At its stand at VivaTech, on Tuesday 17 June 2026, Les Echos devoted a session to a question every publisher knows: "What is the answer to French readers' information fatigue?". On the agenda: the data-backed diagnosis from Jean-Baptiste Leroux (OpinionWay), the brand's values presented by Célia Pénavaire (journalist and digital editor-in-chief at Les Echos), then the product answer led by Yasmine Maslouhi, Director of subscription activities and revenue at Les Echos: a new offer called « La Sélection ». Here is what to take away.

• OpinionWay’s diagnosis: the average French person consumes about 6 media families a day, 20% already use a generative AI to get informed, but a majority say they feel overwhelmed, even fatigued, by the news.
• Les Echos’ conviction: faced with information fatigue, unlimited access is not the answer. The group is making the opposite bet, that of selection.
• “La Sélection”: between 9 and 15 articles a day, chosen from a daily output of 120 to 150 pieces, following a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) and a strict quota discipline.
• Three platforms (a dedicated tab in the app, a section on the site, a daily newsletter), a weekly long read on Saturdays, and 5 shareable articles a month. Early bird price: €9.90 a month.

The diagnosis: more information, but a consumption that comes at a high psychological cost

Jean-Baptiste Leroux (OpinionWay) set the scene. Information fatigue, also called information overload, is a concept born among American sociologists in the 1970s, taken up in Europe and reworked by Edgar Morin around the idea of an “information cloud”, the body of information delivered each day by the basket of media we consume. The average French person consumes around 6 media families a day (television, radio, press, social media, podcasts, and now AI). A live test in the room: roughly 20% of French people use a generative AI such as ChatGPT to get informed about the news.

The first virtue of this cloud is that it informs people better than 20 years ago, even as the world is seen as increasingly complex. But the trade-off is heavy: the feeling of always seeing the same information, the sense, at the end of the day, of not having learned much, and a majority of French people who say they feel overwhelmed, even fatigued, by the news. For some of them, the news is even seen as depressing.

It is not the information itself that is depressing, it is the way it is prioritised and treated. If you only put forward hot, anxiety-inducing news, with a sensationalist treatment, you create anxiety.

Jean-Baptiste Leroux, OpinionWay

His metaphor: the ocean. Immediacy-driven media stay at the surface, on the foam of the waves. Media that take you down to the depths teach you something, but that is more demanding. All of this in a climate of distrust, fuelled by the sense that fake news is multiplying and the impression that media favour the clash of egos and ideas over explanation and analysis. In response, French people build their own strategies: cross-checking sources, talking about the news with those close to them (83% see the news as a topic to discuss with the people around them), taking back control to choose their information rather than endure it, favouring media that help them understand, easing the pressure by slowing down their consumption, and finally accepting that quality information has value and must be paid for. Total avoidance, for its part, concerns only 10 to 15% of French people.

Les Echos’ answer: four editorial pillars and an assumed responsibility

Yasmine Maslouhi first noted that journalists feel this fatigue too, and that it is wrong to believe only anxiety-inducing content works: inspiring and useful content, success stories or profiles of business leaders, work just as well. The group’s answer rests on four editorial pillars. Two belong to the title’s historic DNA, more than a hundred years old: reliability (systematic verification of every piece of information, across all platforms, drawing on a newsroom of experts) and impartiality (analysing the facts without taking sides, decoding the economy and the life of companies). Two are more recent: inspiration (solutions journalism, which does not just note a problem but shows who is solving it) and useful information, for professional as well as personal life (handling a toxic manager, for example).

It is essential for us to give people back a taste for the news, and a taste for reading. We want to live in a society where people read, where everyone can give themselves at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading. It is also a societal stake: to take an informed part in public life, people need to rediscover a taste for information.

Yasmine Maslouhi, Director of subscription activities and revenue, Les Echos

Two needs, two answers: unlimited on one side, selection on the other

The most interesting strategic point for publishers lies in a deliberately segmented view of needs. On one side, readers who use Les Echos daily to work, to prepare business plans or pitches. For them, the answer remains unlimited access to the documentation and to 35 years of archives, complemented by a new AI assistant designed to boost their daily productivity. On the other, those looking for a trusted daily intellectual companion. For that need, Les Echos’ position is clear: unlimited access is not the answer.

Unlimited access has been used a lot as a promise by telecoms and by media. Today, with this information fatigue, we believe a different promise is needed. We have chosen almost the opposite promise: selection.

Yasmine Maslouhi, Les Echos

“La Sélection”: three criteria, three values, one editorial discipline

“La Sélection” rests on three core criteria. Balance first: 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 next: plural voices and op-eds, but grounded in evidence-based, balanced arguments. Impartiality finally, the title’s historic value.

Presented in the opening by Célia Pénavaire, the title’s values break down into three guiding axes for this selection: 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), and 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. A culture piece or a roundup of the best summer crime novels thus has its place alongside the conflict in the Middle East.

Three platforms, a weekly long read, and sharing

“La Sélection” is designed to be identifiable on the three most consulted platforms: a dedicated tab in the app (in the form of immersive cards), a section of the same name on the Les Echos site, and a daily newsletter in your inbox (at 8:30am, signed by the newsroom). On the app, choosing your interests unlocks additional articles; on the site, subscribers can access the full history of past selections. All with some personalisation, but deliberately limited, to preserve a common core shared by all subscribers. On top of that, every Saturday morning, an exclusive long read looks back on the week’s key events, signed by the editors-in-chief Christophe Jakubyszyn and Clémence Lemaistre. And because information is meant to be shared, the offer includes 5 articles to share freely with those close to you each month.

Pricing: a deliberately accessible positioning

Conceived as a daily intellectual companion, the offer is meant to be accessible to as many people as possible, and gives access only to this daily selection (site, app and newsletter). The early bird price is €9.90 a month. Yasmine Maslouhi claimed a positioning “cheaper than Canal+, cheaper than Netflix, and even cheaper than Le Monde today”. A special VivaTech offer was available on the stand: two months free. Note that the AI assistant for professional use was presented right next door, on the same stand.

To subscribe to La Sélection, it’s here. See you in a few months for the first results…

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If you’re trying to scale a subscription or membership program, look at your current structure. Are you offering a clean, high-signal experience, or are you serving your readers "feature soup"?

At the Audiencers Festival in Montreal on June 25th, audience research leader Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines, Director of Subscriptions at Skift, took the stage to break down a critical digital publishing dilemma: How do you package subscriptions to drive business growth without alienating the very audience that keeps you alive?

Subscription fatigue is real. Reuters Institute research from earlier this year found that nearly half of people say they’re extremely interested in news, but less than one in five pay for any of it online. Those numbers don’t match — and if you’ve ever tried to count how many recurring charges are on your own credit card, you already know why. Streaming services, meal kits, toilet paper, fitness trackers, “subscriptions to manage your subscriptions.” People are tired.

That’s not entirely bad news for publishers. It’s an opening. Goligoski spent years running the research practice at NYU’s Membership Puzzle Project, interviewing supporters of news organizations — subscribers, members, donors — across roughly 500 news organizations worldwide. Her research question was almost embarrassingly simple: what frustrates you about mainstream media? People could talk for an hour.

