The line between subscription and membership is blurring, but that doesn’t mean membership is just subscription with a different name.

Subscription is a transaction. Membership is a relationship.

It’s the difference between “Pay to access content” and “Support something you care about, and be part of it”

To help you build a successful membership model, this article shares 4 publisher case studies, with strategies to steal from each. One of these publishers, The Guardian, would likely say they have a supporter model over membership, but the strategies built around conversion are very membership-like, meaning there’s still plenty to take away from their success.

1. The Guardian: turning readers into supporters

The Guardian’s journalism is free to access for everyone. But even without a paywall, over 1 million readers support them on a recurring basis.

What’s working

Although there are some concrete benefits to supporting The Guardian (such as exclusive newsletters, less ads and access to their app), supporters aren’t paying for access, they’re supporting and participating in The Guardian’s mission. It’s this emotional layer that’s paying off.

Messaging around gaining support is built around the 10 ‘supporter motivations’:

1. Editorial independence  
2. Protect the free press  
3. Investigative journalism  
4. Trustworthy, factual, high quality  
5. Holds power to account  
6. Open for all, no paywall  
7. International perspective 
8. Financial challenges in media  
9. Better understand world events  
10. It’s only fair to pay

These are then integrated into homepage banners, end-of-article ‘epics’ and emailing, where messaging is continuously tested, iterated and updated, often making use of current news events:

Every public-facing module is reviewed by an editorial eye to ensure the tone is a seamless extension of the journalism, not a jarring commercial break. This plays an important role in building relationships with readers.

In the US, this year-round messaging and UX testing helps to inform the team for their annual end-of-year campaign, running from early November, through Giving Tuesday and on to midnight on December 31st, the most critical window in their financial calendar.

In their most recent EOY campaign (2025), the final numbers were staggering: 

• Total raised: $3.1 million in liquid cash by Dec 31st (exceeding their $3M goal).
• Lifetime Value (LTV): The estimated total value of the campaign (including recurring commitments) is $8.6 million
• Year-on-year growth: This represents an 83% increase in campaign value compared to the 2023 “standard” year (because a presidential election year – as 2024 was – is usually an outlier).

What you should steal from The Guardian’s model

• Understand reader motivations for supporting or subscribing to you
• Continuously test messaging and offers, integrating supporter motivations
• Experiment with innovative ‘asks’, like The Guardian’s article count
• Bring the reader onboard with your mission, so they really see that their support is valuable to you

Dive deeper into The Guardian’s model

• The Guardian: reader revenue growth & proposition development
• Behind The Guardian’s record-breaking US End of Year campaign
• Relaunching The Guardian app: changing reader habits means we must also evolve

2. The Kyiv Independent: humanizing the newsroom

The Kyiv Independent is a young, English-language media, launched in a context of war, who has transformed from a 18-person startup into a globally recognized authority with over 27,000 paying members and 3 million monthly readers.

What’s working

The team has successfully built a mission-driven membership model with a community of supporters around a shared cause. Part of this success is thanks to building trust with their audience, something that is done between people, meaning they work hard to humanize their newsroom.

Instead of hiding behind a corporate brand, the Kyiv Independent puts its journalists at the center of its marketing:

• They don’t shy away from talking about themselves: their work, almost never say no to interviews, a lot of commentaries and opinion articles…
• Marketing communications are built around journalists and their personalities

• Membership is a community, not a transaction. It’s not a key to a locked door, but a way to keep information free for everyone
• Communication is always transparent, giving a glimpse into the behind the scenes and creating visible experts through personality-led journalism

However the team doesn’t shy away from campaigns asking for support. Countdowns to reach their target, birthday campaigns, country-specific campaigns… these have been a vital part of their growth strategy, creating urgency but with purpose and identity.

What you should steal from The Kyiv Independent’s model

• Be openly transparent on your funding, editorial choices, impact…
• Translate what you stand for, and what would be lost without you in messaging
• Bring the newsroom along with you, putting them front and center in marketing campaigns
• Build channels for journalists and readers to connect, whether that be through Q&As, reader-led articles or discord communities
• Ensure supporters are valued as individuals whilst also helping them feel part of something bigger

Dive deeper into The Kyiv Independent’s model

• How The Kyiv Independent is growing membership through relationship-building
• Inside The Kyiv Independent’s membership model

3. Condé Nast: building a premium membership layer

Condé Nast already had strong brands and a mature subscription model, but wanted to build belonging amongst their most loyal audiences. The team therefore created a ‘Membership’ tier that sits above subscription.

What’s working

This new membership layer represents a fundamental pivot from serving passive recipients to active participants. 

This clearly differentiates it from subscription.

Whilst their traditional subscription represents a scale/volume tier…

• Audience: Broadly focused on volume
• Value Exchange: One-way (passive recipient absorbing content)
• Goal: Volume and scale-based value – content for scale

…Membership is the niche, high-value tier

• Audience: Caters to a very specific segment of the audience.
• Value Exchange: Two-way. Members are active participants contributing data, feedback, and engagement. They expect to belong to a community.
• Goal: Engagement and high retention, not volume – content is focused on the funnel.

This focus on belonging is reflected in their metrics, measuring loyalty and engagement over volume. The most critical metrics include ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), Renewal Rate, Recency (how recently they engaged), and Feature Engagement (which features are “stickiest”).

What should you steal from Condé Nast’s strategy?

