“We didn’t look at this as let’s substitute one for another. Why would you? That’s leaving cash on the table,” Burney says. Print subscribers are highly profitable, the volume decline is gentle, and their engagement is incredible. So, the apps were sold to people who had never bought a magazine. “What we’ve done is create a new audience which previously did not exist. So our growth has been genuine, rather than simply substituting one channel for another.”

• The Good Food app came first, launching around 2022. It now sits just short of 200,000 paid subscribers, from a standing start
• Nutracheck, a diet and nutrition tracking app, was acquired in 2023 and cross-sold to the Good Food audience. It is profitable, has roughly doubled since then, and currently has 580,000 subscribers
• Radio Times followed with its own paid products, including What to Watch, alongside HistoryExtra.

How Immediate decides which brands get a paid product

Importantly, the team hasn’t built a digital product for every brand. Key questions need to be asked before anything is built:  

• Is the audience large enough, and will it return regularly rather than just twice a year?
• Will people habituate to the brand, or is the relationship occasional?
• What can you realistically charge, measured against whoever else already meets that need?

Then the maths: how many subscribers at what acquisition cost, what happens at the first renewal, and what happens at every one after that?

Categories that clear the bar are the ones where Immediate can lead and defend. Food and Wellness through Good Food and Nutracheck, and entertainment through Radio Times. Because each audience answers those questions differently, no two products are priced or packaged the same way.

The same questions explain why paywalling the magazines was never the plan. “If you’re just paywalling content, it doesn’t really take you far enough, unless it’s real must-read content to get people to subscribe and stick around.” Evergreen lifestyle content lacks the urgency of news, so unlocking it alone is not enough. The value has to come from utility instead: cook mode features, prep and planning tools, celebrity takeovers and app-exclusive material.

The websites became the marketing machine

A product that clears the test still has to reach people cheaply enough for the maths to work. Immediate’s answer was already sitting in the business. It kept the free, ad-funded websites that Radio Times, Good Food and the rest already ran, and gave them a different job. They are now the top of a funnel that ends in an app subscription.

“We’ve got big websites for Radio Times, for all of our brands, and we use that to market the products that are appropriate for those audiences,” Burney says. “So it’s a marketing machine, really.” Recipe traffic is directed to the Good Food app, and TV listings to What to Watch. Social reach feeds the same funnel, and paid campaigns run off the back of it.

The machine also runs on creator and influencer talent. Immediate is home to a roster of chefs, presenters and social-first creators, with a dedicated ‘Faces and Voices’ team to cover talent management, including both staff and external names.

“It would be misleading to say that the talent is just going to drive subscribers. The talent is ultimately top of funnel,” Burney says.

Good Food works with talent, including Chetna Makan, Max La Manna, Sophie Wyburd and Angela Hartnett, fronting social campaigns for recipes such as chocolate cake, marry me meatballs and, randomly, rhubarb, at very low cost per order. “I think our best campaign got about 20,000 subs in January.” The same names then run app takeovers that are exclusive to subscribers, so the talent that pulls people in also gives them a reason to stay.

Not all of the talent is bought in. Alex Horne of the UK comedy show Taskmaster featured in an app takeover campaign, and Ricky Gervais did the same for the Radio Times app. So did Perry, a community manager on Burney’s own organic social team, who is massively into musicals. One of his posts about Wicked was retweeted by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and passed a million views. 

The talent stays the same down the funnel, but the message changes, from inspiration at the top (cook this dish, here is your Christmas plan, here is what is on TV) to utility at the bottom, the closer someone gets to paying.

One platform, and the commercial discipline underneath it

A funnel that runs from a free recipe page to a paid app subscription needs a technical stack that can manage the entire journey, and Immediate’s stack had grown incrementally. They spent 18 months replacing it. Paywall, billing, revenue platform, and first-party data now sit in a single system driven by a customer data platform (CDP), which was bought and extensively configured rather than built internally. “Building something in-house of this complexity would be out of the means of most publishers,” Burney says.

The result is an AI-driven paywall that the company expects will significantly boost numbers, as well as enable print and digital packaging options which were previously impossible. A separate commercial analysis team holds the budget on what gets funded: acquisition cost against lifetime value, three to one on a digital product over a couple of years. “People either overinvest and see a very poor return and then get disheartened and give up, or see a really good result but then don’t realise that it’s not replicable.”

What good looks like

Subscription only works if you know what a healthy product looks like. “Talk to some subs people, they can get lost in the detail that sits behind it,” Burney says. “But it’s a science and an art at the same time.” A free or low-priced introductory trial would be expected to achieve a 40-55% conversion to paid status. Below that, the return will not be there. The next renewal period should land between 65 and 80%. For monthly retention, anything under 90% is a problem, with 95% as the target.

“Typically, people don’t invest enough in retention. When you’re in growth mode, acquisition is the lifeblood, and that’s also the thing that everyone loves because it’s all high numbers coming in.”

Where the next 1.8 million comes from

The 3 million target rests on international expansion for Good Food and Nutracheck, particularly in the US, as well as organic growth, new products in markets Immediate already knows, and bundling. On bundling, she personally is more sceptical than many other publishers that this has to be one-size fits all. Nutracheck’s growth came from cross-selling into the Good Food audience and applying industrial subscriptions expertise to a small startup.  She notes, “While we are now experimenting with bundling, it’s actually cross-selling.”

“Your success in the current year hasn’t got a lot to do with what you’re doing in the previous year, because the subscribers you acquire are really building future value. What you’ve done in previous years is what’s making today work,” Burney says. “It massively increases the predictability of future earnings. Massively.”

What this means for you

Most of what worked here is separable from Immediate’s scale. The company refused to trade print for digital revenue, so nothing had to be cannibalised. It ran a product test before a content test: would people use the product repeatedly? And was the commercial model tight enough to identify a repeatable win from a one-off?

Publishers should take different things from their experience.

