new audio & video subscription offer to build deeper relationships with readers
• What are synthetic audiences? Can they replace real ones in research? How can you benefit from them? Khalil provides the guide
•  Audiencers’ industry event calendar
• Links to add to your reading list

The Economist launches new audio & video subscription to build deeper relationships

The Economist recently launched Play, an audio and video subscription tier priced lower than the core digital subscription to attract new audiences & build deeper relationships.

Why? A growing audience across all age ranges is consuming news in audio and video form, specifically in the in-between moments of a day: commuting, walking a dog, running errands. The Economist wanted a way to show up at this moment without asking people to pay full price for a format mix they didn’t want yet

What? Subscribing to Play gives you every piece of audio and video content that’s also available to full Premium subscribers, curated through an editor-shaped homepage, plus access to the subscriber-only newsletter. What it doesn’t give you is the written journalism; those articles remain visible but paywalled, with an upgrade to Premium as the unlock. It’s not a separate app or standalone product, rather a subscription tier inside the existing economist app

How is this performing? First results show an uptick in core Premium sign-ups. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product acts as an anchor, nudging undecided visitors to pay a little extra for the full suite. What’s more, conversions through Play have been driven almost entirely by brand-new readers rather than existing subscribers trading down

Our view: This launch is just one piece of a long-term move toward human-centered publishing, from podcasts to  short-form video, Insider (a premium feature launched in late 2025 that brings subscribers into the newsroom through editor-led shows, biweekly newsletters, and newsmaking interviews with global leaders, building retention & loyalty), and now Play. 

In an AI-saturated information environment, the publishers who win will be the ones readers feel some kind of human connection to, whether that connection starts with an audio tier or a premium interview

Full article interview with Nada Arnot, Co-Managing Director, on Audiencers

Can synthetic audiences replace real ones in audience research?

Many assume that synthetic audiences means we can skip audience research entirely

But consultant Khalil A. Cassimally argues that they’re for narrowing decisions, never making them.

> They can rank, not measure. A synthetic panel will reliably tell you which of six newsletter concepts is weakest, but it won’t tell you willingness to pay, adoption rate, or satisfaction score. These require a real number, not a ranking

> Accuracy depends entirely on what you feed it. An LLM asked to “act like a 35-year-old subscriber” is guessing. A “digital twin” built from an actual interview transcript or cancellation email carries real signal. Stanford found these twins hit roughly 85% of a human’s own test-retest consistency

> Another challenges is that they skew WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) and cluster toward agreement, meaning they’ll flatten the edge cases (at-risk subscribers, superfans etc) that usually matter most

> The workflow that Khalil recommends: fix the decision first, ground the panel in real reader material you already have (old interviews, cancellation reasons, unread survey comments), ask it to compare or analyse rather than just count responses, then validate whatever survives with real people

Full guide on how to where they help, where they stop, and how to run one from Khalil on Audiencers

Your industry events calendar

Starting to plan the next few months of conferences for mastering your digital reader revenue model? Look no further than our new Audiencers’ event calendar!

P.s. If you speak French, you should definitely be coming to our Festival in Paris this September, featuring L’Équipe, Future PLC, Le Temps, Mediahuis, Le Monde & more.

Links to add to your reading list

• What makes subscribers churn – and how the tech industry will keep them
• Publishers’ biggest tech problem is no longer missing tools but disconnected ones
• Designing a more accurate subscription funnel for news media

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #96. The why behind The Economist’s new audio & video subscription appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #95 sent out on August 5th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter: 

• A little Audiencers website refresh is happening
• How the team at Funke Media make better decisions with a KPI tree
• Broadsheet is yet another publisher proving the value of registration in a subs model
• Links to add to your reading list

 A little website refresh 

I don’t know about anyone else, but with fewer emails and no events, summer is always the best moment to dig into some of the projects that have been on the sidelines for months. For me, one such project has been to spruce up the website

The goal: to be as useful to you as possible

How: by helping to surface the right case studies, benchmarks and best practices when you need them, instead of having to dig through pages of articles

The solution (or at least one of them): a tidier menu, with a stronger focus on tools and community over articles

And something I’ve been dreaming of for a while, a filtered case study list  

There’s still a lot of work needed to continue to build out these pages, and our products, but I’d really appreciate your feedback, thoughts and ideas already! Just hit reply to this newsletter:)

(And if you’ve been working on something that would make for a good case study to add to this database, I’d also love to hear from you!)

How the team at Funke Media make better decisions with a KPI tree

Product decisions at most news organisations get made by whoever’s loudest in the room, or by instinct built from experience. Stefan Schneiderbauer, Senior Product Manager, FUNKE, built a framework to replace that with more structured, evidence-led decision-making instead. 