• Don’t be scared of putting membership and subscriptions alongside each other, but make sure to clearly differentiate them
• Membership means moving beyond access to an elevated experience. For high-value tiers, Condé Nast commits to a white-glove treatment. This involves building dedicated membership teams trained to provide high-touch service. At industry events, these teams are equipped with “face sheets” to know members by name and be aware of their recent professional achievements, fostering genuine, human-to-human relationships instead of brand-to-consumer transactions.
• Measure membership differently – belonging and advocacy aren’t easy to define, but they definitely go beyond traditional engagement
• Segmentation matters: one size of subscription tier doesn’t fit all, and you’re potentially leaving money (and advocates) on the table by not creating a higher tier for them

Dive deeper into Condé Nast’s model

• When is a subscriber more than a subscriber? How Condé Nast is evolving its audience strategy with membership
• How Condé Nast is growing the “happy middle” of the audience funnel

4. Daily Maverick: involving members in journalism

The South African publisher, Daily Maverick, is an outstanding example of a successful membership model.

What’s working

One of their unique strategies that’s contributing to this success is a growing database of contactable “Insiders” (Daily Maverick members), providing expertise on every topic imaginable.

“You’re part of this community – it’s more than just a subscription and we need your help. We don’t know everything and there are experts amongst you. Be a part of Daily Maverick, share your expertise.”

Via a 3-step survey in the email onboarding series, Daily Maverick asked Insiders for their name, email address, phone number, job and other areas of expertise, their ‘superpower’ as it became known internally.

By sharing these details, an Insider could be contacted by the Daily Maverick team to participate in their journalism, provide expertise on a certain topic or even be invited to join a panel session at one of their events. 

It’s an impressive way of making a member feel like they’re directly supporting and involved in your journalism.

According to the reader revenue team, every newsroom should be looking for this sense of belonging, the feeling of being proud to be “a Daily Maverick reader”. And this “superpower” strategy, where community members are put at the centre of journalism, will help achieve exactly this, ensuring Insiders are a part of Daily Maverick.

What you should steal from Daily Maverick’s model

• Give readers opportunities to be involved in your work, whether than be through this form of database, commenting, debates or call-outs. Membership becomes real when people can do something, not just support something.
• Create direct channels between readers and journalists
• Build this into your value proposition – it’s a benefit for members, not just for your membership model

Dive deeper into Daily Maverick’s model

• Learning from Membership models: Daily Maverick’s superpower database
• Boosting membership conversion at Maverick Insider with FAQs

The post Steal this strategy: 4 membership models succeeding for publishers (and how to learn from them) appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the fifth in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
> Episode one: 100 subscription business, 15 industries, 1 moodboard
> Episode two: What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-offf
> Episode three: Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1
> Episode four: The subscription pricing page we've all built at least once

The cycle doesn’t stop when someone becomes a subscriber

In episode 1, we introduced the idea that the best subscription businesses don’t follow a linear journey (attract → convert → retain) but an infinite cycle of micro-conversions, where each step has one goal and unlocks the next. In episodes 3 and 4, we looked at what happens before the first paid conversion: how these businesses use registration, onboarding, and pricing to guide the user step by step.

This episode covers what happens after someone becomes a subscriber.

And what we observed is that the journey really doesn’t change in nature once the user has paid. After someone subscribes, the next micro-conversion might be signing up for a newsletter. Then downloading the app. Then discovering podcasts or games or a specific section of the product. Then, when the subscriber is ready (and when you know enough about their usage), you can propose an upsell or bundle.

Acquiring a subscriber isn’t the end of the funnel. It’s just one more step in the infinite cycle we described in episode 1. And what most people call “retention” is really just the continuation of the same sequence of micro-conversions, except now you have data about the user and can be much smarter about what you propose next.

The problem is that most of this work needs to happen fast.

Why you have about 100 days (and probably less)

INMA data shows that a quarter of subscribers cancel in the first month, and half are gone by the fourth month. And a Nieman Lab study on The Wall Street Journal’s data showed that the probability of adopting a new habit drops dramatically after about 100 days.

Half of your new subscribers are gone within 4 months, and after about 100 days the window to build a new habit narrows significantly. If you don’t manage to execute enough micro-conversions during those first few months (newsletter signup, app download, feature discovery, habit formation), the probability of keeping that subscriber drops, regardless of how good your anti-churn campaigns are later on.

(I know this isn’t the most cheerful insight we’ve had in this series, but it’s what the data consistently shows.)

What this looks like in practice: L’Équipe after the Olympics

This is where the theory gets concrete. L’Équipe (a Poool client), speaking at The Audiencers’ Festival in 2025, shared how they built 12 post-subscription projects after the Paris 2024 Olympics, which had generated a huge spike in new subscribers, subscribers they needed to keep. I won’t go through all 12 (the full article is worth reading), but the ones that stood out to me are the following.

Their data analysis revealed something I found really striking: what a subscriber does after paying has more impact on M+1 churn than what they did before subscribing. When Fabien Mulot showed this at The Audiencers’ Festival, it was one of those moments where you think “of course, that makes total sense” and at the same time you realize that most of the industry’s energy is still focused on acquiring subscribers, not on what happens once they’ve subscribed.

Based on this insight, they focused their onboarding on one specific goal: getting new subscribers to read at least two paid articles within the first three days. Their data showed that each paid article read during those first 72 hours reduces the following month’s churn by about 5 points, so two articles in three days already makes a meaningful difference on the curve.

The onboarding sequence they built follows the same micro-conversion logic we’ve been describing throughout this series:

• first, welcome the subscriber and showcase what their subscription unlocks;
• then encourage them to personalize their experience (alerts, newsletters, favorite topics);
• then immediately serve them paid content tailored to their interests. Each step has one job.

The cumulative impact is significant.

• Simply being exposed to this onboarding journey reduces churn by 7 points at M+1.
• Completing the onboarding journey while also activating an action (turning on alerts, signing up for a newsletter) reduces churn by 20 points at M+3
• The more micro-conversions a subscriber completes in those early weeks, the less likely they are to leave.