• Single-title magazines: the portfolio logic does not apply, but the product test does. Ask honestly whether your audience would habitually use an app, and whether the utility you could build is worth paying for. If not, an advertising model might be a legitimate answer.
• Regional and local news groups: the estimation discipline and the retention benchmarks travel directly. So does the argument for protecting a profitable print budget rather than forcing migration to a digital solution, and creating something new for audiences
• Large portfolios and media houses: the transferable strategy is refusing a single payment model across brands. Segment by whether the audience is sticky, whether the brand leads its category, and what the build costs, then invest only where all three hold.
• Nationals and news publishers: Burney’s exception is your advantage. News is one of the few categories where paywalled content alone converts, which makes utility a retention question for you as well as an acquisition one.

I’ve run this process with several businesses this year, and it holds up every time. You don’t decide what the subscription includes and test it against the market. You pull apart your own traffic and behavior data, and only decide whether to keep building once that data has told you there’s something worth building. Here’s the process.

1. Start with frequency

The first thing I want to understand is what people already come back for.

For a publisher, that might be a morning briefing, live coverage, a specialist vertical, or a particular columnist. Pull the behavior of your most engaged users and look for repeat patterns. Which products correlate with higher visit frequency? Which newsletters reliably drive people back to site? Which features appear disproportionately among your most active readers?

You’re looking for evidence of habit. A large audience visiting once or twice a month may still support a strong advertising business, but it’s weak evidence for a recurring consumer proposition.

2. Use registration as the next test

Before asking for a credit card, see whether people are willing to identify themselves.

Registration introduces a small amount of friction and asks the user to exchange something of value, usually an email address and some data, for a better experience. That makes it a useful halfway point between anonymous consumption and payment.

Look at registration conversion by audience segment, then compare registered and anonymous users on frequency, depth of engagement and eventual propensity to subscribe. If your most engaged readers still resist creating an account, that’s worth understanding before a payment step goes in front of them.

If registered users who adopt a particular feature come back twice as often, that is a much more useful metric for proposition design than a brainstorm full of ideas about premium benefits.

3. Build paid around behaviors that already exist

Once you know what your most engaged registered users are doing, the paid proposition should give them materially more of it. That might mean greater access, deeper utility, more convenience, exclusivity or a better experience. The important part is that the benefit connects to something the audience has already demonstrated it values.

If live coverage drives unusually high frequency, ask what a paid live product could add. If specialist newsletters show the strongest retention signals, deeper analysis or additional editions may have more value than an unrelated bundle of perks. If users who save articles and follow topics return more frequently, better personalization may be more compelling than another piece of “exclusive content.”

This is also where proposition bloat creeps in. If the pricing page needs six unrelated benefits to make the subscription feel substantial, that’s usually a sign no single benefit is compelling enough. The pricing page should be the output of the proposition work rather than the place where the proposition gets decided.

4. Be deliberate about what remains free

Publishers have an added complication because the free product often drives discovery, advertising revenue and the future subscriber funnel.

Moving too much behind a paywall can reduce the audience available to convert later. Leaving too much outside makes the paid proposition harder to distinguish. The answer depends on what role each piece of content or product plays in the journey.

A story that brings thousands of first-time visitors into the funnel may have a very different job from a specialist product consumed repeatedly by known users. Treating them identically because they both sit on the same website is usually where the trouble starts.

5. Forecast before you keep building

Most subscription models get validated backward. Leadership picks a revenue number it needs, and the team keeps building a forecast toward it without checking whether the underlying audience can actually get there. The proposition work continues on momentum, not evidence.

Build a forecast from the same data steps 1 to 4 produced instead. Take your traffic and frequency segments, apply a realistic registration rate, apply a free-to-paid rate benchmarked against comparable products at a similar price and frequency, then apply a retention curve for that price tier. You’ll get a range, not a number. Compare it to what the business actually needs. If the range falls well short, that’s the signal to stop building and rethink before the pricing conversation even starts. Better to find out before another quarter of work goes into a proposition the audience was never going to support.

Do the work in steps one through five before you launch anything. Some of what comes back will tell you to stop, and that’s a better outcome at step five than a year into a proposition the audience behavior was never going to support.

If those behaviors aren’t there, you’re not a subscription business. Yet.

Jonathan Gupta-Buckley founded The Twenty One and Kaai after a decade leading audience and subscription growth inside News Corp, including building the largest paid subscriber base in Wall Street Journal history. Today, TTO embeds senior operators inside the world’s most ambitious businesses to solve growth challenges in practice, build internal capability, and leave teams with systems they can run themselves. Kaai is TTO’s proprietary AI growth analytics tool. It is currently deployed at a number of global media businesses. 

Why Le Monde invests in YouTube

Lou Grasser reminded the room that Le Monde has been investing in platforms for more than 15 years, with one conviction: offer free content to younger audiences and bring them toward subscription. Le Monde now counts 700,000 subscribers, 90% of them digital. On YouTube specifically, the audience wants ambitious, long formats. In 2025, total views grew 25%, pulled up by long pieces (Charlie Hebdo, the 13 November attacks, the anniversary of Hiroshima). One telling number: followers represent only 25% of total views, so the platform remains a discovery machine rather than a loyalty channel.

“We’re often asked why Le Monde doesn’t invest in a TV channel. At Le Monde, we’d rather invest in the newsroom and in innovative video formats than in something with no direct return on investment.”

Lou Grasser, CDO, Le Monde

Le Monde does 4 million video views a day, against 6 million daily site visits. Much of the video work relies on OSINT (open source intelligence). The long-term goal: make Le Monde a reference for explainers and long formats, while gaining reach through short formats for discoverability.

Pedro Pina: YouTube’s case for news

Pedro Pina rejected the “Death Star” metaphor raised at the open: “YouTube wants this space to flourish, not destroy it.” He shared a few figures and points: 15 billion news views on YouTube last year, with news consumption growing steadily; Gen Z consume a lot of news, contrary to the cliché, and are not limited to short formats or mobile, since the connected TV is a major use. The revenue share leaves the publisher more than half of what it monetises. The moderation noted a recent partnership with France Télévisions for 20,000 hours of news a year on the platform.