What consistently came out of those conversations was that the single biggest driver of loyalty wasn’t price or feature count. It was a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn’t get anywhere else, followed by a calming, low-friction user experience that let them do what they came to do and get out.

The exercise: fill in the blank

To find that sense of uniqueness, Goligoski runs newsroom leaders through simple prompts about their organizations:

• First in the subject, region, or world to ___
• Best compared to competitors in ___
• Only organization to ___

The exercise surfaces an origin story fast. But it’s only half the picture, and it’s the easy half — anyone can answer these questions for themselves around a conference table. The real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you’re trying to reach, who often can’t name your staff or your specific value prop but can place you loosely (“oh, that’s the one about the business of fashion”). The gap between the two answer sets is the actual work. It tells you what you think differentiates you and what has actually landed.

Her rule of thumb for this kind of testing: n+1 is better than n. At a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already. You’ll walk away smarter from even one conversation, and Goligoski says fifteen years into doing this work, people still thank her for simply being asked for their perspectives.

But watch out for “feature soup.” When you start testing value props and benefits, it’s easy to try to cram everything onto one page or into one pitch. If a first-time visitor needs a magnifying glass to understand what they’re being offered, you’ve already lost the differentiation you were trying to build.

A few examples she pointed to of publishers getting specificity right:

• Caper, a New York food media outlet, prices its annual subscription against hyper-local reference points: “less than a burrata pizza slice at L’Industrie, a potato pancake at Veselka” instead of the generic “less than a cup of coffee a day.” It grounds the price and quietly reminds readers how many small recurring charges they’re already carrying.

• The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review have a once-a-year summer bundle offer for two publications with possible audience overlap and growth potential, a financially compelling deal rather than a permanent merge.
• Capital B, a Black-media outlet in the US, sent an anniversary email that included an actual screenshot of the text exchange between its two co-founders deciding to launch. It reads as human in a way most subscription marketing doesn’t.

Goligoski’s closing asks for anyone doing this work: 

• Limit friction wherever you find it
• Take a less-is-more approach to any data you collect (only ask what you’ll actually act on)
• Keep a running, visible wishlist of the features and coverage areas you hear people ask for. That list becomes a genuine insight bank over time.

The Skift case study: is your product an audience or a feature?

Mines joined Skift, a B2B travel media and events company, two years ago and inherited what she called “a family I didn’t plan for”: four separate subscription products, none designed to sit together.

• Skift Pro: always-on travel news, home-grown, positioned as “the Bloomberg of travel”
• Skift Research: long-form, data-driven reports, also home-grown, aimed at strategy and analytics buyers making a major decision rather than staying informed daily
• Airline Weekly: a roughly 20-year-old acquired product, once faxed, now a newsletter with its own site, read closely by aviation executives (Delta CEO Ed Bastian has called it “the only thing I read every week”)
• Daily Lodging Report: a similarly old acquisition, a daily digest for hospitality and real-estate operators

Three questions before you package anything

1. Identity: does combining these products strengthen each one’s core value, or dilute it?
2. Audience: are these audiences actually growing toward each other, or are they deliberately separate?
3. Operations: can your UX, billing, and support genuinely hold a bundle together, or will the seams show? Mines runs subscriptions with a five-person team, a small product team, and a small design team, capacity is a real constraint.

Applying these questions to the Skift context

Airline Weekly: bundled the content, not the experience. Skift already had aviation coverage in both Pro and Research, plus an aviation conference. The instinct was to fold Airline Weekly’s coverage into all of it. But the products stayed on separate platforms — readers had to hop between a newsletter, a website, and (for a much smaller group) a conference ticket. Layering content across products without integrating the actual user experience just produced a disjointed one. Nobody complained loudly about it; it showed up quietly instead, in renewal numbers drifting down. 

Mines’ takeaway: audit the identity of what you’re bundling before you bundle it. Packaging without UX clarity is just confusion with a price tag.

Daily Lodging Report: the right move was nothing. This subscriber base — Mines described them candidly as mostly finance and real-estate professionals — wanted exactly one thing: the digest, in their inbox, undisturbed. Skift gave the product a new site and new data tools anyway. The response was, in effect, I don’t care, just give me the newsletter. 

So, they left it alone, and it’s remained one of their steadiest, best-growing products. Leaving a product untouched is a strategic decision, not a lack of ambition. Some products’ value comes directly from their constraints.

Pro + Research: complementary, not interchangeable. These two live in the same sales conversation but serve different budgets and different personas — daily information versus decision-support research. Combining them into one package would have devalued Research and bloated Pro. Skift’s framing: they don’t need the same package, they need the same conversation.

Mines’ shorthand for thinking about all of this is a marriage metaphor: some products should merge households (full integration makes both better); some should keep separate addresses (related, committed, but each keeps its own front door); some need couples therapy first (real potential, but only after the UX and integration work happens); and some are simply happy as they are, and the kindest, smartest move is to leave them alone.

From the Q&A: a few things worth stealing

Don’t let a new feature justify a price increase — check whether anyone asked for it first. When Skift acquired the Women Leading Travel membership group, the team raised prices and then went looking for features to justify the increase — a research report, an add-on. Mines stopped that process to ask a more basic question: did any of these members actually want the research report? They hadn’t. What they wanted was networking and job connections, and that’s where Skift redirected. Goligoski added a comparable example: ProPublica offers a branded t-shirt only after someone donates, framed as a thank-you rather than a subscription perk — about 17% of donors take it, self-selecting into people who’ll actually wear it and become visible advocates, rather than shipping merchandise nobody asked for.

Test new features free before you charge for them. Goligoski’s suggestion for the free-versus-paid feature question: launch new features free first, watch uptake, get people to describe the value in their own words, and work out the rough edges before you decide whether it becomes a paid add-on or a built-in part of the product.

When you research your gap between positioning and perceived value, don’t blend your audiences. Talk to loyal long-term subscribers, low-frequency readers, and non-subscribers separately, and be explicit — internally — about exactly who any given finding came from. Self-reported research also goes stale fast, so treat it as something to refresh regularly rather than a one-time study you cite for years.

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The takeaway to carry into your next packaging conversation: don’t start with pricing, and don’t start with the bundle itself. Start with audience needs and wants, including the friction points people tell you about. The best package isn’t the one with the most crammed into it — it’s the one your subscriber would actually notice if it disappeared.

The post Before you bundle: how to find out what your subscribers actually want appeared first on Audiencers.

For its fifth edition, the “Tech Stack” study, conducted by the association of the same name in partnership with the Sciences Po Journalism School, paints the most complete picture to date of the tools that French news publishers rely on to produce, distribute and monetise news. Four tool families, 118 contributions, nearly 5.5 billion monthly page views described: the findings of the 2026 edition are now available to download.

Which tools do French news publishers actually use to produce, distribute and monetise their digital content? Since 2021, the “Tech Stack” survey has answered this question by drawing directly on the voices of the professionals who work with these tools day to day: chief technology officers, newsroom managers, product managers, marketing managers and ad sales house directors. Between in-house solutions and external vendors, they all administer a technical apparatus in constant recomposition. The very word “stack” captures the iterative nature of this accumulation, driven by the evolution of technologies and the transformation of usages.