Beyond onboarding, L’Équipe continued the logic with a newsletter strategy (a monthly preview of upcoming content, plus journalist-led newsletters across four sports verticals where subscribers can ask questions directly to editorial teams), and a new “Games” vertical to expand consumption into other formats. Each of these is another micro-conversion in the sequence, another reason for the subscriber to come back tomorrow.

El País and FT Strategies confirm the pattern at a broader scale

L’Équipe’s data is specific to sports media, but the pattern holds across other publishers.

El País shared at a 2024 INMA conference that subscribers who use editorial newsletters churn 24% less, app users churn 15% less, premium newsletter users churn 29% less, and loyalty scheme users churn 30% less. Each one of these is a micro-conversion that happened after subscribing, and each one reduces churn by 15 to 30%.

FT Strategies ran some very complementary work, analyzing the impact of each product feature on engagement vs. the percentage of subscribers who actually use it. The features with the highest impact (multimedia, interactive content, games) are also the ones that fewer than 30% of subscribers use. The gap between impact and adoption is where the biggest opportunity sits.

What happens when you get the micro-conversions right: lock-in effects

When the micro-conversion sequence works well over time, you eventually reach a point where leaving becomes genuinely hard for the subscriber. This is thanks to long-term engagement and relationship-building.

But of course, there are other strategies to keep your subscribers retained, ones that can be used in conjunction with the micro-conversions detailed above. When combined, they’re powerful for developing loyalty.

During our benchmark, we saw three main types of lock-in across the 100 businesses:

• Personalization – we talked about Spotify in episode 4, but the principle applies to any product that gets smarter with use, adapting the product to the user
• Multi-accounts – Netflix profiles, Blinkist’s partner account where you sometimes keep the service for the other person
• Bundling with external services – Canal+ with Netflix, Amazon Prime combining shopping, streaming and delivery, Walmart+ bundling grocery delivery with Paramount+

(You can read more about lock-in effects here)

Funnily enough, each of these is really the result of many successful micro-conversions accumulated over months and years. The lock-in is earned, not imposed.

Anti-churn: necessary, but it’s the safety net

And then there’s anti-churn, which is what happens when the micro-conversion sequence hasn’t worked well enough and the subscriber is about to leave.

L’Équipe has been methodical about this too. Their cancellation form (which handles two-thirds of all unsubscriptions) was redesigned through A/B tests: they added an intermediate screen summarizing the benefits the subscriber would lose (+2% retention), and tested personalizing the message with the subscriber’s first name and a specific discount percentage (+1.2 points on conversion). Small changes, but measurable impact at scale (source).

Unidad Editorial took a different approach by building a churn propensity model that predicts which subscribers are about to cancel, triggering personalized actions before they reach the cancellation page. Result: a 25% reduction in churn in three months.

These are well-executed tactics. But in the broader picture, they’re the safety net.

The real strategy is everything that happens before the subscriber even thinks about leaving: the onboarding, the feature discovery, the newsletter signup, the app download, the habit formation. All of those micro-conversions that, together, make the product too valuable to walk away from.

What you can take away from this (and test tomorrow)

Map the post-subscription micro-conversions you want your subscribers to make. Newsletter signup, app download, podcast discovery, games, alerts configuration, etc. based on their value. Then ask yourself: do you have a sequence designed for this, or are you hoping it happens on its own?

Focus on the first 3 days and the first 30 days. L’Équipe’s data shows that each paid article read in the first 72 hours reduces the following month’s churn by 5 points, and a completed onboarding with an action reduces churn by 20 points at M+3.

Check the gap between feature impact and feature adoption. FT Strategies’ framework is a useful lens: if your most impactful features are also the least used, that’s your biggest opportunity. And El País data shows that each additional touchpoint is worth 15 to 30% less churn.

Treat anti-churn as a safety net, not as a strategy. If the majority of your effort goes into save campaigns for subscribers who are already about to leave, you’re fighting the battle at the wrong end of the timeline.

And if all of this sounds like a lot to orchestrate (because it is): that’s exactly the kind of problem we’re solving with Poool and Darwin CX. From onboarding sequences to engagement actions to anti-churn triggers, across web, app, and print. Orchestrating micro-conversions at every step of the subscriber journey is what we do. If that resonates, or if you’re currently looking at your subscription platform options, let’s talk.

Next week, episode 6, the last one: toilet paper, Japanese snack boxes, razor blades, wine, and genealogy. The most surprising subscription models we came across, and what they confirmed about engagement (because at this point in the series, I think you already know what the answer is going to be).

The post The first 100 days: why most of what we call retention is really just micro-conversions (again): episode 5 appeared first on Audiencers.

Written by Catherine Léger, Director of Performance Marketing, & Mathieu Therrien, Director of Products, at Radio-Canada. They'll also be speaking on the topic at Audiencers' Festival Montreal on June 25th 2026.

Let’s talk about the fear that keeps product managers tossing and turning at night: the soul-crushing fear of alienating your audience. There’s nothing quite like the stress of watching users churn because you dared to put a barrier in their way.

Yet, a little over a year ago, Radio-Canada decided to stop holding its breath and start taking risks. We did the unthinkable for a public broadcaster: we implemented a hard registration wall across our entire app suite. It was a global first for a public news entity—a move driven by equal parts boldness and strategic necessity. We realized that if we wanted to remain relevant and maintain a long-term relationship with our audience, the “status quo” was no longer an option; it was now or never.

In this article, we share the results of this “high-stakes gamble” one year on. From transforming our internal digital maturity to seeing a massive +83% surge in monthly active accounts, we’ve proven that you don’t lose trust by asking for an account—you lose it by pretending you can build a future with anonymous visitors.

What we feared

Like everyone else in the industry, we had the same fear: if we block access, we block the audience. We worried that users would become discouraged, that the most impatient would leave, and that the trust we had built up over decades would be undermined. Internal skeptics argued that people would never create an account just to listen to the radio or read a quick news story, noting, “we’re not Netflix.” In short: the wall was supposed to cause people to flee.