On shifting habits, Pina described a move in demand: users already know “the what” through end-of-day notifications. What they want is “the why,” and how it concerns them. Hence, he argued, the explosion of podcasts. He cited the NYT podcast: “you know the news, now we explain why.”

“People expect journalists to have a face, a voice, to be on camera, to have a direct relationship with viewers. That’s not really new in TV. But it’s becoming more and more central.”

Pedro Pina, VP YouTube EMEA

His advice to publishers came in three points: be personality-driven, direct-to-camera and authentic (the hardest lever to move culturally, but the most decisive); don’t copy-paste TV onto YouTube, since it needs a different edit, a different rhythm, different voices; and “hire a YouTuber,” meaning one or two people who have run their own channel and can train the in-house team as it scales. Pina later clarified that he meant channel management, not putting creators in front of the camera in place of journalists.

What Le Monde’s audience actually asks for

Asked live what users want from Le Monde, Lou Grasser listed: long formats, long documentaries and journalists on screen; transparency around investigations, with “behind the scenes” coming up often; short breaking-news formats with systematic voice-over and subtitles; and recognisability of the Le Monde brand, on both long and short content.

On performance, the best-performing video cited was a storytelling piece on the Paris attacks: around 20 minutes of average watch time, more than 2 million views on the English edition and roughly 2.5 million on the French one. Long investigations and explainers perform on reach, engagement and watch time at once. Breaking-news formats, by contrast, are effective for discovery and habit-building, but not enough for long-term retention. Future priorities named by Grasser: strengthen hard-news video (with the live coverage of Ukraine and Iran as a reference), launch video podcasts in thematic series (climate, parenting), and improve video coverage of major events. On the recent municipal elections, Le Monde overperformed across the board and was an ultra leader on search, the weak spot being video and social platforms, hence the priority given to video.

Building one integrated newsroom

Le Monde shifted to a majority of digital subscribers back in 2017, but its workflows were still partly organised by medium. After study trips to American and British newsrooms, Grasser said the newsroom is now fully dedicated to digital, with a small print-specific team. The next step: getting the audio, video and other sections to genuinely work together, as an integrated newsroom rather than format-based silos. On creators, the position is clear: it is not a strategic priority for Le Monde, which would rather invest in its in-house journalists, who in Grasser’s view have the potential to carry stories on screen. For other titles in the group’s portfolio, the calculation could be different.

Monetisation: ads first, video paywall next

Pina reminded the audience that YouTube’s base model is advertising, as the historic model of publishers has always been, and that this is where you start. More than 10 monetisation modes exist on YouTube, and subscription products already exist. What is in the works is the integration between YouTube’s paywall and publishers’ own paywall, with partners like Le Monde pushing for it. The open questions: confidentiality, data handling and legal compliance.

“On a long investigation titled ‘Northern Europe is preparing for war with Russia,’ put behind the paywall on the site, we got 300 to 400 conversions in a few days. We can’t paywall on YouTube yet, so we had to publish the video on the platform a few weeks later. It’s a strong opportunity for us.”

Lou Grasser, CDO, Le Monde

12 months and 5 years out

Grasser’s 12-month horizon: deliver first-rate video coverage of the 2027 French presidential election, and make progress on dubbing and translation, notably to boost the growth of Le Monde in English. Her 5-year horizon: a newsroom no longer organised by sections (audio, video, text) but fully integrated, serving readers the content they want in the format they want. Pina’s 5-year view: that every major traditional journalism brand becomes video-first, not because it is good for YouTube, but because it is good for viewers and for society.

Methodology: written for Audiencers by Claude (Anthropic) from a Trint audio transcript of the session, translated and cleaned. Quotations in quote marks are faithful reformulations, not exact verbatims. WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, Marseille, 3 June 2026, Partner Showcase.

We have entered the Age of Experience

Audiences still seek information and fulfill particular needs. But they increasingly choose where to spend their time according to the experience surrounding that value and whether another worthwhile experience follows.

Where platforms provide a compelling sequence, attention accumulates.

Experience is more than a new way to describe “what users need.” It is a different way to organize what an outlet produces, how its products connect, and how audience value translates into revenue.

Asking “How can we improve this product?” therefore misses the sharper question: “What experience should audiences consistently associate with us, and what should lead them to the next one?”

Experience connects audience strategy with revenue

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.”

Those may be sensible decisions, but format alone does not explain why audiences will value the product, return, or move deeper into the publisher’s environment.

This is the logic behind the AXR framework: Audience → Experience → Revenue.

We developed AXR to connect 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 behavior it should create. Revenue can then follow through advertising, sponsorship, registration, or subscription.

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 recognizable across the sequence, beyond this particular item.

That difference matters, because formats produce outputs. Experiences create behaviors. Repeatable behaviors (staying longer, returning more often, and moving to the next item) connect audience value to commercial value.

The most valuable experience is the next one

One strong experience is rarely enough.

Audiences do not open a social platform for one excellent post and then move elsewhere. They stay because another relevant experience is immediately available. Games create the same continuity from one level or challenge to the next.

Publishers still tend to optimize the individual item. Even when related content is offered, the connection is often topical rather than experiential. The next item may cover the same subject but feel completely different in format, pace or purpose.

In our work developing recurring video experiences, we see a passive-active pattern. After one video, many viewers prefer to remain passive and let the next one begin. But when the experience changes too sharply, they must become active again: reassess, choose, and decide whether to continue.

That decision point is often where they leave.

Continuity does not mean showing people more of the same. It means preserving enough of the experience promise while introducing new value.

Before launching a new product or format, publishers should therefore ask:

• What experience begins here?
• What is the most natural next experience?
• What must remain consistent so the next experience feels like a continuation rather than a new decision?

These questions change the unit of planning. Instead of producing one engaging item and hoping the audience finds another, the publisher begins designing the sequence itself.

The bottom line

The strategic question is no longer only which products to build, but how those products combine into a recognizable experience system.

The practical shift is to evaluate every product on two levels: the experience it creates on its own, and the role it plays in the sequence around it.

