Competition and reader feedback pushed DC Thomson to act. Football-only websites were appearing in Scotland, focused on the big Glasgow and Edinburgh clubs, with Aberdeen an obvious next stop. And viewers of Highland League Weekly, a highlights show for the north’s semi-professional league, kept saying that content was all they wanted. “We assumed that everybody would want their local news as well.”

Existing content, sold on its own

The Sports Pack is the sports section of the full digital pack. Nothing new was commissioned. “We just took what we had and tried to package it up in a way that our Potential subscribers were going to like.” Each title’s pack follows its audience: The Courier’s is football (Dundee, Dundee United, St Johnstone, Dunfermline); the Press and Journal’s adds the Highland League and shinty, a traditional Highland team sport similar to field hockey.

Sport readers buy through an in-article payment screen and rarely see the subscribe page. Around 95% of Sports Pack sales happen in-article, so the pack is often left off the subscribe page entirely; its three slots go to whatever needs volume that month.

> Another regional publisher acing subscriptions: How Irish News is growing digital from a strong print legacy

Exclusive reporting made it grow

Once the pack showed sport readers would pay, growth came from exclusives. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the P&J sent a reporter to his home country to find out who he was. Nobody else had the story. “All of a sudden we started to see huge success,” McDougall says. “It started to teach the journalists what kind of content would really resonate, and what people would be willing to pay for.”

The sports desks stopped writing Saturday match reports and Friday team news, and started reporting what readers could not get elsewhere: youth players coming through, a different lens on the club. “It heroes the journalists. If they create great content, it will convert and retain subscribers.”

It retains better than the full pack, and most buyers never upgrade

Trial conversion and retention are both significantly better on the Sports Pack than on DC Thomson’s other products. Drop-off comes after months one and two, then flattens. McDougall credits the focus: a Dundee United fan goes to one page, finds everything, and follows a team with a passion that general news does not attract.

Around 15-20% of Sports Pack subscribers upgrade to the full pack, with half of them doing so in the first month. The other 80% stay. Internally, that raised the cannibalisation question. A recent reverse test answered it: DC Thomson offered both packs on the same sport articles, and readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster than those who chose the Sports Pack. “Sure, they might have gone onto the web pack, but maybe they would not have enjoyed paying for all the content they weren’t wanting to read.”

A smaller product at a rising price

The Sports Pack launched at £3 for three months, about half the price of the full pack, purely to find out whether sport readers would pay anything. They did, so the question became what a credible price looked like. Over the last year, DC Thomson has switched from chasing volume to growing revenue. Every trial is now one paid month, and the Sports Pack costs £4.99 after a £1 first month. When the main pack’s trial was cut, the cheap pack’s trial was cut with it.

Win-backs exist in the cancel flow, but there is no 90%-off deal for anyone who phones and asks; on a £4.99 pack it would be pennies. Instead, subscribers who try to cancel are offered an annual subscription paid monthly: a lower monthly price in return for a twelve-month commitment. McDougall says it makes far more money than a large percentage discount.

“If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it’s going to be a lot harder. We’ve got to get people to see that the product is worth something.”

DC Thomson is now looking at the same idea by geography: packs for Aberdeen or the Moray coast, built on data about what people read. “We’ve got to be really careful that we don’t offer another pack at £4.99 when people could be paying £9.99 for the content and getting more.”

What this means for you

Find the section that gets the most engagement and the fewest subscriptions, then try selling it on its own. DC Thomson didn’t need new content, nor an app and editorial mandate. The product succeeded with existing articles, a simple payment screen and a lower price. How far that travels depends on what you publish.

• Regional and local publishers: Football is the obvious choice where a club has a real fan base, but build the pack around what your readers actually follow: the P&J’s includes shinty, a sport rarely covered elsewhere. Sell it in-article, keep the trial identical to the main pack, and run the reverse test before anyone asks about cannibalisation.
• Nationals: a sport-only pack competes with dedicated sports subscriptions. The transferable part is the method: pick an under-monetised segment (a section, a region, a day pass), test it against the full product on the same pages and judge it on retention as well as conversion.
• Magazine and specialist publishers: your product is already a niche, so slicing it thinner is risky. Take the pricing rules instead: one trial length across products, a term commitment in the cancel flow rather than a percentage off, and retention tracked for every offer cohort.
• Single titles and small teams: if no section is big enough for its own pack, the cheapest thing to copy is an annual contract paid monthly.