The tipping point

And yet, we had to go for it. A wall was deployed on July 3, 2024. We launched on iOS, Android, and connected TVs, followed by a partial web rollout ahead of the Paris Olympics. On that day, we took the risk of frustrating our users in the name of long-term relationships.

What really happened

Spoiler alert: Not only did people not leave, but they came back in greater numbers and with accounts.

• +83% monthly active accounts in one year.
• +14% engaged visits to our platforms (excluding the Olympics).
• Peaks of over 800,000 active registered visitors per month.
• Stable engagement: No collapse in reading time or listening, and no abandoned applications.

Regarding user reaction, comments related to mandatory authentication accounted for less than 2% of user tickets, and the majority of those were simply requests for assistance.

Key lessons

We learned that registration is not perceived as an obstacle when it is justified, clearly explained, and respectful of the user experience.

Internal surveys show the impact on our organization:

• Nearly 90% of internal teams believe the initiative advanced the company’s digital maturity.
• 75% have a better understanding of the potential of authenticated data.
• 9 out of 10 already see concrete uses for this data in the coming year.

Why we must persevere

The wall is not an end; it’s a foundation. You can’t build lasting relationships with strangers, and you can’t personalize blindly. Mandatory authentication is an act of digital sovereignty that allows Radio-Canada to better understand, serve, and activate our audiences.

TLTR: Trust is not lost by asking for an account, but it can be lost by pretending that we can build the future with anonymous visitors. For a public media outlet like Radio-Canada, the status quo was and is impossible.

Written by Catherine Léger, Director of Performance Marketing, & Mathieu Therrien, Director of Products.

The post Obligatory registration at Radio-Canada: a successful gamble appeared first on Audiencers.

In the saturated world of digital subscriptions, simply acquiring a user is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in the “sticky” phase: ensuring subscribers actually use the myriad of benefits they’ve paid for.

Recent research from The Times revealed a common pain point: subscribers often didn’t know the full extent of their benefits. “I didn’t know I had X, Y, and Z in my subscription,” was a recurring theme in surveys. To solve this, the marketing team launched the “Customer Rail”, a dedicated, highly visible module on the homepage designed to surface high-value actions (HVAs) that drive long-term retention.

I spoke with Em McLaughlin to hear about how The Times developed their Customer rail strategy, and how your newsroom can implement something similar.

1. Define your “High-Value Actions” (HVAs)

Before building a rail, you must identify which behaviors actually correlate with lower churn. For The Times, these aren’t just clicks; they’re “habit markers.” 

Key HVAs identified at The Times include:

• Newsletter Sign-ups: Direct lines of communication straight into a subscribers’ inbox
• App Downloads: Shifting users to a more controlled, immersive environment.
• Bonus Accounts: Sharing a subscription (which The Times found improves retention by 6 percentage points).
• Puzzles: High-frequency, low-friction interactions that build a daily habit.
• Times+ Rewards: Redeeming exclusive discounts or entering competitions (like a high-performing Coldplay ticket giveaway last summer).

The Lesson: Work with your data team to identify which 3–5 actions separate your most loyal subscribers from those likely to churn.

2. Claim “marketing-owned” real estate

The homepage of a news site is traditionally editorial territory. However, a “Customer Rail” requires a permanent, non-negotiable space where the marketing team has autonomy.

At The Times, the rail sits directly under “Editor’s Picks.” It consists of two blocks that are updated every Tuesday and Friday. This frequency ensures that frequent visitors aren’t seeing stale promotions, which leads to “banner blindness.”

Of course, the messaging and actions are continuously tested to find the variants that connect most with subscribers. For instance: 

“Discover Bonus Accounts: Give the people you love the gift of The Times” didn’t work as well as simple “Bonus Accounts: Share your Times subscription with your family” 

By amending the feature to showcase who someone can share it with (their family) they saw a 100% uplift in CTR.

Having the control over these messages and being able to adjust based on performance, provides Em and the team with endless lessons to continuously improve. 

3. Establish a cross-functional “gatekeeper” system

To keep the content fresh and relevant, The Times established a bi-monthly stakeholder meeting. This group includes representatives from:

• Retention/Marketing: To drive the primary KPIs.
• Editorial: To ensure the brand voice is maintained.
• Product Verticals: Puzzle editors, newsletter leads, and the Times+ rewards team.

The goal is to map out upcoming launches (e.g., a new puzzle like “Word Hunt”) and rotate them against evergreen benefits (e.g., app downloads) based on past performance data.

4. Move towards deep personalization

The “North Star” for any customer rail is completion of the action, but The Times is currently moving towards a Next Best Action (NBA) model, one that hides tiles for actions a user has already taken.

• Current Restriction: All logged-in UK subscribers see the same rail.
• The Goal: If a user has already downloaded the app, they shouldn’t see an “App Download” tile. Instead, they might see a prompt to enter a competition or play a puzzle they haven’t tried yet.

The Lesson: Even without a complex algorithm, start with simple segmentation. If your tech allows it, exclude users from promotions for products they already use. 

(hint: Poool is a great tech solution for this kind of targeting throughout the funnel!) 

5. Measure quality, not just clicks

The Times uses an automated report to track click-through rates (CTR) but goes a step further by working with the analytics team quarterly to measure conversions.

“A high CTR is good, but did they actually redeem the offer, play the puzzle… i.e. complete the desired action?” asks Em McLaughlin. This data helps guide the copy. For instance, testing revealed that high-intensity calls to action like “Redeem Now” often outperform softer phrases like “See what’s on offer.”