Publishers that design both levels can turn journalism into more time spent, stronger habits, and clearer paths to revenue. In the Age of Experience, the advantage will belong to outlets that make every experience valuable, recognizable and naturally connected to the next.

Inside, you’ll find data on how engagement concentrates among a small group of super users, how much richer content formats like audio, video and games boost engagement and where publishers are still struggling to measure the value their apps create.

Here are a handful of the biggest takeaways from this year’s report, useful for any publisher trying to get a deeper understanding of how their apps are performing and where to focus effort going forward.

> The Pugpig Media App Report, drawing on 440 apps and 140 publishers, 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. 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

> 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, and the strongest apps are simply the ones given sustained attention rather than clever engineering

Rich features consistently drive deeper engagement

Features like games, audio and video consistently drive deeper engagement. Users who interact with these formats, as well as those who search, save and share articles, show a clear lift in engagement compared with those who do not.

Users who play games open their app 2.7x more often than those who don’t and rack up over 29 hours of in-app time a month in top-performing apps. Video and audio show a similar pattern, with users who watch video spending 3.3x more time in-app each month and audio listeners spend 2.5x longer.

Search, save and share tell a similar story, suggesting these are genuine signals of loyalty and intent and important features for publishers to use in their apps. The report shows that these features have an outsized impact on how habitual and valuable that group becomes.

A small number of super users drive the majority of engagement

One of the clearest patterns in this year’s data is how important super users are to overall app engagement. Our report found that just 15% of monthly active users generate 75% of all sessions, whilst 6% of MAUs account for 75% of all screen views. Those numbers point to a small group of users that come back to the app more often and get through far more content once they’re there than the average reader.

This should frame how publishers think about app strategy. Growing the total user base is very important, but the data suggests that significant value comes from deepening the relationship with the most engaged readers. That means identifying the content and features that most encourage repeat use.

There’s a wide gap in how many subscribers actually use the app

Another significant factor that drives app engagement is the share of the audience with a direct subscription, which varies widely between publishers. The report finds that, for news titles, anywhere from 11% to 94% of total subscribers open the app each month. 

There’s a real opportunity here too. Many apps attract a substantial number of non-subscribers alongside their paying base, yet only 26% of survey respondents said the main role of the app is subscriber acquisition. With non-subscribed users significantly less engaged than paying users, there is clearly a lever publishers could pull to improve conversion.

The report also hints at a commercial opportunity in in-app advertising. Apps are often designed as ad-light experiences, which keeps impressions per screen low when compared to web. But high session frequency among engaged users means total impressions per user per month can still be meaningful, particularly when formats and targeting are tuned to app audiences. Treating the app as a revenue platform across both reader and advertising income is one of the clearest commercial signals in the data.

Publishers know what to measure, but not all can measure it well

When we speak to our customers about what matters most for their apps we get fairly consistent answers around subscriber retention, acquisition, time spent and engagement. However, according to this year’s survey, there is a significant challenge in the ability to measure these KPIs with any consistency.

That gap between what publishers know they should track and what they can actually measure is significant. Without clean measurement, it becomes much harder to attribute revenue to the app clearly, which in turn makes it easier for the app’s contribution to be undervalued internally.

According to the report, capacity, not money or technology, is the issue. Product team capacity is named by half of publishers as the single biggest blocker to progress, well ahead of budget constraints, stakeholder alignment or editorial capacity. 

Effort and investment separate the top performers from the rest

Perhaps the most encouraging takeaway from this year’s report is that strong app performance is less about technical sophistication and more about sustained investment. The best-performing apps are usually the ones publishers have consistently given time, resources and attention to.

That shows up across almost every metric in the benchmark data. Richer content formats, push strategy, onboarding, personalisation and content discovery all follow the same pattern. The report’s overall message is that small, sustained improvements compound, and publishers who treat their app as a genuine priority tend to see it reflected in the metrics

Next steps for publishers 

For teams looking to act on the data, the report closes with a set of practical recommendations for turning these findings into progress.

Getting more subscribers to actually use the app is the starting point, alongside investing in features that reward repeat use. Audio, video, games, search, save and sharing are clearly all associated with stronger engagement, and there’s clear room for more publishers to make better use of them.

The report also flags push notifications as an underused tool and highlights the opportunity in converting anonymous users into known readers, given how many app users still aren’t logged in or registered.

Beyond acquisition and adoption, the guidance turns to consistency and discovery. Publishing frequently, improving how users find relevant content and measuring app performance against real business outcomes are all highlighted as ways to make the app pull its weight as a genuine engagement, retention and revenue channel.

These findings show that the apps performing the strongest currently are combining richer content, sharper measurement and consistent investment to build real habits with their readers. 

For any publisher trying to work out where they stand, that’s exactly what this year’s report is designed to help with, giving you a clear picture of how your app compares and what the leading publishers are doing differently.

The 2026 Pugpig Media App Report is available to download now, published by Pugpig, the mobile app platform that powers apps for over 450 of the world’s leading media brands.

The premium experience offered in the app

The app isn’t a stripped-down version of the site. It’s built around giving already-engaged readers more ways to spend time with SFGATE’s journalism and journalists.

• Pop-up newsrooms (launching soon) in parks across San Francisco, where readers can meet a journalist in person. Editor-in-chief Grant Marek cited a statistic that only 23% of people have ever met a journalist face to face, and framed the initiative as a direct attempt to change that for SFGATE’s own readers
• Planned live journalism events across California, built around specific local reporters who are, in some cases, literally living the stories they cover. Julie Brown Davis, a reporter covering the Lake Tahoe housing market, was born and raised there, and was herself pushed out to Reno by rising housing costs. The plan is to put reporters like her in community spaces with readers who already trust them
• A California-themed mini crossword, distinct from a generic puzzle in that some clues specifically reward local knowledge. The app adds a streaks feature (consecutive days completed) and a leaderboard letting readers see how they stack up against SFGATE’s own staff
• Audio versions of articles, extensive bookmarking, and premium maps that plot SFGATE’s historic archive geographically
• Granular push notification controls, roughly 30 different alert categories, built specifically because California’s geography doesn’t map neatly onto any one set of interests

Why Friends?