Introducing, the KPI tree: 

The goal is to ground product decisions in evidence, not to take judgment out of the process. And luckily for you, the tree is pretty easy to replicate in your team.

 Start with one metric (not dashboard) at the top. Funke picked Engaged Time, then broke it down layer by layer: what drives sessions, what drives active users, what drives new vs. returning. Each layer down gets more specific, until you hit a movable metric, one a single product decision can actually shift.

 One of the most useful things a completed tree enables is simple calculation.

Once you have even a partial tree, you can start to model the relationships between metrics. Take any KPI in the tree that is influenced by two variables below it. Increase each of those variables by five percent in isolation and see what happens to the KPI above. Which one has the bigger effect? A basic sensitivity analysis like this tells you quickly where the highest-leverage opportunities are in your product, and where effort is likely to be wasted.

Only after the tree exists, build the org around it. Funke’s four pillars (Reach, Engagement, Monetisation, Infrastructure) came directly from the tree’s branches

 Don’t start with the whole tree. Stefan’s advice is to instrument one branch, show your team what it reveals, and let that build the internal case before you expand

> Find Stefan’s full piece here, originally shared at Audiencers’ Festival London

Broadsheet is yet another publisher proving the value of registration in a subs model

The team at Broadsheet, Australia’s leading cultural publisher, now with a London edition, chose to implement a registration wall a few months ahead of their subscription launch. 

Aside from setting the tone for a value exchange and guiding product strategy, the goal of this strategy was to:

1. Unlock engagement features to increase user exposure to the upcoming paywall

2. Secure marketing permissions to establish direct communication channels which heavily influence later conversion to subscription. 

Despite being in the early stages of the paywall rollout, Broadsheet data has already brought in key insights on user behavior, and the value of this model on the reader revenue funnel:

• Registration captures high quality readers: Superfans register at a rate 127x higher than casual readers, making them prime target for direct relationships
• Newsletters initiate the conversion journey: registered newsletter subscribers over-index on paywall hits by 10x compared to the average user

• The newsletter is the core conversion engine: a daily newsletter serves as an automated nudge that yields 3.5 paywall hits per unique visitor, a 35x higher exposure rate than anonymous readers.
• The compounding effect drives the majority of subscriptions: the micro-segment of registered, newsletter-engaged users (just 0.7% of total audience) drives a massive 43% of all digital subscriptions (a 61x over-index).

• Registration unlocks direct offer emails: Registration captures critical marketing consent, enabling direct sales offer emails to convert warm leads. At Broadsheet, immediate sales emails successfully account for 18% of all subscription conversions

It’s certainly the kind of data that should encourage you to consider a registration wall strategy!

> Find the full summary of Ross Wilmot’s, Direct of Reader Revenue, session at Audiencers’ Festival London on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• The Observer UK, a 233-year-old title, launched its first-ever digital subscription. Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer, explains why simplicity beat segmentation at launch, and why the hardest part hasn’t been the tech.
• 3 acquisition tactics from Foreign Policy, a publication offering near-to-zero free articles
• In Sweden, VK Media has blended marketing and newsroom to increase its audience

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #95. Make more informed decisions with a KPI tree appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #94 sent out on July 22nd, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

It’s mid-July and I feel like I’m mainly speaking with automated OOO replies Still, the newsletter goes on! At the very least, I hope it helps you to catch up once you’re back!

In today’s newsletter: 

• Information fatigue: why Les Echos are betting on « La Sélection » rather than unlimited access
• Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free
• Before you bundle: how to find out what your subscribers actually want
• Links to add to your reading list

P.S. If you’re an avid Audiencers’ reader and have a bit of time to spare over summer, I’d love 15 mins of your time to improve on what we do! Just reply to this email and we’ll find a slot:) Thank youuu! 

Why Les Echos are betting on “La Sélection” rather than unlimited access

How do we deal with information fatigue? 

With research suggesting that consumers are becoming increasingly more overwhelmed by too much information, the question is an important one for an industry selling access to it.

At the French daily business newspaper, Les Echos, the answer isn’t unlimited access, but a daily, deliberately limited but highly curated “selection” subscription offer.

“La Sélection” rests on three core criteria.