Launched in 2021 on the initiative of Marion Wyss, an online-media professional and specialist in subscriber-acquisition strategies (and Audiencers’ Publisher), the Tech Stack reaches its fifth edition in 2026. As early as 2022, Sciences Po joined the project to ensure its longevity in the form of an annual update. Its founding principle remains unchanged: to consolidate the full range of practices in order to draw up a complete overview, while guaranteeing each respondent strict confidentiality over the solutions they report using.

A survey of unprecedented scope

The 2026 edition is based on four separate questionnaires: marketing, editorial, advertising and technical tools. Completed by the managers of the relevant teams, each solution cited was analysed through a twofold approach: its market share among respondents on the one hand, and an assessment of its quality on the other. Beyond listing the tools they use, respondents rate them: each professional gives their solution a satisfaction score from 1 to 10 and specifies, in free-text comments, what wins them over or frustrates them in terms of quality and everyday use. It is the aggregation of these scores that makes it possible to measure whether, in France, publishers feel well served by their CMS, their subscription manager or their adserver. And it is this cross-analysis of equipment rate and satisfaction that makes the study a genuine decision-support tool, allowing each publisher to guide its own equipment choices by drawing on the experience of its peers.

Measured against the combined audience of all participating titles, the study describes the Tech Stack underpinning more than five billion monthly page views. Contributors include the majority of national daily press titles, several audiovisual brands, magazine titles, regional and trade press groups, as well as numerous pure players. In keeping with the confidentiality commitment made to respondents, all responses were consolidated and processed anonymously, but the list of respondents is set out in the study’s introduction and in each section.

Publishers now properly equipped

The first takeaway from the 2026 edition lies in the convergence of scores. The four tool families obtain closely aligned averages: 7.1/10 for marketing, 7.2 for editorial, and 7.4 for both advertising and technical tools. The message is clear: French publishers are now properly equipped. No category collapses, and none reaches excellence. The gaps lie at the extremes, from the success of digital advertising audio to the struggles of the subscription manager — the backbone of the subscriber relationship, still largely inherited from the print era. Over three years, the trend is one of slow improvement as stacks stabilise.

This maturity shifts the challenge. Everywhere, value no longer lies in the tool itself but in its ability to connect to others. Marketing calls for a unified data layer; editorial dreams of a CMS turned cockpit, linking planning, publishing, social media and measurement; the technical side seeks observability and orchestration; and advertising, the reconciliation of its fragmented signals. The 2026 stack is not under-equipped: it is under-orchestrated. To this integration tension is added, among legacy press groups, a persistent divide between print-inherited foundations and digital building blocks — a divide that dreaded migrations still struggle to close.

Two underlying forces: AI and sovereignty

Two dynamics run through all the chapters. First, artificial intelligence, now present in almost every use case (nearly nine publishers out of ten on the marketing side) but still confined to assistance and individual productivity. Its industrialisation, plugged into data, is shaping up to be the next front of differentiation. Second, sovereignty, which is emerging as a structuring criterion in the face of dependence on the major US players, from web analytics to the adserver, from cloud to language models, and in the face of rising costs (licences, cloud, tokens) that everyone is seeking to keep under control.

One constant remains, a common thread throughout the study: in-house solutions, when designed together with the teams, consistently earn the best scores. Proof that satisfaction stems less from a tool’s power than from its right fit with needs. That is where the 2027 challenge lies: not in accumulating new building blocks, but in the art of connecting them.

Download the study

The full results — a detailed analysis of the four tool families, equipment rates, satisfaction scores and publisher verbatims — are available in the complete summary of the “Tech Stack 2026” survey.

→ Download the Tech Stack 2026 study (PDF)

A study by the Tech Stack association, in partnership with the Sciences Po Journalism School.

The post The Publishers’ Tech Stack Study: findings from the 2026 survey appeared first on Audiencers.

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

The publishing industry has spent the better part of two decades chasing the wrong metrics.

Publishers chased reach when scale was the story. They chased pageviews when programmatic told us impressions were currency. And now, in an AI era where Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a growing constellation of answer engines are intercepting traffic before it ever reaches a publisher’s domain, the old playbook isn’t just tired. It’s broken.

So here’s the question every publisher CEO, CRO, and audience leader should be asking right now:

What the F are you doing?

The “F” in RFV is the metric that survives the AI era

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. Frequency tells you whether you have a business.

Frequency is the metric that tracks habit formation. It’s the metric 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, one-and-done visit, Frequency is the only metric that compounds in your favor.

If a reader visits you once a month because Google sent them, you don’t have a reader. You have a rounding error.

If that same reader visits you twelve times a month because they want to be there, to weigh in, to read what others are saying, to participate in a live conversation with your journalists, to follow a topic they care about, then you have a customer. You have ad inventory that actually performs. You have a registration waiting to happen. You have a subscriber in the making.

AI broke the funnel. Community rebuilds it.

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

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

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

This is where Frequency lives.

The Frequency Loop

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

That shift creates what I call the Frequency Loop

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

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

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

What the F should you actually do?

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

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

What the F are you doing?

The post What the F Are You Doing? Why frequency is the metric that matters in the AI era appeared first on Audiencers.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Shirin Shity, Senior Marketing Manager at Project Syndicate, shared how transitioning from an aggressive friction model to an open, communication-first strategy revitalised user engagement and subscription conversion. 

By treating the registration layer as a value journey rather than a restrictive barrier, the publication grew their logged user base, increased the number of registered users converting into paid subscribers by 52% and saw a 22% uplift in overall RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) scores. 

Context: balancing global reach with direct subscriptions

For over 30 years, Project Syndicate has operated as a syndication network, distributing high-level commentary from leading global thinkers as widely as possible. Its primary business model involves charging media outlets in developed countries to subsidize the dissemination of op-eds to more than 520 outlets across 158 countries.

Direct consumer digital subscriptions represent a newer engine of growth. However, traditional subscription paywalls naturally pull against their historic key metric, reach. This tension is where registration sits perfectly: it acts as a bridge, allowing for intentional content sampling while pulling anonymous readers into a known ecosystem.

The evolution of the reg wall

Project Syndicate launched its initial website in 2012 as a fully open platform. The site has since evolved through several operational iterations:

• 2017: Introduced the first native paywall with a single subscription offer.
• 2020–2022: Moved to a dynamic paywall approach and introduced multi-tiered subscription packages.
• 2023: Conducted A/B testing comparing a 1-read vs. 2-read allowance. This led to a standard model where readers received 1 free article, then had to register to receive 1 additional free article every 30 days.
• 2025–2026: Migrated to a new, flexible paywall architecture (powered by Poool) to run rapid onsite user experiments. Prior to this upgrade, backend limitations meant simple copy or design changes took weeks or months to implement through remote developers.

The metrics that made the case for a change

Data collected in early 2025 revealed a structural mismatch between user acquisition and long-term retention. While Project Syndicate excelled at building an initial database of registered users, surpassing 200,000 total accounts, active engagement post-registration was remarkably low.