Before landing on ‘Friends of SFGATE,’ the team tested more classic subscription names, including SFGATE+ and SFGATE All Access. But they found that ‘subscription’ read as too transactional for what they were trying to signal, and ‘membership’ carried strong associations with charities and causes that people support out of obligation rather than affinity. ‘Friends’ tested as warmer than the former and less formal than the latter, reflecting a relationship that already existed with SFGATE’s most engaged readers, rather than inventing a new transactional one.

Redefining what success looks like

Marek described a shift in how his newsroom is measuring its own performance since the move towards reader revenue. Total visits, historically the default newsroom metric, matters less to this project than repeat visits. How many times can someone who’s already shown up once be brought back a second and third time. 

That reframing also changes the editorial calculus. While competing on the exact same breaking story as ten other outlets used to be table stakes, Marek’s team is now weighing differentiated, SFGATE-specific coverage more heavily, on the logic that unique journalism is what actually builds the habit loop the app is designed around.

The early numbers

Four weeks post-launch, one figure stood out to Campbell specifically: of the readers who took the 7-day free trial, close to 90% converted into paying Friends. It’s an early signal rather than a settled result, but this number represents a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate than he’s seen in close to three decades of doing this work.

This is, in part, due to active retention early on, during these 7 days:

• An email series that includes a personal message from Marek himself, alongside reminders of specific app benefits
• Push notifications, tuned to each reader’s chosen interests from day one
• The crossword’s streak mechanic, which Marek described as quietly addictive once someone gets a few days in
• Daily social content (SFGATE has the largest Instagram following of any Hearst Newspapers title) introducing different app features on rotation, audio, bookmarking, events, to readers whether or not they’ve installed the app yet

What changed internally to make this possible

The launch required real organizational change, not just a new product wrapper:

• A newly created role, Community Engagement Program Manager, currently being hired for, is a first for SFGATE
• A second hire added to the video team, driven by strong reader response to journalists as recognizable, followable creators (Melissa Cho, known to readers as “SFGATE Girl,” for instance)
• An existing audience desk editor, with prior app programming experience at The Athletic and SmartNews, moved into leading app programming for SFGATE specifically, work Marek described as sitting dormant until this launch gave it a purpose
• On the marketing side, Hearst’s existing team and infrastructure stayed the same in headcount. The real work was calibration, such as learning to write copy and design interstitials that actually sound like SFGATE, a two-way collaboration between the marketing lead and SFGATE’s news team

Marek connected this to a broader shift he’s watched happen over his career. Journalists who started out purely writing have had to add video, then podcasting, and now, in his framing, business literacy generally. Understanding Campbell’s side of the operation, and vice versa, is what he considers necessary now for finding initiatives that contribute to reader revenue. 

What’s still being figured out

On acquisition, Campbell’s team is four tests into learning what actually drives trial sign-ups, testing different feature framings and on-site placements, with paid acquisition still to come.

On audience targeting, Campbell said the current approach has been intentionally broad – go wide and go loud, but the next phase, drawing on lessons from Hearst’s other subscription brands, is sharper segmentation, including identifying which readers are statistically most likely to convert to a Friend, and targeting acquisition efforts accordingly rather than treating the whole audience as one pool.

The bigger shift this represents

Campbell framed Friends of SFGATE as evidence that the old binary (a site that’s either a subscription business or a free one) doesn’t have to hold. 

It’s a structurally similar idea to the ‘willingness to pay versus willingness to commit’ gap The Washington Post has written about in its own flexible-access research. Rather than forcing every reader through the same single gate, SFGATE has effectively added a new, optional tier above the free web experience, built specifically for readers who were already deeply engaged but never had a way to formalize that relationship or directly support the journalism.

SFGATE has, for its entire history, had no answer for the reader who finishes a story during a big moment and asks how they can support their work. Now there’s a concrete answer. And one that has been designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. 

Thank you to Grant & Mark for their time!

That leaves a whole category of question permanently unanswered. The recurring ones, where we need to know:

• How a piece of content will serve the users we are trying to reach
• Which of several options is weakest, before we invest in any of them
• What objections a change is likely to run into
• How different groups of users will react to the same thing

To take one example: whether a new onboarding flow feels like a data grab. Too small to commission a study for, and it creates uncertainty that festers within the onboarding team. So somebody decides on instinct, usually whoever is most senior, and the instinct becomes the decision. It might well be right. Nobody will ever know though because nothing was tested.

This is the gap synthetic audiences fill. They don’t have to replace the research we already do well. What they change is the dozens of small calls a month that currently run on somebody’s hunch. And for the many newsrooms doing no audience research at all, the comparison isn’t between synthetic feedback and properly-designed research. It’s between synthetic feedback and nothing, and synthetic feedback done well beats nothing.

The value is that a whole class of decisions moves from opinion to evidence, at a cost and speed that makes asking routine.

What a synthetic audience is

“Synthetic audience” is an umbrella term, and the field hasn’t settled on what sits under it. You’ll see people use synthetic personas, synthetic users, digital twins, synthetic panels and silicon samples loosely and sometimes interchangeably. I’m using three here because the differences between them change what we can trust.

• A synthetic user is an LLM given a description of a type of person and asked to respond as they would. We write the description – the segment’s age range and media habits, whatever we know – put it in the prompt, and ask the question. Nothing sits underneath it. What comes back is the model’s averaged sense of what somebody matching that description would say, assembled from everything in its training data about people like that.
• A digital twin is built from one real person’s own material: an interview transcript, their survey answers, their support emails, their behaviour on our site. That material goes into the prompt and the model answers new questions as that person. It’s also possible to fine-tune a commercially available LLM on the material instead of putting it in the prompt. Academic studies from Stanford and Columbia tested that route, and neither found it beat simply placing the person’s words in the prompt. Which is good news for small teams: building a twin should not require any substantial engineering lift.
• A synthetic panel is either of the above, multiplied. We can build twenty or fifty across our segments, put the same question to all of them, and read the pattern rather than any single answer.