• Balance: the goal is no longer breaking news at all costs (others do breaking news better than Les Echos), but information that is useful for understanding the world and taking a step back
• Calm: plural voices and op-eds, but grounded in evidence-based, balanced arguments
• Impartiality: the title’s historic value

These break down into three guiding axes:

• Reason over ideology: an economic DNA that calls for a rational, almost mathematical reading of the world
• Optimism over fatalism: giving room to success stories and to solutions that work
• Ambition over declinism: investigations and analysis to handle professional and personal challenges

On the production side, it is a genuine editorial discipline, run by a dedicated team (two full-time journalists, according to our information). Each day, the newsroom produces between 120 and 150 articles; this team selects 9 to 15 of them, spread across a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) with fixed quotas per category, several times a day. Concretely, “develop” accounts for around 20% of topics, while “get inspired” and “unwind” are capped at 10% each.

> Find the full article on Audiencers, and come back in a few months for the first results!

Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free

When you’re working to continuously optimise your paywall strategy and sell access to content, it’s crazy to think about how The Guardian has convinced 1.4M to pay when anyone can read it, whether they pay or not. 

But even if you’re a paywalled publisher, Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth, reminded us at the Audiencers’ Festival in Montréal that access doesn’t need to be the thing you’re selling. For The Guardian, it’s their story of ownership. 

> The organisation’s value proposition comes down to three words – global, independent, free. Owned by the Scott Trust, their sole purpose is to ensure The Guardian can keep publishing. It’s this that’s sold to readers.

> One email, built entirely around that pitch, generated $2 million!… When The Washington Post and LA Times pulled their 2024 election endorsements, The Guardian sent readers a simple message – we published ours, and always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to.

> But it’s the method that’s worth noting rather than the moment: The Guardian surveys readers right after they give, with the goal of understanding supporter motivations. The top answers include protecting the free press, editorial independence, or the journalism itself.

> These surfaced motivations don’t just become a slide that’s presented once to the team, they’re used to build every single message that asks for support. They keep telling the story, deliberately and repeatedly.

Thanks to this blend of mission + motivation + benefits, people don’t pay for access, they pay to support The Guardian’s story. 

For The Guardian, the story is ownership. For your publication, it might be something else entirely, a specific beat, a founding mission, a community it serves. One method Emilie shared is to survey people right after they convert while the reason is still fresh. You can then build your marketing copy around what they tell you, something that works regardless of what that story turns out to be.

> Find the full summary on Audiencers

Before you bundle: how to find out what your subscribers actually want

When you start testing value props and benefits, it’s easy to mix and match features, and try to cram everything onto one page to make subscription “worth the cost”…

But as audience research leader Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines, Director of Subscriptions at Skift, shared at Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, research has proven that the biggest driver of loyalty isn’t usually price or feature count. It’s a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn’t get anywhere else

Your team can answer this easily, but the real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you’re trying to reach. Emily said that, at a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already. You’ll walk away smarter from even one conversation, and people will even thank you for simply asking for their perspectives.

Once you know your differentiation, packaging decisions get easier. Rachel’s 3-question test before bundling anything: does it strengthen or dilute each product’s identity? Are the audiences actually converging? Can your ops hold it together without the seams showing?

 Sometimes the research tells you to do nothing. One of Skift’s four products stayed untouched, on purpose, and it’s now one of their steadiest, best growing subscriptions.

> Full session from Emily and Rachel on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• The Publishers’ Tech Stack Study: findings from the 2026 survey 
• The reality check of user needs: “Update me” drives most demand for news
• How publishers are winning back the direct reader relationship
• In Spanish: Los medios tienen audiencia, pero no siempre comunidad: cómo activar a los lectores que siguen las noticias en silencio / The media has an audience, but not always a community: how to engage readers who follow the news silently

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #94. Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #93 sent out on July 8th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

After a packed-to-the-brim month of events, and more networking than I thought was possible in such a short space of time, I’ve resurfaced with a (surprisingly?) positive outlook for the industry. Conversations and recent articles are increasingly agreeing with the necessary direction that the industry needs to take. The connection economy, the community era, whatever we call it, the priority today should be about building relationships with audiences.

So, in my enthusiasm for the topic, it’s taking over today’s newsletter: 

• The traditional attention economy is being replaced by a connection economy 
• Is frequency the most concrete, easily-measurable metric to build these relationships?
• What does this all look like in practice? How Financial Times already prioritises belonging
• Don’t just take our word for it: other useful links on the topic

The traditional attention economy is being replaced by a connection economy

Back in March, at our Festival in Hamburg, Heiko Scherer, CEO and co-founder of tchop, took to the stage to discuss belonging, advocacy and trust, and how you define, measure and build relationships that last. 

What was clear from the conversation was that the traditional attention economy is being replaced by a connection economy. Reach & traffic are now merely necessary, surface-level foundations rather than the end goal. Instead, publishers should be moving towards belonging, measured by return, participation and sharing. 