Case Study: The Times Benchmarks

Since launching in June 2025, The Times has tested over 120 different tiles. Some of their key findings include:

• For their loyalty program (Times+), 35% of people who took an action from the rail were first-time redeemers.
• They found that 29% of users who engaged with a puzzle from the rail returned to play on two or more subsequent days.
• Data showed that female subscribers and those aged 56+ have the strongest CTR on the rail, allowing them to skew content toward culture, fashion, and newsletters that appeal to these demographics.

Ready to try it?

The customer rail is a fairly simple starting place to prove the power of pushing high value actions across the subscriber experience, using the homepage as a tool for service discovery. 

The post How to use a “Customer Rail” to drive retention and habit formation, just like The Times appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the fourth in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
> Episode one: 100 subscription business, 15 industries, 1 moodboard
> Episode two: What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-off
> Episode three: Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1

If you’ve ever worked on a subscription business, chances are the pricing page you’ve built looks a lot like the pricing pages I’ve seen across the industry. You know the one: three columns with a “recommended” plan in the middle, a monthly/annual toggle at the top, and a comparison table at the bottom with feature checkmarks. The kind of page where you end up spending weeks arguing about whether the middle plan should be the best offer, and A/B testing the color of the CTA button.

I’ve been there, I’ve built those pages too.

So I ran an experiment whilst working on this article.

I asked Claude to design a “classic subscription landing page” for a publisher, just to see what it would come up with. Here’s what it gave me:

Three columns, a “MOST CHOSEN” label in the middle, Digital / All Access / Patron (whatever that means), monthly prices, bullet lists of features. Claude didn’t really invent anything here, it just reproduced what it had learned from crawling the entire web, which tells you something about how standardized the media pricing pages are.

What is interesting is that it means that there is so much potential for publishers.
Why? Because when we studied 100 subscription businesses, we noticed that the best performers don’t really do this anymore.

Forget “acquisition vs retention”, think micro-conversions

Before we get into the pricing side of things, we need to revisit something we talked about in episode 3: 

When it comes to converting users into subscribers, the classic “attract → convert → retain” model doesn’t really hold up when you look at the best performers. Their customer journey is actually a series of micro-conversions, each one with its own goal and each one unlocking the next. The first micro-conversion might just be creating an account, then comes a cheap first subscription, then an upsell, then a bundle, then another upsell, and it goes on from there. It’s a long series of small steps that never really ends.

This matters for pricing, because the “acquisition price” and the “retention price” aren’t really two different things. They’re just two points in a longer sequence, each one adapted to what you know about the user at that specific moment.

I borrowed a sentence from INMA that captures this well: “Acquire with one simple offer, retain with many.” 

In our micro-conversion language, what this really means is one offer at a time, always.

And tailored to the user needs and interest (tailored to what you learn at each micro-conversions).

What are the best performers doing? One or many offers?

When you go through the first paid conversion step of Spotify, Headspace, Apple Music or most of the top subscription businesses we looked at, the pattern is pretty consistent. You see one offer clearly highlighted, sometimes with a secondary option tucked next to it, but always with a hierarchy that makes the decision essentially binary: you take it, or you don’t.

Spotify, for instance, still pushes “Premium, 1 month free” as the primary entry point on most of their pages. The other plans (Student, Duo, Family) are technically available somewhere, but they’re not what you see first: you only find them if you scroll or click around a bit.

Apple does this almost perfectly, I think. Whether it’s Apple Music, Apple TV+, or Apple One, the page pushes one offer prominently (usually the standard individual plan with a free trial), while the rest is deliberately tucked behind a small “See all plans” link. The whole layout is engineered around a single decision, and the other options only really exist for people who go looking for them.

And if you look at the NYT, they are doing it too. Depending on the context you’re in (and I imagine the profile you have) they push one offer (the same offer) with different arguments and design. Then if you scroll down you can find the print offers, or the cooking offer

And this connects to something we already covered in episode 3, which applies just as much to pricing as it does to the rest of the journey: the goal isn’t really to make money at this moment. It’s to get the user inside the product long enough to start building a habit. That’s why these first offers tend to be cheap, sometimes free (trial), and almost always presented as one simple choice. At this step of the journey, the job is to get the user through the door, not to explain the full menu of everything your product can do.

The next micro-conversions: same logic, different offers

So where do all the other offers actually show up?

They show up later in the journey, once the user has made that first paid conversion, once they’ve spent enough time inside the product to see its value, and once you know something concrete about how they actually use it.

The New York Times is probably the clearest example of this playing out at scale. At their 2022 Investor Day, they explicitly framed their growth model as: push one offer, then upsell, then bundle, with the conclusion that ARPU is the end game, not conversion. That single sentence captures most of what we observed across the 100 businesses. With the NYT, you get the basic subscription first, and over the following months and years they progressively introduce you to Games, Cooking, The Athletic, Wirecutter, each one a potential upsell or bundle presented when the data suggests you might actually care about it.

Each of these is a different price and a different offer, but you never actually see them all at once on the same page. You see the one that fits where you are in your life right now.

Across all examples we’ve seen (Apple, Spotify, + 97 others), the underlying logic is the same: each micro-conversion comes with its own offer, and the complexity of the catalog lives in the sequence of steps rather than crammed onto a single landing page.

Ideal world vs real world: the “Jeune Afrique middle ground”

In an ideal world, you’d build this entire journey end to end. Every user would get their own path, and every offer would be personalized based on what they read, how often they visit, which device they use, and what they’ve already subscribed to. At any given moment, the user would see exactly one offer, and it would always be the right one for where they are in their relationship with your product.

(I would love to live in an ideal world, everything seems always so perfect)

The problem is that building this kind of journey is genuinely hard. Most publishers don’t have the tech stack, the data infrastructure, or the resources to orchestrate dozens of personalized micro-conversions in real time, and for most teams it’s still pretty far out of reach.