What synthetic audiences are good for

A number of use cases have emerged. These four have the clearest evidence behind them:

Testing language before it goes out. Paywall messages, membership appeals, onboarding copy, campaign framing. We put the draft in front of a synthetic panel and ask what they find unclear and what would make them stop reading. This is the highest-value use, partly because language is what these models handle best, and partly because it’s a decision we make most often.

Narrowing a field of options. Six newsletter concepts, or four pricing structures. The panel won’t tell us which one to launch. But it will reliably tell us which ones are weakest. So, the real research budget goes to the survivors. Spindrift Beverage Co., a US drinks brand, used a synthetic panel to choose between new product concepts. It reached the same answer in a week that a 500-person consumer study had taken two months to produce.

Surfacing objections we haven’t thought of. Ask the panel what would stop them subscribing, or what they’d assume about us from our about page, and we get a list of concerns to check. Where synthetic panels have been compared against real research, they have identified the same themes and the same objections. The magnitude and the proportions differ, the list doesn’t.

Comparing groups against the same thing. Put one paywall message to a synthetic lapsed-subscriber panel and a synthetic loyal-reader panel, then read the difference. Relative comparison is where these systems are most useful.

You may have spotted that all of the four use cases narrow or pressure-test rather than decide.

How accurate are synthetic audiences

A figure of around 85% circulates in coverage of this field, usually without much explanation. Read quickly, it suggests a synthetic version of a person gets 85 out of every 100 answers right. That isn’t what was measured.

The figure comes from the Stanford study. Researchers interviewed just over a thousand people at length. They built a digital twin of each person from their interview transcript. Then they tested whether the twin could predict that person’s answers to a survey the person had already completed.

But they didn’t score the twin’s answers against the persons’ answers and leave it at that. Because if we ask a person to fill the same survey again two weeks later, they match their own earlier answers only about eight times in ten. (Memory shifts!) So, the fair question is not whether a twin matches perfectly. It’s how a twin does against that eight-in-ten human benchmark.

Researchers found that the synthetic twins reached roughly 85% of that human benchmark – so, not 85% of the answers.

The figure tells us that synthetic twins built on rich individual material carry genuine signals about the people they came from.

The evidence in this field is still early, and most of it comes from outside media. For me, that’s another reason to use synthetic audiences for narrowing rather than deciding, which is what the rest of this piece argues for.

Where synthetic audiences stop

They can’t tell us how much. Synthetic responses cluster. Real people spread out more across opinions, while synthetic ones converge towards each other. A panel can tell us which option comes out ahead. It can’t tell us by how much, which rules out adoption rates, willingness to pay, satisfaction scores and anything else where the size of the number is the finding.

They can’t show us the small segments that matter. Clustering also means that the users at the edges disappear: the share of subscribers already on their way to cancelling, or the small core of superfans who account for a disproportionate slice of revenue. Those groups are small because they’re specific, and specificity is something a synthetic panel loses.

They tilt in a consistent direction. Synthetic respondents tend to be WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic). They come out more comfortable with technology, less worried about privacy, better informed and more agreeable than the people they’re modelled on.

They shouldn’t speak for communities we haven’t spoken to. A team in the US building a WhatsApp media-literacy service for the Indian diaspora tried synthetic personas and got the diaspora as Westernised media imagines it. They caught it because they knew what the actual community sounds like. This is the kind of stereotype that synthetic responses can perpetuate.

How to start experimenting with synthetic audiences

Running a synthetic panel takes four steps, and each exists to make the next one worth doing.

The first fixes what you’re actually trying to settle, so you don’t generate material nobody acts on. The second decides what evidence the panel stands on, which sets how much weight its answers can carry. The third picks the kind of question you’re putting to it, which determines whether the answer is usable at all. The fourth gets an honest answer out, then records it in a form a colleague can judge for themselves rather than take on trust.

Set up once, the marginal cost of the next question is close to nothing. That’s the point. You’re building something you put questions to whenever they come up.

1. Fix the decision before you write the question

Most synthetic research fails before a panel is ever built, by producing interesting material nobody was going to act on in the first place.

Understand what you’re trying to achieve – what decision you’re hoping to make. Then determine the insights you need to inform the decision. Then figure out how to get those insights from a synthetic panel.

This ensures that the work you’re going to do is aligned with what you’re working towards. This is the step that stops the output becoming a slide nobody uses.

2. Decide what data the panel is standing on

What a panel stands on sets the ceiling on everything after it. The same question put to a well-grounded panel and an ungrounded one produces answers that may look similar but instead mean completely different things.

There are three levels:

• Nothing. A prompt describing a reader, with no evidence underneath it. What comes back is the model’s general impression of people like that.
• Demographics. Market or audience data about the segment you’re aiming at. Better, and still a description of a category rather than of anybody.
• Real material from real readers. Words that actual people you can name said or wrote.

The test is whether you can name the humans whose words are in the system. If you can’t, you’re on one of the first two levels.

Reaching the third level may be easier than it looks, depending on what your newsroom has kept. Worth looking for:

• Past interview transcripts, from any research project, however old
• Open-text answers from surveys (which usually go unread)
• Subscriber cancellation reasons
• Support and complaints emails
• Comments and community posts

Prepare the material by anonymising the person and keeping the detail that makes them specific: their circumstances, and what they came to you for. Spread it across your segments rather than piling it up. Fifteen people covering five reader types beats forty of the same type.

3. Pick the job

There’s more than one kind of question you can put to a synthetic panel. Two are worth setting out here, because most teams use the first but never the second. Choosing deliberately between them is what separates a usable answer from a merely plausible one.

• Count them. Put the same question to the whole panel and use the aggregate: which of six concepts is weakest, or which objection comes up most often. Read the ranking and ignore the margins. This is the workhorse, and it’s subject to the tilt described earlier.
• Analyse against them. Instead of asking how users would react to a membership appeal, ask where that appeal conflicts with what you’ve documented about them. The model isn’t being asked to be anyone. It compares your draft against a profile you wrote and can check, then hands back specific points of friction you can verify or throw out. Most teams never try this, and it’s the job best matched to what these systems genuinely do well, which is analyse language.