An audit of user segments highlighted two main leakage points:

1. The fly-by loop

Because the old registration wall appeared immediately after a visitor’s first article, light readers coming from external platforms (such as LinkedIn or social media) simply left. The wall blocked them before they could discover the site’s wider value, resulting in zero captured emails and an average of just 0.8 article page views per user.

2. The newsletter wall

Even highly engaged newsletter subscribers regularly hit unpredictable hard walls without any indication of how many free articles they had remaining or when their monthly allowance would reset. This arbitrary friction disrupted habit formation and caused valuable readers to abandon the platform entirely.

The experiment: communication over friction

Collaborating with FT Strategies, the marketing team realised that increasing wall friction was not the answer. Instead, expanding content sampling while providing transparent progress indicators would give readers a clearer path to building a subscription habit.

The team launched a soft-to-hard paywall journey based on three pillars:

1. Transparent onboarding: The site clearly states the exact terms of the offer up front across multiple touchpoints: three free reads every 30 days.
2. Explicit personalisation benefits: The registration wall highlights functional perks, showing readers they can follow specific topics, track favorite authors, and save pieces to a personalised reading list.

3. An active unlock mechanism: Instead of immediately showing a full article, the platform introduces a stepped widget on the second and third pieces. Readers must intentionally click a “Continue Reading” button to spend one of their available credits, encouraging them to treat their monthly allowance as something of value. Once the third credit is spent, a hard paywall prompts a direct subscription offer.

Strategic impact and performance signals

The soft-to-hard communication strategy yielded immediate results over a four-week trial period, proving that looser constraints could drive higher economic value:

• Higher direct subscriptions: The business saw a 52% increase in registered users converting into paid subscribers compared to the previous model.
• Stronger onsite conversion rates: The combined click-through rate across both registration and paywalls jumped from 7% to 9%, while subscription prompt success rates rose from 11% to 14%.
• Deeper reader habits: Registered users saw a 22% uplift in overall RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) scores. Average monthly sessions for authenticated accounts climbed from 1.9 to 2.5, demonstrating steady habit formation.

Core takeaways

Shirin summarised the lessons from Project Syndicate’s migration into three operating principles for digital publishers:

• Registration volume is a vanity metric without engagement: Amassing hundreds of thousands of registered emails is meaningless unless you build an active onboarding experience that keeps readers engaged during the critical first 30 to 90 days
• Understand your audience: Publishers must build flexible data infrastructures to track how their unique audience sample content, how often they return, and what roadblocks cause them to churn
• Fail fast: Cultivating an internal environment where teams feel safe running iterative product experiments, and knowing when to sunset unsuccessful tests, is essential to keeping pace with fast-changing user behaviour

The post Project Syndicate’s registration strategy: refreshing the value proposition to engage and convert appeared first on Audiencers.

Anjali Iyer, Global Head of Subscriptions at The Washington Post, delivered a session at the Audiencers’ Festival in London focused on how news organisations must adapt to modern consumer habits by expanding beyond rigid subscription structures.

Invited by event partners, Arc XP, the platform and CMS for media companies, Anjli outlined The Washington Post’s shift toward a broader monetisation strategy centred on flexible access, shifting the way that value is captured.

The incomplete subscription model

Publishers share a collective obsession with subscriber growth. However, maintaining and expanding this base is becoming increasingly difficult as churn grows more expensive. Over the past few decades, media organisations built vast digital subscription operations by asking their most loyal readers to commit long-term.

While successful, this framework is facing a critical bottleneck. Industry data reveals that out of 100 anonymous users who hit a hard paywall, 74% will simply abandon the site, while only a single reader (1%) will convert into a subscriber.

Of that tiny conversion pool, retention is highly fragile:

• 13% churn on day one, meaning the user bought a subscription solely to access a single, moment-driven story, and immediately cancelled once their immediate need was met.
• 40% churn within the first six months.

This reality exposes a massive gap between the willingness to pay and the willingness to commit. Modern readers, particularly younger cohorts, operate in a fragmented digital landscape shaped by streaming services, search loops, and social algorithms. They demand short-term choices and are often willing to pay a premium price for temporary access over a recurring subscription package.

Defining the flexible access market

To capture the vast audience that traditionally walks away from a hard paywall, publishers must widen their monetisation funnel. The Washington Post’s market research in the United States identified a substantial untapped addressable market:

• 38 million engaged citizens are actively interested in news.
• 19 million of those consumers express explicit interest in flexible access options.
• 12 million are actively willing to pay for the right short-term product at the correct price point.

When publishers offer flexible access side-by-side with standard recurring subscriptions, overall user conversion increases 1.2x, and long-term subscriber retention improves by 6 percentage points.

Testing the flexible access products

To determine how to capture this demand without devaluing their core subscription model, The Washington Post conducted extensive customer testing across three primary transaction models:

1.  The week pass: Appealing to 62% of surveyed consumers, this product is highly popular during intense, moment-driven breaking news cycles where readers want to follow a developing story for a few consecutive days.
2. The day pass: Appealing to 57% of consumers, this option provides a friction-free, low-commitment window for casual site visitors.
3. Pay-per-article: Appealing to 46% of consumers, this model allows readers to immediately unlock a single piece of journalism via a frictionless digital wallet transaction.

During live pricing experiments for the week pass, the team tested price points at $4, $7, and $10 as standalone, one-time payments shown side-by-side with recurring monthly and yearly subscription prompts.

For the pay-per-article interface, they deployed a highly optimised widget directly inside the paywall layer. A reader can enter their email address and use a frictionless mobile payment method (such as Apple Pay or a credit card) to execute a one-time $2.00 purchase (plus local sales tax) that unlocks access to that specific article for one calendar year.

The profile of a flexible access purchaser

The data explicitly proves that flexible access buyers are not just early-stage subscribers who are downscaling their commitments. Instead, they represent an entirely different audience profile that hard paywalls completely lock out.

• Content preferences: Unlike core subscribers who are driven primarily by heavy politics and opinion pieces, flexible access buyers over-index significantly on non-political lifestyle, wellness, deep investigative features, and historical archive content.
• Device and payment footprint: This audience is heavily mobile-first, with more than half visiting via mobile devices and purchasing via Apple Pay compared to subscribers.
• Discovery pathways: They are 1x to 2x more likely to discover articles via search engine optimization or social media channels, arriving with highly specific, momentary search intent.

The pathway to long-term subscriptions

While flexible access is built to capture transactional, short-term demand, it also serves as an elite nurturing mechanism for long-term subscriber growth. Over a 180-day horizon, there is a strong statistical probability of transactional buyers upgrading to recurring, full-time subscriptions:

• 8% of week pass buyers transition into full subscribers.
• 4% of day pass buyers upgrade to full subscriptions.
• 3% of pay-per-article buyers eventually become subscribers.

When evaluating who is performing these upgrades, the lifecycle acts equally as a net-new acquisition tool and a win-back loop: 

• 40% of upgraders are existing site registrants
• 35% are entirely new registrants
• 25% are previous subscribers returning to the brand. 