McDougall’s warning is to ask first what problem the pack solves and which readers it is for. DC Thomson had readers asking for it and reporting nobody else had, and the pack needs both.

“What you are trying to do is to put the conversion (from free user to paying subscriber) into the user journey as soon as possible. Because that’s what you want… By having a nice “beware, premium content ahead” icon (or, should we say warning), you are short circuiting that thought process and user journey. Conversions need to happen based on the article on your website, not how you market it in a newsletter or on the homepage.”

It’s perhaps one of the reasons why we’ve seen increasingly more publishers trying the opposite, i.e. signalling when content is free to access.

The New York Times and The Verge for instance have been testing this for a while now, dedicating a whole section of their homepage to “free to read” content.

The Independent in the UK also has a tag on a newsletter promotion, highlighting the 1 month free.

Subscription without blocking content

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. The web stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been. What’s new sits next to it, a separate, paid app.

This means that the web traffic and engagement on-site is preserved whilst the brand also monetises their most engaged, loyal readers through an additional product.

> Read the full story of SFGATE’s subscription launch

Subscriptions focused on community and relationship-building

In an age of content abundance, where generic content becomes easier to produce, the advantage shifts to what is harder to replicate: original journalism, trusted relationships and communities that give audiences a reason to return. It’s what FT Strategies has labelled as the Community Era, and it’s exactly what many publishers are moving towards with subscription products built for lasting relationships.

The Economist launched Play, a $15/month audio and video-only tier that sits inside the existing Economist app. It sits alongside a second, deeper relationship-building product: The Economist Insider, a premium video series featuring the editor-in-chief and senior journalists interviewing figures like Christine Lagarde and Mark Carney. A year after launch, 75% of subscribers have engaged with Insider at least once, and churn drops further the more deeply someone engages with it, holding even through a recent price increase.

Together, Play and Insider represent two ends of the same strategy: Play is built to start a relationship with a reader who isn’t ready to commit to the full product yet, Insider is built to deepen the relationship with a subscriber who already has.

WIRED also relaunched their subscription offer in Summer 2025, priced at $48 a year (roughly $4/month) with a focus on connecting “our humans to all of you humans.” (Katie Drummond, WIRED):

• A five-newsletter subscriber suite. Two entirely new verticals launched alongside three previously free, popular newsletters moved fully behind the paywall. All five are written conversationally by senior correspondents and built to work as standalone “inbox reads,” not link round-ups, which is what makes them habit-forming rather than skimmable.
• Structured, cadenced livestream AMAs, running at least twice a month, with a staff moderator and two senior beat reporters per session. The tight panel format, rather than sporadic ad-hoc video, self-selects WIRED’s most loyal readers and puts them in direct, live conversation with the reporters covering their beat.
• Expanded commenting, rolled out across a much wider set of articles than before, specifically to turn passive readers into visible, active participants in the conversation around a story.
• Subscriber-exclusive narrated articles, giving the subscription a genuine audio dimension rather than treating audio as an afterthought.

Alternative ways to bridge the gap to subscription

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.

Anjali shared how data 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.

The Washington Post’s solution is flexible access models. By testing micropayments (weekly and pay passes, as well as pay-per-article with an in-paywall mobile payment module), they’re uncovering an untapped market: 42% of flexible access buyers are brand-new, anonymous users outside the existing ecosystem.

Interestingly, this also serves as a nurturing mechanism for long-term subscriber growth. Over a 180-day period, up to 8% of week-pass buyers, 4% of day pass buyers, and 3% of pay-per-article buyers eventually became full subscribers.

> Read the full story from The Washington Post

A handful of publishers are also testing “pay what you can” subscription models.