4. Make it argue back, then record what you did

Left alone, these models are agreeable, and an agreeable panel tends to tell you what you already believe.

Three things to build into the prompt:

• Tell it to answer as a reader rather than as an analyst. Otherwise the responses arrive sounding like a dull report, with tidy conclusions no human user would share.
• Tell it that being indifferent is a valid answer. Plenty of readers genuinely don’t care, and a panel where everyone holds a strong view is already wrong.
• Show it a few examples of how real people answered a similar question, with any polished phrasing taken out.

Then narrow with the panel and validate the surviving one or two options with real people. You’re only testing what has already survived something, which is where the saving comes from.

Finally, write up what you ran: who the panel was defined as, what it was grounded in, what you showed it, what you asked, what came back, and what still needs checking. Synthetic output is convincing whether or not it happens to be right. In one study, experienced researchers reviewing persona material could not reliably say which of it had been written by people. Making the output less convincing doesn’t help either, because results that read as obviously machine-made don’t get acted on. Since you can’t remove the believability, the write-up is what stops a plausible answer becoming a fact by repetition.

Start with the research you already have

The case for synthetic audiences isn’t that they closely match real readers. Academic testing has consistently found that they don’t. The case is that most audience questions in most newsrooms are currently answered by whoever is most senior in the room, and a synthetic panel grounded in things our actual readers said is better than that.

So, use them to narrow, not to decide. Ground them in real material, and know which level you’re on. Ask them to compare and to analyse. Keep them away from magnitudes, from the small segments that may matter most, and from communities you haven’t met. And, finally, validate what survives with people.

To get started: find the research your newsroom already commissioned and hasn’t opened since – the launch interviews, the subscriber survey, last year’s churn study – and work out which of this month’s decisions it could answer, if only you could ask it questions.

Arnot was clear that this is not a sign of declining interest in text. Older subscribers still demand “the whole buffet” of text, audio, and video. However, AV formats are specifically what attract the next generation, audiences who are likely to skew toward 90% audio-video consumption and 10% print.

How Play is marketed and priced

On the acquisition side, paid media campaigns in test markets lead directly with the Play proposition. However, when prospects land on the offer page, they see all three tiers side-by-side: Play, Premium (Digital), and Premium Plus Print.

Play receives the same intro mechanics as the core subscriptions: 30% off an annual pass or a one-month free trial.

Early signals, three weeks in

So far, subscription growth is looking very promising and, critically, existing Premium subscriptions in those markets have stayed healthy. Arnot even noted an uptick in Premium sign-ups that they attribute partly to Play’s presence on the offer page. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product seems to be nudging some undecided visitors toward paying a little more for everything, rather than pulling people down to the cheaper tier. So far, everyone acquired through Play has been genuinely new to The Economist, rather than existing subscribers trading down.

Importantly, Arnot’s team is watching closely to check that the new lower tier isn’t cannibalising their classic subscription. The logic they’re applying: it’s fine to accept some cannibalization risk as long as incremental new subscriptions outweigh it, and so far, that hasn’t materialized as a problem.

Product portfolio realignment: Play vs Espresso

The Economist already operated a lower-cost daily news offering, Espresso, alongside Economist Podcast Plus. However, Espresso offers only a handful of written pieces per month—a materially thinner proposition than Play’s full audio-video catalog.

To prevent audience confusion and eliminate product overlap:

1. The Economist delisted Espresso from app stores entirely within the Play pilot markets.
2. The team funneled all lower-friction entry points toward one unified brand experience inside the primary app ecosystem.

The wider relationship-building strategy

For Arnot, Play is one piece of a long-term evolution toward human-centered publishing:

1. Podcasts (top of funnel): Un-paywalled podcasts introduced audiences to journalists as real people—a shift for a publication that historically ran without bylines.
2. Short-form video (mid funnel): Put journalists directly in front of the camera, deepening visual familiarity.
3. Insider (retention & loyalty): 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. The value of these “human” formats was echoed by Diana Babei, Principal Product Manager, at Audiencers’ Festival London, who 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. 

4. Play (acquisition & conversion): 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

Arnot connected this directly to the pressure AI search and AI-generated summaries are putting on publishers broadly: as it becomes easier for a reader to get information without ever visiting a publisher’s site, the case for a human-centered, personality-driven product only gets stronger, not as a defensive move, but as one of the few remaining things a subscription can offer that a summary can’t.

Insider and Play, in that sense, aren’t two separate initiatives so much as two different answers to the same underlying bet: that 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 a $15 audio tier or a premium interview.

Key takeaways for publishers

• Lower barriers, high intent: Play acts as both an affordable entry tier for news consumers and a funnel toward the full-fat product
• Single-app ecosystem: Consolidating tiers inside one core app keeps brand equity intact and simplifies the upgrade journey
• Format-led segmentation: Rather than gating by topic, gating by format (AV vs. text) aligns naturally with mobile habits and daily routines
• Human-first defensibility: Prioritising formats that showcase real journalists builds trust and retention that AI summaries cannot replicate. 

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

• Reach

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

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

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

• Trials

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

• Active subscribers

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

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

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

• Former subscribers

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

Let’s go through these stages in detail:

1. Reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Leads

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

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

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

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

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

3. Trials

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Active subscribers

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the following examples:

1. DIE ZEIT

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

2. BILDplus

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

3. The New York Times

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

Why does this distinction matter?

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

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

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

4.5 Expiring subscriptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.6 Former subscribers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paywall is genuinely strict, and getting stricter

FP offers essentially no free content. Osnos was upfront that this is unusual – freemium is perhaps the most popular model in Europe, whilst in Canada a lot of content is freely accessible and many media are government supported. And their model has only gotten more restrictive over time. In 2018, the meter allowed around five free articles a month. Today it’s practically zero. Because there’s no ad revenue to fall back on, every article needs to justify its existence through subscription value.