Furthermore, these flexible entry points attract high-intent customers, with 13% of all upgraders bypassing the basic subscription tier to jump directly into the highest-yield premium tier.

While approximately 91% of flexible access buyers remain single-use transactions, a growing, habitual cohort is developing, with 9% of pay-per-article buyers, 8% of week pass buyers, and 5% of day pass buyers demonstrating repeat purchasing behavior.

Driving overall organisational growth

When evaluating total paying user growth across the entire funnel, pay-per-article options deliver the highest overall volume lift at 83%, followed by the day pass at 35% and the week pass at 19%. Because pay-per-article operates as a frictionless entry point, it yields the highest efficiency and retention results among readers who are structurally unready to commit to a long-term media subscription.

Ultimately, this represents a major philosophical pivot for modern publishing groups. Rather than treating monetisation as a choice between a hard subscription paywall or zero return, organisations must build a diversified revenue tier:

1. Off-platform partnerships & licensing: Reaching audiences beyond owned and operated properties.
2. Flexible access: Transactional, non-recurring options designed to monetize an untapped, high-intent audience.
3. Core subscriptions: The foundational, enterprise, and standard domestic news consumer.
4. Premium subscriptions: Higher-yield tiers that include multi-account sharing capabilities.
5. WP Intelligence Subscriptions & Councils: B2B analytical products for subscriptions and invite-only councils specialized executive loops tailored for policy and corporate leaders.

Implementing this layered approach transforms user monetization from a simple transactional gate into a holistic, long-term ecosystem. It effectively captures diverse consumer demands across different points of the user journey, creating a sustainable foundation for modern newsrooms.

Thank you to Anjali for sharing these insights, and to Arc XP for supporting our event.

About Arc XP: Arc XP is a cloud-native enterprise content management system (CMS) built for publishers and broadcasters. Designed as a complete media operating system, Arc XP connects content, identity, personalization, monetization, and AI — empowering media brands to own their audience, activate first-party data, and build sustainable, independent revenue. Media companies use Arc XP to create, deliver, and scale digital experiences across every channel.

The post The Washington Post tests flexible access models, addressing the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to commit appeared first on Audiencers.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Arnaud Aubron, Director of Diversification at Le Monde, took to the stage to share the journey of Le Monde in English, a project that the organisation has dreamed of for 50 years. 

With technological advances and the move to digital, Le Monde in English was launched in 2022, and has since gone from strength to strength. 

Why an English version and why now?

The fundamental reason for publishing in English is simple: to speak to the world, you have to speak English. If Le Monde wanted its journalism to have a truly global impact, keeping it exclusively in French was no longer an option.

But the more pressing question was why now?

1. Reaching the glass ceiling in France

As of December 31, 2025, Le Monde ranked number one in digital subscriptions in France, boasting 602,218 purely digital subscribers. Additionally, Le Monde drove 35% of all digital subscriber growth in France in 2025.

While the publication possesses elite know-how in digital subscriptions, the French market itself is capped. The total addressable market in France sits around 3.3 million total news subscribers across all publications. With Le Monde capturing such a significant portion, the team faced a looming question: Can we hit 1 million or 1.5 million subscribers in a market this small? They simply didn’t know. To sustain further growth, they had to look beyond their domestic, and linguistic, borders.

2. The tech triggers

Two key factors finally made the project feasible in 2022:

• Artificial Intelligence: AI finally matured enough to drastically lower the financial and temporal costs of translation.
• The digital subscription model: Unlike the 1970s print attempt, which incurred immense logistics costs to print and ship copies across the UK and US without any guarantee of sales, digital distribution completely eliminates the friction of international expansion.

Aubron contrasted this with The New York Times, which launched a Spanish edition in 2016 but shuttered it a few years later. The New York Times relied heavily on manual translation without AI and built a business model dependent on advertising rather than subscriptions, a strategy that ultimately proved unsustainable.

The launch and operational workflow

Following Aubron’s appointment in September 2021, the project launched in April 2022 to coincide with the French presidential elections.

At launch, the assumption was that AI could handle the heavy lifting, followed by a quick proofread. In reality, it required much more human intervention.

1. DeepL translation: The software was used to generate the initial baseline translation. While highly rated, the technology in 2022 still required heavy editing to meet Le Monde’s journalistic standards.
2. Professional freelance translators: To ensure maximum quality for a premium subscription product, two translator agencies were brought in to meticulously review and correct the AI-generated text.
3. In-house editorial team: A dedicated team of 8 journalists was embedded directly within the French newsroom. This physical proximity allowed them to collaborate, anticipate news, and edit translations seamlessly alongside the original authors.

Article selection: quality over quantity

Le Monde in English does not create original content; it exclusively translates a curated selection of the French edition.

• 30% of French articles translated: The team skips live coverage, podcasts, and strictly local French wire stories (e.g., specific domestic politics, local school or banking issues) that hold little relevance to an international audience.
• +10 daily dispatches: They supplement translated deep-dives with roughly ten English news dispatches per day to provide hot news.

Pricing: A “second read” strategy

Because an international reader is highly likely to already hold a primary subscription to a domestic title like The New York Times or The Guardian, Le Monde in English positions itself as a “second read.”

To account for this, the pricing structure had to be highly accessible:

• Introductory price: €2.50 per month for the first year.
• Standard price: Loops up to €10.00 per month progressively.
• Average price point: As of March 2026, the average revenue per user sits at €4.66.

Aubron noted that an attempt to raise prices in 2025 stalled subscriber growth because the price increase came at a time when audience acquisition hadn’t scaled sufficiently to absorb the change. Lesson learned: a secondary read strategy demands highly sensitive, highly competitive pricing.

Four years later: audience & subscription performance

The strategy has paid off, yielding steady traffic and subscription growth since the launch 4 years ago.

• Current Subscriber Base: Hovering near 16,000 active subscribers.
• The American engine: A staggering 50% of all subscribers come from the United States. Aubron attributed this to a stark cultural difference in the propensity to pay for news: while only roughly 10% of French consumers pay for digital news, closer to 20% of Americans do. The subscriber base consists heavily of students, retirees, and individuals with an existing personal, educational, or marital link to France.
• Global traffic footprint: The platform pulls in approximately 5 million monthly visits.
  • United States: 38.5%
  • United Kingdom: 12.2%
  • Canada: 9.5%
  • France: 7.3% (although access to the English edition from France is limited to subscribers on higher-tier plans)
  • India: the fastest-growing traffic segment
  • Germany: the first non-anglophone country.

What do they read?

True to Le Monde’s core strengths, the most read sections are international news, French politics, and economy. Surprisingly, culture and lifestyle pieces perform exceptionally well; articles about new Parisian restaurant openings or art exhibitions see massive engagement from readers living as far away as Texas and Florida.