For instance, Canada’s Les Coops de l’information, a cooperative of six Quebec news outlets, let readers name their own price for the first three months.

Against a C$1 minimum, the average paid was C$3.12 a month, and some new subscribers chose more than the regular subscription price. The suggested figure in the price field did the work – suggesting C$5 lifted the average to C$3.39 and suggesting C$6 lifted it to C$3.50, with more people simply taking the suggestion each time.

84% of the acquisitions were from readers who had never subscribed before, which is the number that matters most for a local publisher wondering whether it has exhausted its market.

> Read more about Les Coops’ pay what you can campaign

Selection over unlimited access

Faced with information fatigue, unlimited access as a subscription product is not always the answer. Les Echos is instead making the opposite bet, that of selection. “La Sélection” consists of 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 sits at €9.90 a month.

> Full article on Les Echos’ “La Sélection” here

Not trying to sell on day 1

When benchmarking 100 subscription businesses, including the NYT, Figma, Miro, Calm and Masterclass, we noticed that conversion almost never happens in one step. It happens through micro-conversions, each with its own objective. And more importantly, even conversion itself seems secondary. The real priority for those companies is to create value for their user as a first goal. To build engagement. To make the product feel indispensable before asking for money.

The critical principle behind this model: each step has one single goal.

Figma: $12.5B company.
Homepage: “Get started for free.”

Then the onboarding starts: What’s your name? How do you plan to use Figma? What do you do for work? Where do you work? Have you used Figma before? What do you want to make first?

Six questions before you see anything about pricing. And when the plan page finally appears, it includes a free Starter option, so even the pricing step isn’t a hard sell.

The New York Times even tested this earlier in the year. The only action button in the top right corner (on the left) says “LOG IN”, because at this stage, the goal is registration, not subscription.

Countdowns

Whether on the paywall, subscription offer page or in the registration onboarding journey, publishers are using countdowns to create urgency and encourage conversion. It’s a small change but one that’s proven to convert.

> Find 100+ paywall benchmarks here

“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.

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.

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!

Why there are no tiers

Where many publishers reach for tiers early, The Observer launched with a single umbrella subscription covering print, digital, audio and now, Culture Club (see below). “We wanted the subscription to be simple to understand, great value for money and comprehensive,” Riley says. Reintroducing a heritage brand to an audience that may not be familiar with it, or has never encountered it digitally at all, is not the moment to ask people to choose between packages.

A separate audio-only subscription, a legacy of the Tortoise audio model, exists through Apple Podcasts and Spotify for readers who want nothing else, and there is real cross-pollination between formats. But the umbrella model is deliberate: with only six months of data, Riley says tiering decisions now would rest on very little evidence. Simplicity was the safer bet, leaving room to see where the value lands before carving up the product.

Culture Club, for every subscriber

The Observer’s most visible product launch since the initial rollout is Culture Club, a set of arts and culture benefits bundled into every subscription: two-for-one tickets to the National Gallery, exclusive cinema screenings with directors, author events and book clubs held in the newsroom, and discounted theatre tickets. “It’s your cultural life, curated,” is how Riley describes it.

Rather than a separate product built for a distinct audience, Culture Club is included in the standard subscription and goes to every reader who pays for it, with no separate tier. Riley frames it as adding significant partner benefits to those that The Observer was already quietly offering, like giving a 70% discount on home cinema memberships through their partner MUBI and turning them into a coherent proposition tied to the brand’s editorial identity. Arts and culture were the deliberate focus rather than, say, food or travel: Riley sees it as a standout interest for Observer audiences that other subscription products in the market have overlooked. The commercial logic is retention as much as acquisition: subscribers who attend an event or use a benefit build a tangible relationship with the brand that a login alone cannot create.

Riley traces the conviction to the i newspaper, where he launched reader events and saw that most people find news organisations distant and faintly mysterious right up until they are sitting in a room talking to a journalist. Subscribers who have had that kind of experience with a brand, in his experience, are simply more likely to stay, which is the logic Culture Club now builds into the subscription itself.