Four problems sitting underneath that strategy

Osnos framed FP’s current position around four challenges, several of which will be familiar to most publishers reading:

• Top-of-funnel erosion. Organic discovery through Google search, historically a major channel, has dropped off significantly, even though FP isn’t chasing traffic.

• A demographic gap. FP’s core paying audience skews over 50. But it also has a large 18-to-23 segment, driven almost entirely by university group subscriptions. Those students are a meaningful exposure channel (Osnos says it’s one of the most common things she hears from subscribers she meets: “I used to read FP at university”), but they arrive through IP-authenticated access, meaning FP has no contact information for them, and loses nearly all of them the moment they graduate.

• High pricing on a strict meter. Because there’s no ad revenue, FP has to price for value and hold the line on access, which creates real friction for readers who aren’t ready to pay upfront.

• Rising competition in a moment that should otherwise favor FP. Geopolitics is dominating headlines, which sounds like a tailwind, but it also means FP is now competing directly with much larger outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times for the same coverage. Osnos noted that FP used to see clear, isolated traffic and subscription spikes tied to major geopolitical moments (the clearest being the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war). More recent moments, including developments around Venezuela, have still moved the needle, but far less distinctly, because so many outlets are now covering the same stories simultaneously.

Given a small team (3 on the individual subscription side, 2 focused on group subs), Osnos’s operating principle is to prioritize low-effort, high-impact tactics, three of which she shared with us in Montréal: 

Win 1: The weekly trending digest

This is a weekly email combining a curated feed of articles, with marketing messaging at the top and bottom. Its effectiveness comes almost entirely from precise targeting and testing, not from the format itself.

Targeting: the email goes to users who visited the site in the last 30 days but haven’t visited in the last 7, a segment the team calls “Active 30, Dark 7.” These readers haven’t seen the last week’s stories, so the email surfaces what’s new rather than repeating content they may have already seen, and it re-engages them before they drift into a fully at-risk state. Readers still inside that 7-day window get more direct subscription-offer messaging instead, since they don’t need a content refresher.

Article selection: the team tested a blend of signals (last-touch conversion attribution, subscriber engagement time, and Apple News performance as a proxy for general news interest) against Sailthru’s personalization engine. Curated selection matched or outperformed the automated personalization engine consistently. Osnos’s read: curation still beats algorithmic personalization here, even though full automation would have been the lower-effort path.

Format specifics, tested directly: seven articles per edition, chosen after testing five, seven, and ten; seven won. The email always ends with an “end unit,” a final clickable item (a magazine issue, a new feature, a limited offer) so the reader has somewhere to go after the content rather than the email simply stopping. The top of the email is segmented into four different versions depending on who’s reading it, students and academics with .edu addresses see different pricing and messaging, former subscribers see a different version again, and existing subscribers never see price or offer messaging at all (they instead see messaging to reinforce sub benefits e.g. gift links, new issues, FP Live).

Effort and what’s next: the whole build takes under 30 minutes a week and consistently lands in FP’s top 10 monthly conversion sources (by campaign). The team is now testing an internally built AI tool that analyzes FP articles for conversion and subscriber-traffic performance and generates optimized headlines and decks, since the email leans almost entirely on headline and deck to pull readers back to the site.

Win 2: The exit-intent registration wall

FP has tested hard paywalls against softer meter strategies repeatedly, across every audience segment (known, unknown, newsletter subscribers, everyone), and hard paywalling consistently converts 5x better. That’s why 80% of FP’s traffic sees a hard paywall 100% of the time.

The remaining 20% is where the exit-intent wall comes in. When the system detects a reader about to leave the page (or swipe away on mobile) without paying, it offers a registration prompt instead: create a free account, get that one article. This avoids cannibalizing the primary hard-paywall conversion moment while still capturing readers who weren’t going to pay this time but are worth keeping in the funnel.

What happens after account creation matters as much as the wall itself. New registrants go through on-site onboarding and a structured nurture sequence: an explanation of why FP exists, a set of “greatest hits” articles with the paywall temporarily removed, a note from a subscriber-favorite columnist, and promotion of newsletters, which the team has found to be one of the strongest drivers of paid conversion among registered-but-not-subscribed readers, along with FP Live, FP’s video series. The average time from account creation to paid subscription across this flow is 14 days.

Win 3: Newsletter courses

FP’s first newsletter course, an introduction to core international relations theory, was launched in 2026 and authored by Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor and one of FP’s top-converting columnists (also featured in the onboarding nurture sequence above). The format is a five-part email series covering foundational IR concepts.

The logic behind it: geopolitics is increasingly relevant to people well outside FP’s usual readership, but without some grounding in the basics, a general reader has a hard time getting real value from FP’s actual coverage. The course is designed to meet a younger, less specialized audience where they are and bring them into FP’s orbit gradually.

In its first six weeks, the course drew roughly 9,500 signups. 40% of signups were net new to FP, meaning they’d never previously been in FP’s email system. Paid acquisition for the course is running at a $1 cost per lead, against FP’s normal average of roughly $3. These users are driven to the FP website rather than using an ad platform email capture, a strategy that may lead to higher CPLs but means higher quality leads.

The course also functions as a self-contained subscription funnel. Throughout its five parts, it embeds subscription messaging: “homework” assignments using gift links to relevant FP coverage, and promotion of specific benefits, like FP’s podcasts, that the team believes will resonate with a similar audience. Rather than offering a broad free trial that risks prompting cancellations among existing subscribers, FP built a narrower incentive: completing the course earns a 30-day free trial, available only to that specific, already-engaged cohort. So far, 18% of readers exposed to the trial offer go on to claim the trial.

Because the course is built once and requires no ongoing maintenance to keep running, it fits the same low-effort, high-impact principle as the other two tactics: a small team’s structural bet, built on the front end and left to keep converting on its own.

For any publisher weighing a stricter paywall against the traffic it might cost, Osnos's session is a useful reminder that the constraint didn't stop growth, it forced the team to continuously innovate and develop tactics precise enough to convert when article access can’t.