Subscriber acquisition strategies

To recruit international subscribers, Le Monde deploys a three-pronged approach:

1. Leveraging LeMonde.fr’s SEO hierarchy: Internal debates weighed whether to launch on a standalone domain (LeMonde.com) or a subdirectory (LeMonde.fr/en). Choosing LeMonde.fr proved to be a major SEO blessing, allowing the English edition to instantly draft off the massive domain authority of the main French site.
2. Paid acquisition adjustments: Google advertising is a core driver. Aubron also highlighted a massive breakthrough in their Meta acquisition costs: after peaking at an expensive €86.90 cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in late 2025, optimization strategies successfully drove that CPA down to just €9.30 by March 2026.
3. Strategic publisher partnerships: By setting up reciprocal marketing exchanges with premium Anglo-Saxon publishers (The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic), Le Monde cross-promotes free trial offers directly to highly qualified audiences who are already accustomed to paying for premium journalism.

Achieving break-even

The most significant milestone of the session was the announcement that Le Monde in English has officially achieved financial break-even in 2026, a full year ahead of the initial business plan.

Revenue breakdown:

• Subscriptions: 66.2% (The core driver of the business).
• Licensing: 16.9%.
• B2B: 12.3%.
• Advertising: 4.6%.

Product evolutions: what’s new today?

Since its 2022 launch, the operational model has undergone substantial changes, heavily driven by advancements in generative AI:

AI-driven productivity gains

• The transition to ChatGPT: Le Monde migrated its primary translation workflow away from DeepL to customized ChatGPT protocols. This allowed the team to deeply bake Le Monde’s distinct editorial tone and style guides directly into the translation layer.
• Eliminating the translation layer: The quality of generative AI advancements and the know-how developed by the team of journalists completely eliminated the need for external freelance translators.
• Creating journalism jobs via AI: Instead of using tech to downsize, Le Monde redirected those cost savings into expanding its internal editorial team from 8 to 10 full-time in-house journalists. AI handles the mechanical translation, freeing human journalists to focus purely on editing, nuance, and curation.

Platform and multimedia expansion

• A bilingual app: They integrated a native toggle inside the core Le Monde app, allowing users to switch effortlessly between the French and English editions. While app users represent just 4% of total English traffic, they account for a massive 49% of all English subscribers.
• A dedicated YouTube channel: Rather than merging video content, they launched a standalone English YouTube channel. High-end video investigations have achieved breakout success: their video on Dubai money laundering garnered 760,000 views (vs. 1 million for the French original), and their documentary on the November 13 Paris attacks pulled in 2 million views (nearly matching the 2.2 million views of the French version).
• Apple News+ integration: Le Monde in English is now available directly within the Apple News+ ecosystem to capture a broader layer of casual readers.
• M International magazine: In March 2025, they went “back to paper” by launching a premium, biannual print magazine called M International (themed “The French Touch”). They distribute 25,000 copies across 350 elite newsstands in 20 countries and 37 global cities.

Key takeaways

Aubron concluded his presentation with three definitive lessons learned over the four-year journey:

• It’s not about translation: Translation is now a commoditized utility. Success comes down to content market fit, product distribution, and understanding the distinct profile of your international audience.
• Hard to imagine working in another language: Due to global curiosity around French art de vivre, culture, and global politics, in the US, the English edition works beautifully. However, Aubron noted he would not attempt to launch a Spanish or German edition of Le Monde yet, as those markets lack the critical size and same unique cross-border structural demand.
• AI can create jobs: The project stands as living proof that when publishers embrace automated productivity tools like generative AI, they can reinvest the dividends directly into hiring more human journalists to elevate the final product.

The post Inside Le Monde in English: Four Years in and already profitable appeared first on Audiencers.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Ross Wilmot, Director of Reader Revenue at Broadsheet, shared how implementing a registration wall served as the cornerstone for a highly resilient digital subscription model. By transforming anonymous audiences into known, authenticated users, Broadsheet unlocked a powerful engagement framework that directly accelerated conversion rates.

The strategy behind registration

To pave the way for their subscription model, Broadsheet deployed a registration wall in December 2025, strategically positioning it as an essential precursor to the full paywall, which followed on 21 April 2026, both built and launched using Poool. This sequential approach was designed to achieve several key outcomes:

• Accelerating conversion: By unlocking specific engagement features, the team could efficiently increase user exposure frequency to the upcoming paywall.
• Unlocking direct channels: Secure marketing permissions during the registration process to establish direct lines of communication, which heavily influences ultimate conversion.
• Setting the tone: Introducing a clear value exchange on the site, conditioning readers to understand that completing an action is required to access premium content, ensuring a smoother transition to a paid model.
• Boosting confidence: Confirming the audience’s willingness to complete an action built immense internal confidence within the company regarding the viability of the model.
• Guiding product strategy: Capturing known user identities allowed Broadsheet to develop personalised services tailored to specific reader needs.

Five key findings from Broadsheet’s registration data

Despite being in the early stages of the paywall rollout, Broadsheet data has already yielded critical insights regarding user behavior and the reader revenue funnel.

1. Registration captures high-quality readers

Broadsheet segments its audience into four distinct engagement cohorts based on monthly session frequency: 

• Fly-bys (1 session)
• Regular Readers (2–4 sessions)
• Engaged Regulars (5–9 sessions)
• Superfans (10+ sessions)

The data reveals that registration penetration rises sharply alongside engagement. Specifically, Superfans exhibit a registration rate 127 times higher than casual Fly-bys, with 38% of them willingly authenticating. This confirms that a registration wall successfully establishes a direct relationship with the most loyal segments of the audience, those with the highest propensity to buy a subscription in the future.

2. Newsletters initiate the conversion journey

Authentication acts as the primary gateway to newsletter adoption, which serves as a massive catalyst for paywall hits.

While registered users who actively engage with newsletters account for less than 1% of the total audience, they drive a staggering 7% of all paywall exposures. This means that this specific segment over-indexes for paywall hits by an impressive 10x, successfully drawing high-intent readers straight back into premium, monetisable touchpoints.

3. The newsletter is the core conversion engine

The daily newsletter serves as a continuous, automated nudge that repeatedly invites authenticated users back to the site, where they naturally encounter paywalled boundaries.

Registered users who are signed up for newsletters hit the paywall an average of 3.5 times per unique visitor, representing a 35x higher exposure rate compared to the average anonymous reader, who sits at a mere 0.1 exposures.

4. The compounding effect drives the majority of subscriptions

When high-intent audiences are paired with a high frequency of paywall exposures, the compounding effect generates the vast majority of subscriber growth.

The numbers paint a clear picture: the cohort of registered, newsletter-engaged users, which accounts for a tiny 0.7% fraction of the total audience, drives a disproportionate 43% of all digital subscription conversions. This equates to an extraordinary over-indexing factor of 61x. Registration hooks the high-intent reader, and the newsletter sequentially delivers the repeat paywall exposure required to close the sale.

5. Registration unlocks direct offer emails

The marketing permissions captured during the initial registration step open up a highly profitable parallel conversion path: direct offer emails.

By targeting prospects who are already kept warm by daily editorial newsletters, these high-impact, immediate sales emails successfully account for 18% of all subscription conversions.