Pricing without the tricks

The Observer priced its subscription at £16 a month or £144 a year, deliberately avoiding 99p-style pricing. “That was part of just trying to be really clear about what we think the value is of the work that we’re doing,” Riley says. An under-35 price point at 50% off acknowledges that younger readers are often priced out of premium subscriptions, with 35 chosen as a deliberate life-stage threshold.

The Observer has no obvious competitor to benchmark against. The Guardian’s UK voluntary model and the Times’ hard paywall represent decades of pricing evolution aimed largely at winning back or re-engaging audiences a mature business has already exhausted. The Observer has no such legacy to correct for, which Riley treats as an advantage: the headline price can reflect where the business is now, without unwinding years of promotional pricing.

What’s driving retention

Six months in, Riley says the clearest signal in the data is breadth of engagement. Subscribers who touch multiple parts of the product, reading Nigel Slater’s recipes, doing the crossword and listening to a podcast, are significantly less likely to cancel than those who arrived for one thing and never explored further. Because the product is still young, many subscribers do not yet know everything they have access to.

That is why subscriber messaging pushes Culture Club so hard: highlighting more than £800 in available benefits is a fast way to demonstrate value to someone who subscribed for a single podcast series before they reach a cancellation decision. The Observer has also seen a healthier-than-expected skew towards annual plans, which Riley reads as an early show of faith, buying time to build a relationship before the first renewal.

The Salt Path’s second life

The Chloe Hadjimatheou investigation into the bestselling memoir The Salt Path was a hit before the subscription even existed, driving millions of readers to the open-access site last summer and helping build the registration base the launch depended on. In January, a narrative podcast series built on the investigation became, in Riley’s words, the biggest catalyst for subscriber growth in the first few months after launch, driving uptake in both the standalone audio subscription and the full subscription that includes it. A Sky documentary over Christmas had extended the story’s reach further. A new Hadjimatheou series, We Call Her Emma, has just been released, an investigation focusing on the extraordinary rise of Asma al-Assad from West London girl to the heart of Syria’s brutal dictatorship: the next test of whether a story that brings subscribers in at scale can hand them on to the rest of the product.

Building fast without the legacy costs

The Observer’s product team has moved almost entirely to an agentic coding approach, using AI tools to handle the bulk of feature development. A small team of engineers from an outside agency works alongside an in-house tech lead and product manager. Claude writes most of the code for new features, while the engineers concentrate on harder technical problems and on testing and quality assurance, checking that the output does what it was meant to. The approach lets a young, lean organisation compete with newsrooms that have far larger legacy technology teams, freeing more of the business’s resources for journalism itself.

Riley applies the same instinct himself. After seeing a story-support widget demonstrated by a US publishers’ collective at the recent Audiencers Festival in London, he built a rough version of it within an afternoon, not to launch it but to show his own team the idea. Prototyping, he says, has become quick enough that showing is often faster than telling.

On the harder question of AI companies and publisher content, Riley is careful not to stake out a fixed position. The Observer has partnered with Particle News, an AI-powered aggregation app, as its first UK publisher, and Riley points to Reuters Institute research showing a growing share of global news journeys now beginning inside a chatbot as a signal publishers cannot ignore, whatever position they eventually take on direct deals versus industry coalitions.

The hardest part isn’t the technology

Asked what has been harder than expected, Riley doesn’t hesitate: discipline. A brand this old, with this much editorial breadth, invites endless extensions: more tiers, more products, more features, especially now that the barrier to building any of them has collapsed.

“When Claude can build you a recipe site in an afternoon, you have to ask yourself: is that really what we want to build?”

Riley has previously cited The Atlantic’s decade-long path to a million subscribers as a realistic model for the kind of timeline this takes. His ambition for The Observer is to build a sustainably profitable media business on reader revenue and other income streams, and he argues that doing so without the legacy cost base of an older company changes the calculation. He won’t share subscriber numbers this early. Six months in, he says, The Observer is on track. There is, by his own admission, still a long way to go.