The challenge with these connection metrics is that there are such a wide variety of definitions, as well as emotional and functional layers of a reader’s relationship with a brand.

For Heiko, it could look something like this:

But these types of metrics pose interesting questions about measurement and optimisation…

Is frequency the most concrete, easily-measurable metric to build these relationships?

Whilst belonging, advocacy and trust are hard to define and measure, RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) has been a customer-analytics staple for decades. Recency tells you when someone last showed up. Volume tells you how much content they consumed while they were there. But of those three letters, frequency is the one that quietly does the heavy lifting, because frequency tells you whether you have a business.

Frequency is the metric that tracks habit formation, that signals brand loyalty. It’s the leading indicator of customer lifetime value, registration propensity, and subscription conversion. And in an environment where AI is steadily eroding the casual, search-driven visit, frequency is the only metric that compounds in your favour.

What’s more, in an era where AI can summarise, paraphrase and serve without ever sending a click your way, content is increasingly a commodity. Community, however, is not. This is where Frequency lives.

AI can’t replicate the experience of debating a local election with your neighbours in a comment thread moderated by your newsroom. It can’t replicate a live Q&A with the reporter who broke the story. It can’t replicate the feeling of being recognised, replied to, and known by a brand you trust.

When publishers invest in community-building experiences like these, readers stop coming back for the content alone. They start coming back for the conversation. This shift is what Mark Zohar, President & CEO of Viafoura, calls the Frequency Loop.

Readers come for the content > they stay for the conversation > they get notified of replies and live events > they return > they register > they subscribe. Every loop tightens the bond, increases the visit count, and unlocks more revenue per user.

As Mark highlights, whilst AI is going to keep getting better at answering questions, it’s not going to get better at being a community. It’s this asymmetry that provides the single largest strategic opening for publishers 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.

> Mark’s article is definitely in line with Heiko’s conversation above, maybe adding a more accessible angle given that frequency is (hopefully) already part of your KPIs

What does this all look like in practice? How Financial Times already prioritises relationship-building

Lucy Alexander, Director of Analytics & Insights at FT,  described how belonging, trust and advocacy sit at the center of the brand, and importantly, are business drivers:

• 58% of subscribers chose the FT specifically because they needed a reliable news source they could trust
• 15% of readers start their journey with the FT through articles shared on ft.com
• Another 11% of new readers begin consuming FT content based on direct recommendations from friends or colleagues.

How is the FT building belonging, trust & advocacy?

> The shift from physical to digital advocacy – historically, the physical pink newspaper served as a visible, integral part of reader advocacy, acting as a badge of identity. As the industry shifts, the FT is replicating this “outward expression” through digital means:

• The emotional layer: Advocacy is defined as the “outward expression” of a reader’s relationship with the brand.
• Signaling identity: Readers share FT content because it “signals who I am” to their professional and social networks.

> Strategic “Trusted Voices” – to deepen this advocacy, the FT launched the Trusted Voices marketing pilot in 2025.

• Personal branding: By elevating individual writers and creating personal brands, the FT encourages readers to defend and promote specific journalists, which in turn reinforces their loyalty to the parent publication.
• Broadening inclusivity: Initiatives to make the FT feel less like a “gendered entity” (moving from 80% male in 2016 to 92% non-gendered perception in 2025) have been essential in making more people feel they belong, thus empowering a more diverse group of advocates.

> Cultivating “evangelical” communities – the FT fosters advocacy by creating spaces for “authentic” and “nerdy” interactions that go beyond standard corporate communication.

The FT Alphaville section for instance has developed a core of evangelical fans by maintaining an authentic tone that appeals to readers on a personal level.

These micro-communities focus on specific niches where belonging forms most naturally.

Ultimately, whilst content is the trigger, interaction and participation are the product. Looping back to Heiko’s discussion, it’s in this area that we have a lot to learn from social platforms.

Don’t just take our word for it…

Other links on the topic of trust, advocacy and belonging:

• The rise of explainers as an audience growth strategy: CNN, Bloomberg, Vox and the Financial Times are proving that helping audiences understand complex issues can drive engagement, trust, and sustainable business growth
• In Spanish: ‘La confianza no se automatiza’: humanización del periodismo para fidelizar audiencias 

“At The Athletic, individual journalists are usually the main point of contact with readers. In a subscription model, trust is built directly with the reporter as much as with the publication. That’s why we don’t see personal brands as something to resist. Our approach is to align them with the strengths of the company,” – Claudio Cabrera, Vice President of Audience.

• Navigating the Community Era: key takeaways from the 2026 Future Newsrooms Study

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #93. How is the FT building belonging, trust & advocacy? appeared first on Audiencers.