The registration flywheel

The compounding dynamics of Broadsheet’s strategy form a self-sustaining lifecycle designed to maximise reader value:

1. Register: Capture invisible, anonymous readers via the registration wall to unlock the newsletter engine.
2. Engage: Deploy targeted newsletters to consistently return these authenticated readers back to paywalled content.
3. Expose: Systematically increase the frequency of paywall exposures over time.
4. Convert: Activate premium digital subscriptions through a combination of repeated paywall prompts and direct offer emails.

Next steps for Broadsheet

To refine the registration flywheel and further optimize conversion rates, Broadsheet is focusing on five core strategic enhancements:

• Refining analytics tracking: Adjusting internal analytics tracking frameworks to compile a completely transparent picture of user engagement metrics both immediately before and after registration
• Revamping user onboarding: Overhauling the initial post-registration onboarding flow to actively encourage the early adoption of editorial newsletters across the new database
• Introducing dynamic onsite experiences: Moving away from a static, one-size-fits-all approach to deliver tailored onsite journeys based on an individual’s specific engagement cohort
• Segmenting email campaigns: Categorising and filtering direct offer email campaigns to match the specific engagement levels of different user cohorts
• Continuous A/B testing: Initiating rigorous A/B testing variations directly on the registration wall interface to continuously optimize structural conversion efficiency

The post Broadsheet’s path from reader to subscriber: The registration flywheel in action appeared first on Audiencers.

The Audiencers' team spent the first three days of June in Marseille for WAN-IFRA's 77th World News Media Congress (1–3 June 2026). Three days, one dominant question: what does AI mean for the value, and future of journalism? We sat through a dozen sessions to share a wrap-up of the event, and the conversations that mattered most.

• “Information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable”: AG Sulzberger, Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times, opened the Stewart Brand quote the industry has been misquoting for 20 years, and laid out an 8-point plan against AI’s “original sin”
• “ChatGPT converts 17x better than Facebook and 173x better than Google Discover”: Louis Dreyfus on the Le Monde & OpenAI deal, and why 25% of the revenue goes to the newsroom
• “Your next customer won’t be a human, it’ll be an agent”: the new three-layer infrastructure (Rights, Access, Payment) that lets publishers charge the machines
• “The metric I look at every morning is the share of our content that AI cannot copy”: VG’s Gard Steiro on speedboats, and hiring “the profiles we hired in the 90s”

The AI reckoning: rights, traffic, and the first real deals

AG Sulzberger (NYT): the “original sin,” and an 8-point plan

The congress opened on its hardest line. AG Sulzberger (Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times) argued that generative AI is built on an “original sin” (the unprecedented theft of publishers’ intellectual property) and that this theft is now re-enacted “countless times every single day.” His most effective passage broke an AI model into four inputs: talent, compute, energy and data. The first three are paid for, handsomely; the fourth, books, films, music, journalism, is taken without consent or compensation. No tech CEO would ask their engineers to work for free or steal chips from an Nvidia plant; on data, “we just take” has become the norm.

“Tech giants strip-mine news websites… that otherwise would go to the news organisations that created this work.”

AG Sulzberger, Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times

He was careful to add he is not anti-AI (the NYT uses these tools internally) and that his target is the companies’ choices, not the technology.

The scale he put on the table: the NYT publishes ~500,000 original works a year for over $2bn, and remains the single largest source of proprietary data in a major dataset used to train many different models. Meanwhile the Google click is 10x harder than a decade ago, rival AI models send 96% less referral traffic than a Google search, and the largest news sites tracked by comScore have lost 45%+ of traffic in four years. His action plan came in eight points — four to defend your rights (stand up for them, deal carefully, push legislators, join together) and four to strengthen your title (use AI the right way, be a destination first, focus on original reporting, explain why journalism matters). He closed by restoring the half of the Stewart Brand quote everyone forgets:

“Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life.”

Stewart Brand, quoted by AG Sulzberger

Le Monde × OpenAI vs the SPUR coalition: negotiate alone or organise together?

The panel, “Creating an AI content marketplace where publishers can win,” moderated by Madhav Chinnappa (Reuters Institute, ex-Google), with Niamh Burns (Enders Analysis) and David Buttle (DJB Strategies / SPUR coalition), put two strategies side by side. Burns framed it: news has real value in the AI era, but mostly for B2B and enterprise use; on the consumer side, AI products are embryonic and news sits at the margins. She cited the Disney / Sora deal, pulled abruptly after launch, as a warning — you can license what you want, you have no control over the product.

Louis Dreyfus (President & CEO, Groupe Le Monde) told how the OpenAI deal began: three years ago, a French publishers’ association lamented “we don’t even have OpenAI’s address.” Dreyfus used a public Q&A with Sam Altman — “you’re in France, the country of copyright… 83% of our revenue comes from our readers; how do you expect reliable information without that?” — got an “OK, I’m willing to discuss it,” and signed after a January-to-March negotiation. The numbers: ChatGPT converts 17x better than Facebook and 173x better than Google Discover, with no cannibalisation. (An INA study presented elsewhere at the congress confirmed the visibility upside: on French editorial queries, nearly a third of ChatGPT’s outbound traffic points to Le Monde — the publisher that signed.)

“We made a choice at Le Monde: to treat the revenue from these outputs as neighbouring rights. We share 25% of it with the newsroom — every single person in it. It helps the journalists, it helps journalism, not just the publisher’s business model.”

Louis Dreyfus, President & CEO, Groupe Le Monde

David Buttle, a founding member of the SPUR coalition, made the collective case: publishers arrived in disarray to search and social, and shouldn’t repeat it with AI. His warning on the deals themselves was the panel’s sharpest:

“Most of today’s AI deals are defensive agreements, not product partnerships. You sign, and you still get scraped. It’s rational to take the money on the table — but know that we have no control over what becomes of our content.”

David Buttle, DJB Strategies / SPUR coalition

On Mistral, Dreyfus was precise — a nuance worth keeping exactly as he framed it. His point was not that Mistral rejects copyright, but that it has signed with the press agency AFP and not yet engaged the wider French press: “it would be a good signal for a French company, backed by the French government, to abide by copyright AND engage with all the major French publishers,” noting NewsGuard ranks Mistral as the least reliable LLM on news.

Madhav Chinnappa closed with the framework that travelled around the room: “We now have three audiences to serve — agents, bots and consumers. ABC. Build products that the foundation models will, reluctantly, want to cite. Don’t wait for regulation. And do it collectively.”

Ezra Eeman (WAN-IFRA / NPO): from “AI in media” to “media inside AI”

Ezra Eeman’s State of AI plenary delivered the conceptual pivot of the congress. AI is now a mainstream habit (ChatGPT ~2.5bn queries/day; Google AI Overviews ~8bn AI answers/day; +250% AI use among UK over-55s in a year). But it’s barely used for news: only ~10% of prompts are about current events. People use AI to do things (write, learn, decide, act); classic journalism sits in the opposite quadrant, “generic, built for mass consumption.”

“The future value of journalism is no longer the article itself. What becomes valuable is everything around it: provenance, context, your editorial judgement, the updates, continuity over time. The question is how to turn all of that into machine-readable intelligence.”