Jack Riley is Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, where he leads customer revenue strategy across subscription growth, marketing, data and product. He joined in 2025 from The London Standard, where he was Chief Digital Officer, and previously led Huffington Post’s turnaround to profitability as Managing Director. The Observer is owned by Tortoise Media.

The starting point: ownership as the product

The Guardian was founded just over 200 years ago as The Manchester Guardian, a local UK paper. It’s now the fifth most visited news site in the world, pulling in roughly a billion page views a month. Its US team is small, about six people, working alongside a much larger marketing and reader revenue team of around 90 people at the London HQ.

The organization’s value proposition, as Harkin frames it, comes down to three words: global, independent, free. The independence part is structural, not just marketing language. The Guardian has no billionaire owner. It’s owned by the Scott Trust, established 90 years ago with a single purpose: ensure The Guardian can keep publishing in perpetuity. The Trust isn’t built to generate returns for shareholders. It exists to keep funding journalism.

That structure becomes the actual product sold to readers, not just backstory.

Ownership isn’t just a backstory

In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, both The Washington Post and the LA Times pulled their presidential endorsements, reportedly at the direction of their billionaire owners. Inside The Guardian, an editor suggested sending readers a simple message: we published our endorsement, and we always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to.

That email went out to The Guardian’s list. It generated two million dollars.

Harkin described it as one of those moments where you assume your analytics dashboard is broken, because the spike looks impossible for a normal day. What it confirmed for her team was that US readers are far more media-literate about ownership structures than publishers often give them credit for. People understood exactly what billionaire ownership can do to editorial decisions, because they’d just watched it happen at two major outlets, and they responded to a publication that structurally couldn’t be pressured the same way.

What people say when you ask them why they paid

The Guardian surveys readers immediately after they support the organization, while the motivation is still fresh. The consistent, top-ranked answers: protect the free press, protect editorial independence, protect the journalism itself. Further down the list, at roughly position six, is a motivation specific to The Guardian’s model: keeping the journalism free and open for everyone, not paywalled.

Further down still, in positions eleven through fourteen, is a newer and growing motivation: dissatisfaction with other media sources. Harkin ties this directly to visible cases of ownership interference, citing Jeff Bezos later restricting which topics The Washington Post’s opinion pages were authorized to cover. Readers notice, and it shows up in what they tell you when they give.

How this research becomes the actual email copy

The endorsement email wasn’t written as an abstract mission statement. It was built, deliberately, around the specific motivations the research had already surfaced, worded so it read as natural rather than like a fundraising checklist:

• Dissatisfied with other media: named exactly what The Washington Post and LA Times did, and what The Guardian did instead
• Wants editorial independence protected: explained the Scott Trust ownership model in plain terms
• Wants work that holds power to account: made clear that only the editor-in-chief, never a business owner, decides what gets published
• Wants to protect the free press: the direct ask

Harkin’s point in walking through this line by line: the research isn’t a slide you present once internally and then forget. It’s the literal structure of the copy you send.

The revenue mechanics underneath it

Readers who want to support The Guardian financially see three recurring options: a five-dollar monthly contribution, a fifteen-dollar tier called Supporter Plus that comes with added benefits, and a higher Digital Plus tier with more on top. There’s also a one-time support option and a recently launched student discount.

Alongside the main organization sits theguardian.org, a registered nonprofit. Harkin pointed to US philanthropic culture, Americans give roughly half a trillion dollars a year to causes, ranging from small one-off donations to major gifts, as a real reason this structure matters specifically in the US market, even though The Guardian itself isn’t a nonprofit. The motivations that drive nonprofit giving (mission alignment, wanting to sustain something you believe should exist) map closely onto why people choose to pay The Guardian.

The Guardian currently has 1.4 million digital subscribers. The UK has the largest paid supporter base, but North America, US and Canada combined, is the fastest-growing region, now at 14% of the base.

The takeaway

Her closing point applies well beyond publications without a paywall: figure out the full range of motivations and emotional connections your audience has with your organization, not just the functional value proposition of “you get access to the app.” Then keep telling that story, deliberately and repeatedly, across your marketing rather than assuming people already know it.

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

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…