So there’s an interesting in-between approach worth considering: keep the classic pricing page with its multiple offers, but make that page itself dynamic.

That’s exactly what Jeune Afrique did a couple of years ago (full disclosure: they’re a Poool client). Their situation was pretty specific, because their audience is spread across many different countries, with very different propensities to subscribe, different payment methods, and different engagement patterns. Pushing the same static pricing page to all of those audiences was clearly leaving money on the table.

So in 2024, they rebuilt their offer page around dynamic segmentation, combining two layers of logic: a user engagement score (an RFV calculation based on recency, frequency, and the number of articles read) and a country segmentation (5 groups based on propensity to subscribe, conversion rate, and dominant payment method, including “mobile money” countries where even the currency symbols and the payment icons adapt automatically).

The results speak for themselves: a 30% increase in conversion on the dynamic paywall, and a doubled conversion rate on the dynamic subscription offer page.

And there’s one detail from this story that I find particularly telling. When they started, the team had assumed that low-cost offers would work best for “mobile money” countries, because lower purchasing power should mean lower prices, right? But after running the tests, they actually discovered that these audiences preferred longer-term annual offers, contrary to assumptions. That kind of counterintuitive insight is pretty much impossible to uncover when you’re serving the same page to everyone.

It’s obviously not the fully personalized journey we described earlier, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction compared to pushing the same static pricing page to every visitor regardless of who they are or where they come from.

What you can take away from this (and test tomorrow)

Do the Claude test. Ask Claude (or any other LLM) to design a classic subscription pricing page for a publisher, and compare the result with your own. If they look suspiciously similar, that’s a signal worth sitting with. Not a judgment, just a signal. The classic three-column model became the default for a reason, and it’s also become increasingly stale and predictable.

Think in micro-conversions rather than in acquisition vs retention. Next time you design a pricing step, ask yourself which single offer fits this exact moment of the user’s journey, given what you already know about them. The question isn’t really “what are all of our plans?”, it’s “what’s the right offer to show right now?”.

If you can’t build a fully personalized journey end to end, at least make your offer page dynamic. Jeune Afrique’s approach is a solid middle ground, with different offers for different segments based on engagement and profile. Doubling conversion on the offer page is really not a marginal win, and it’s within reach even if you haven’t rebuilt your entire customer journey yet.

And keep in mind what the NYT shared at their 2022 Investor Day (and still true): “ARPU is the end game, not conversion.” The first paid conversion is just the starting point. The real game is growing the user’s lifetime value over many small, well-timed steps.

Next week, episode 5: what happens after the first paid conversion, and why the first 100 days are basically your only window to shape the user’s long-term relationship with your product. Or I should say, almost the only window.

PS: After writing this article, I went back to Claude and asked it to redesign the landing page based on what we just discussed (one offer, micro-conversion logic, the whole thing). Here’s what it came up with. A bit more interesting than the first version, I’d say.

The post The subscription pricing page we’ve all built at least once: episode 4 appeared first on Audiencers.

In a country with 4 official languages, and in the complex landscape of international public service media, SWI swissinfo.ch is a pretty unique case (to say the least!).

With a mandate to reach the Swiss diaspora and a globally curious audience, the publisher needs to navigate linguistic diversity and localized contexts, all digital- and community-first. 

Although you may not relate to their context, Swiss Info’s strategies to achieve all of the above certainly provide important lessons for the wider industry. 

We spoke with Veronica DeVore, Head of Audience, to discuss the operational and editorial challenges of adaptation over translation, the role of community engagement across borders, and product-building for different audiences.

Company card:

SWI swissinfo.ch is the international online service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC).

For many national broadcasters, the "international service" is often a secondary consideration. At SWI swissinfo.ch, it’s their core mission. Operating in 10 languages, ranging from the four Swiss national languages to English, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, the platform serves as a bridge between Swiss perspectives and global conversations, with about 75% of audiences located abroad.

“Our content puts Switzerland in touch with the world and reaches people in all 195 countries recognised by the United Nations.

Thanks to our journalistic quality, our articles are referenced up to 80 times a week in 46 languages and serve as a reliable source not only for diplomatic services and journalists abroad.” - Swissinfo.ch

Tapping into global touchpoints 

It’s part of the uniqueness of Swiss info and also part of the challenge: doing right by all of these language markets whilst bringing perspectives from Switzerland. That means reporting always has some touchpoint to Switzerland, but the team looks for points where it’s an internationally relevant conversation. 

“We aim to be at the intersection of where Switzerland has an impact on global conversations,” says DeVore. “Whether it’s the pharma companies operating out of Basel, the diplomatic hub of Geneva, or the unique system of Swiss direct democracy, we look for touchpoints that resonate internationally.”

Adaptation over simple translation

One of the most striking aspects of the swissinfo.ch workflow is the move beyond literal translation. Instead, the team practices adaptation.

With small teams of roughly three people per language service, journalists must act as cultural mediators. “It’s not just translating from English to Chinese – you have to adapt for the context and the market. For example, how do you explain the Swiss Federal Council, a body that has no single president, to an audience in China? Our teams often have to invent lexicons and style guides to transmit these unique political concepts effectively.”

Deep engagement through debating

Moving away from a traditional broadcast model, swissinfo.ch has pivoted toward community building to bring these diverse audiences together. Five years ago, they launched a debate format to replace standard comment sections. 

Instead of readers commenting in their own language, often sharing information that didn’t really serve anyone’s needs (not to mention the necessity to moderate heavily), journalists now pose specific, theme-based questions seated in a theme currently being explored. 

To solve the problem of linguistic silos, they implemented auto-translation within threads, usually using Deepl but not only. The best tool/LLM is chosen per language depending on the feedback of the editors. This allows a reader in Brazil to engage in a conversation with a reader in Russia, both viewing the thread in their native language.