Ezra Eeman, AI in Media Lead, WAN-IFRA / Strategy & Innovation Director, NPO

His WAN-IFRA “AI in Media” survey put hard figures on the shift: 58% of publishers report falling search traffic, 72% blame AI, and only 3.5% receive meaningful referral traffic from chatbots. His user-journey framework — Finding, Feeling, Flowing — describes a world where a personal agent surfaces the news before you ask, adapts it to your mood and context, and follows you across devices. The economic warning was concrete: a fixed-price subscription versus real marginal AI costs per query. “A large media group told me last week it had a monthly budget of ~€300,000 for coding tokens. They burned through it in 10 days.” His two parallel playbooks: go upstream (a trusted ingredient inside AI systems) and downstream (own the relationship, the community, the experience).

Florent Daudens & Christophe Israël: your next customer is an agent

The opening AI session (Florent Daudens, co-founder of Mizal AI, ex-Hugging Face; Christophe Israël, AI consultant founder of OK Lab) turned the theory into infrastructure. Daudens’ core message: the value chain is broken and must be rebuilt on three machine-readable layers where publishers can finally hold control:

1. Rights & Permissions (RSL, ODRL, CC Signals — robots.txt was a gentleman’s agreement, useless against agents)
2. Access & Enforcement (OAuth + MCP, Web Bot Auth)
3. Payment & Value Exchange (x402, AP2, AgentCore Payments). Micro-payments failed for humans (mental friction) but will work for agents (zero friction) — Sam Altman has floated “an agent paying 70 cents for a summary, $1 for the full article.”

“Your next customer won’t be a human, it’ll be an agent. Move from a supplier mindset to a builder mindset — you can design a conversion funnel on the agent side, just as you did for readers.”

Florent Daudens, co-founder, Mizal AI

Mizal has a “newsroom in a box” running daily in a large public broadcaster: five agent routines fire before the 8:30am editorial meeting (competitive briefing, fact-checking the prior day’s 20 articles — it already caught a real error past the desk — grammar/style, social trend monitoring, podcast monitoring).

Christophe Israël’s counterpoint: none of this holds without governance on four pillars (Policy, Roles, Risk, Monitoring), and Daudens’ refrain for anyone deploying agentic workflows — “evals, evals, evals.” The hard question is no longer technical but cultural: how do you equip teams to be good at working with AI agents?

The newsroom of tomorrow, in an AI world, is already being built

The Future Newsrooms Study 2026 (FT Strategies × WAN-IFRA): four gaps

Lisa MacLeod (Director, FT Strategies) launched the first edition of an annual global benchmark. Its thesis: we’ve entered the “community era.” When generic content is trivial to produce, the advantage shifts to what’s hard to replicate — original journalism, trusted relationships, loyal communities. For the first time, engagement is cited as the most frequent #1 priority for the year, ahead of reach. The study names four structural gaps:

• Strategy: 25% of newsrooms don’t translate strategy into daily editorial decisions; 62% involve only 1–2 roles in setting long-term strategy
• Trust: reporters still spend 38% of their time on production vs 33% pre-publication and just 11% post-publication — “a catastrophic waste,” given how good production automation already is
• Capability: only 14% of leaders are very/extremely confident their tech stack is fit for purpose; 42% still measure AI success by “time saved”
• Skills: confidence drops from 55% today to 39% at three years; 61% of newsrooms have no formal training programme

“Maybe the KPI isn’t ‘we saved seven hours,’ but ‘we made more original stories this week.’ The right question isn’t how much time you saved — it’s what can you do now that you couldn’t do before?”

Freja Sofia Kalderén, Development Editor, Bonnier — quoted in the study

The standout adoption case was Bonnier News (~2,000 journalists, 11 countries), which built three in-house AI platforms and, crucially, solved adoption through voluntary workshops (sceptics excluded by design, then opting in once ambassadors are trained): 2,000+ journalists trained, 7,800 prompts contributed in 10 months, weekly active users +45%. MacLeod’s own obsession: commissioning. “When commissioning is done right, aligned with the business, that’s where you unlock value, but today it stays destination-based, and 45% of newsrooms only use data after publishing, to validate, never upstream to steer.”

Gard Steiro (VG): speedboats, and the only metric he checks each morning

Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief of VG (Schibsted, Norway, with 2 million daily users, half the country), opened with a disclaimer: “if you’re expecting clear answers, you’ll be disappointed. Our job as newsrooms is to navigate uncertainty.” VG is a container ship, hard to turn, so it launches “speedboats”: small teams that run ahead, experiment, take sharp turns and come back with transferable learnings.

“They can move faster, they can be more agile, they can make sharp turns and experiment freely without risking the entire cargo, or audience trust in our journalism.”

“And one of these speedboats is called VGX,” a project for which company tasked a small team to “rethink everything” and “challenge the way we work across VG and Schibsted.”

VGX: engineers, business developers, designers and a single reporter, mandated to rethink everything from scratch.

One such project has meant abandoning some basic tenets of news publishing, including the traditional news article format.

Instead, the VGX app has no traditional front page, instead presenting users with a feed of content. And rather than being primarily text-based, video is a natural part of the app experience.

And of course, the metrics are following suite:

“I used to look at reach, now we’ve defined a new key metric: the share of our content that AI cannot copy. It’s at least as important as traffic, conversion and churn — because that’s our future.”

Gard Steiro, Editor-in-Chief, VG (Schibsted)

This is defined as “Super Content” – articles where journalists have been outside the office to report on the story, when they’re on location where the story is being written from, or when VG has received information that is not publicly available.

“This is a key step forward … because this content is our future.”

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A big thank you to the WAN-IFRA team for three days of frank, useful conversations in Marseille — and to the speakers who shared real numbers, not just slides. See you next year.

Methodology: this recap was written for Audiencers by Claude (Anthropic), based on Trint audio transcripts of the sessions and the speakers’ slides, translated and cleaned, and (for the Future Newsrooms Study) cross-checked against the official report. Quotations in quote marks are faithful reformulations, not exact verbatims; a few proper nouns transcribed from audio were verified before publication. Sessions covered at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, Marseille, 1–3 June 2026.

The post Inside WAN-IFRA Marseille 2026: the deals, the data, and the fight for what journalism is worth appeared first on Audiencers.

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.

“One reader is not two different entities” 

For a long time in the media industry, publishing teams have worked in silos. Users were treated as entirely separate entities depending on the department looking at them:

• The advertising side: Focused purely on maximising reach and ad impressions to drive advertising revenue.
• The reader revenue side: Focused on exclusivity and conversions to drive subscriptions.

This division creates a constant conflict: advertising teams demand more reach to scale ad revenues, while subscription teams countered by demanding more exclusivity to lock content behind paywalls.

However, in reality, one reader is not two different entities, it is one and the same person. A single user can generate both advertising and reader revenue simultaneously, meaning the perceived target conflict doesn’t actually exist. 

What’s more, publishers have long suspected that registered audiences hold a significantly higher value than anonymous users. But without the concrete data to prove it, this debate remains stuck in opinion-based, gut-feeling discussions. 

So, Patrick and the team set about establishing a holistic, comprehensive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that combines both revenue streams.

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.

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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.

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