This focus on dialogue has led to long-running, nuanced discussions on high-stakes topics like Swiss neutrality, which DeVore notes has seen consistent engagement for over a year following the invasion of Ukraine.

“On some topics, we get really interesting, nuanced, and sometimes surprising threads going, for instance on things like Swiss neutrality. Of course, it’s a hallmark of Switzerland; people think of that quite quickly alongside cheese and chocolate and army knives when they think of the country, but what does it really mean in practice? Especially after the Ukraine war started. And this thread has had hundreds and hundreds, an evergreen comment section that’s been going for a year or more.”

Products for niche needs

SWI swissinfo.ch also develops bespoke products for specific audience segments. Of course, part of their niche is the Swiss connection, but at the same time they’re trying to fill gaps in people’s media needs in markets where accessibility isn’t exactly a given, or where content might be behind paywalls.

• The SWI Plus App: Tailored for the Swiss diaspora (over 800,000 citizens living abroad), allowing them to personalize their news feed across multiple languages

• The Russian Edition: Recognizing that their website is partially blocked in Russia, the team has leaned into video-based platforms like YouTube, producing long-form, one-on-one interviews (up to an hour) to provide in-depth context to Russian speakers
• ‘Truth or Tale’: A short-form video series focused on myth-busting common misconceptions about Switzerland, designed for social media discovery

Trust in the age of AI

As a publicly funded media outlet, trust is the currency swissinfo.ch relies on. DeVore highlights their involvement with a recent research cohort piloted by the US-based nonprofit  Trusting News, which helped them understand audience needs around AI transparency and develop “disclaimers” regarding the use of AI.

“We are a niche media with an international footprint, which makes it even more important to show people at a glance that we are trustworthy.” While the organization uses AI for translation assistance and other tasks to manage resource limitations, they maintain a strict “human-in-the-loop” policy to ensure cultural accuracy and editorial integrity.

> If you’re working on a similar strategy, you’ll also be interested in hearing about the business logic behind Le Monde in English

The post Beyond borders and between the lines: How swissinfo.ch engages a global audience in 10 languages appeared first on Audiencers.

As media organizations shift from volume-based traffic to value-based reader revenue models, the challenge often lies in bridging the gap between an anonymous click and a loyal subscriber. Sadly, this isn’t like Married at First Sight… this relationship won’t be built in a day, nor with a paywall alone. It takes time, energy and a variety of formats to develop. 

Milenio, one of Mexico’s most influential news groups, has well understood this. Their answer wasn’t found in aggressive paywall tactics, but in cultivating a highly engaged community within its own ecosystem.

We spoke with Chief Reader Revenue Officer Juan Manuel Nava Madrazo about how, by strategically pivoting toward conversational tools and gamified loyalty, Milenio has successfully tripled user time-on-site and established a sustainable pipeline for its January 2026 paywall launch.

Moving beyond “social media friction”

For years, Milenio relied on Facebook for its comment sections. However, this led to audience leakage, where users were pulled away to external social platforms, and a double login friction that stifled local community growth. Worse, the lack of moderation created a toxic environment that excluded younger audiences and alienated quality readers.

“We needed to centralize data and convert anonymous readers into loyal registered users, all within our own ecosystem,” 

To reclaim its audience, Milenio replaced its social media plugin with a proprietary community engine, Logora, focused on three pillars: 

• Unified login (SSO): Eliminating friction by integrating the comment system directly with Milenio’s registration.

• Smart hybrid moderation (AI+Human): A robust moderation that drastically reduces toxicity and ensures a civil debate.
• Local identity: Total customization, including avatars specifically designed to reflect Mexican culture (e.g., Frida Kahlo), strengthening the sense of belonging.

• New editorial product (“Realidades”): Creation of a new video-debate section that fosters deep discussions on everyday life topics (Mexican lifestyle and social topics).

This ownership of the community, with attention to details that help encourage participation, is paying off across the board: 

1. Community growth

• Volume: +150% in daily comments in the first year and an additional +100% in the second year
• Engagement: Over 120,000 comments accumulated with 80–85% approval rate (vs. 60% previously) and 120,000 interactions (likes/votes)
• Quality: Users went from leaving emojis or short phrases to writing reasoned paragraphs and reading others’ opinions

2. Retention and time spent

• All Milenio users: 1 minute 48 seconds
• Registered users (non-commenting): 2 minutes 20 seconds
• Registered users using commenting: 4 minutes 40 seconds (+200% vs. average)

3. Conversion driver for registration

• 10-11% of new daily registrations come directly from the comments widget
• Between 2,000 and 2,500 new users register each month to participate in comments
• Commenting is the 4th most important registration source for the media outlet, surpassing many content sections

The new video series “Realidades” shows:

• +20% higher participation
• +10% more users writing arguments, not just voting

Gamifying loyalty: the points milenio program

A central component of Milenio’s retention strategy is Puntos Milenio, a loyalty program that rewards high-value behaviors with redeemable points.

To bring Puntos Milenio to life, 3 key elements were needed:

• The talent of the Milenio team (Development, Business, Data, etc.).
• External platforms that understood their needs
• Trust in the project

With these three elements, they had to integrate and adapt different technologies so they could coexist and function as a single system. In addition, it was essential that operations and configuration were as simple and scalable as possible.

The end user was always the focus: “someone for whom we aimed to create an easy, hassle-free experience and who clearly understands the value of staying informed through reliable journalism”.

Users aren’t aware of how they earn points in detail, to avoid cheating of the system, but internally these are built up by:

• Engaging with content: commenting, reading multiple articles, or reaching specific scroll depth targets
• Watching videos (encouraging long-form consumption)
• Referrals: sharing articles to social platforms (to bring in new potential registrants)

Although the project is still in a maturation phase, the initial results already show strong signs of impact:

• More than 2,500 users are currently participating in the program
• They have generated more than 1 Million points, mainly by reading news, playing EntrenaMentes, listening to podcasts, watching videos, and commenting on content

These points can be exchanged for tangible rewards, such as discount coupons for Starbucks, Amazon, and Google Play. Critically, subscribers to Milenio Plus receive double points for their activities, adding a layer of perceived value to the subscription itself.

Community “Lovers” as a qualified pool for subscription

Registration is widely recognised as a valuable model to launch pre-subscription. It helps to build a qualified, engaged audience of potential future subscribers, as well as providing a testing ground for conversion tactics. Mileno, however, have gone a step further by building a community around registration, ensuring these audiences are engaged enough to convert when faced with a paywall. 

Commenting is placed behind the registration wall, establishing a simple value exchange that builds engagement whilst collecting key data points. 

Using Marfeel’s scoring, Milenio identified commenters as high-value “Lovers” (70 pts vs. 10 pts for casual users). With 50% of registered users classified as lovers, this community is the prime target for the subscription revenue to come in 2026.

The post Owning the community and gamifying loyalty: Inside Milenio’s engagement strategies appeared first on Audiencers.

In Fall 2025, Les Coops de l’information, a collective of six Canadian media outlets (Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, La Tribune, and La Voix de l’Est) launched an innovative subscription drive named internally as the “Pay what you can project”.

Designed to coincide with the 2025 Municipal Elections, the campaign aimed to lower the barrier to local news while reinforcing the value of independent, cooperative journalism.

Results were beyond their expectations:

• 4.2% increase in subscribers
• Despite the minimum amount being $1 per month for the first three months of subscription, the average amount paid was $3.12 per month. This increased to $3.50 after increasing the suggested price

Principal Director, Audiences and Platforms, Marc Gendron shared how this strategy boosted subscriber growth and increased ARPU for those on this offer.

“Pay what you can” strategy

The core of the initiative was a flexible pricing model for the first three months of a new user’s subscription.

“We wanted to make an audacious promotion that would be too good to ignore! It shouldn’t rely solely on a heavy discount, but also on our unique value proposition at a time when it’s more relevant than ever.

Our gamble was: we know that there will be more interest towards our local politics content during the municipal campaign, so let’s surf on that wave and make sure our new promotional subscribers get the most out of their plans, that they feel that they are getting much more than what they are paying for. Instead of opening up access to our elections coverage, or setting up a fixed promotional price, we wanted to give more power and autonomy to users by letting them choose their price.”

Key components include:

• Democratic access: The campaign was rooted in the belief that a strong democracy requires exhaustive and impartial electoral coverage.
• Price autonomy: Prospective subscribers were invited to “fix the price” for their initial three-month period.
• Transparency and trust: Using the slogan “Un média qui vous ressemble, un média qui nous rassemble” (A media that looks like you, a media that brings you together) the group highlighted its status as an employee-owned cooperative.

“Our goal was to increase the total number of subscribers, between 3.5% and 4.3% of total subs. 

We mobilized everyone we could in order to achieve these targets. The new features we needed to implement, flexible pricing mechanics, everything was put on the development roadmap early in 2025. Our collaborators from Wizeline, who take care of all our platform development projects and Arc XP integration, worked tirelessly to have every feature ready for the fall campaign.

We also got the help of Drakkar Digital (renamed deRabane since), our long-lasting marketing partner, in order to create the visuals, copy and plan the delivery of all the marketing messages.

The editorial team was mobilised too, because the success of the campaign relied heavily on their capacity to deliver unique, useful and original content during that specific period.

Finally, our small digital growth team (including the IT and customer service team) operationalized the whole process.“

Feature gating: creating a product worth paying for

Of course, a promotional project is only as good as the product you’re selling! Les Coops has worked on developing strategic “feature gating” to build a subscription worth paying for, with clear value and strategic steps through registration towards subscription: 

Interactive engagement: Features like the “Question of the Day”  required users to be connected to vote and view live, constantly updated results.

Bookmarking across devices: Registered users gained access to a bookmarking feature, allowing them to save their favorite articles across web and app platforms.

Premium audio: Audio versions of articles were restricted to “All-inclusive” and “Ultimate” subscribers, serving as an upsell for basic plan holders.

Access limitations: To maintain account integrity, the platform limited simultaneous access to four devices, automatically disconnecting the oldest session when the limit was reached.

Premium content: Chroniques (articles written by columnists) and archives (articles published more than 30 days ago) have been hard paywalled as a key part of their subscription value proposition 

Marketing across site

As with any campaign, design and messaging needs to be consistent across the website and platforms, including the paywall. 

Dedicated paywalls: Les Coops d’Information built dedicated “Pay what you can” paywalls in Poool, including a live countdown to create urgency.

Subscription landing page: To ensure continuity of messaging through the user journey, dedicated subscription landing pages were also created in Poool, highlighting the value proposition, sharing subscriber testimonials and providing reasons why users should subscribe. 

Multi-channel promotion

The campaign was supported by an intensive five-week marketing blitz:

Email campaign: 72 unique emails (12 per media outlet) were delivered, each utilizing different angles and value propositions.

Targeted ads: The group targeted known non-subscribers through Google Ads, StackAdapt, and Bing Ads

In-app and newsletters: Non-subscribers were greeted with dedicated “Pay what you can” headers in free editorial newsletters and pop-up messages upon opening the mobile app.

Results 

“The final results were pretty impressive. By the end of the five weeks of promotion, our total subscriber base had increased by 4.2%, more than our targets and very close to our most optimistic forecast.

What was the most interesting though was the fact that, despite the minimum amount requested being 1$ per month for the first three months of subscription, the average amount paid was 3.12$ per month. This average increased to 3.39$ when we suggested 5$ in the price field and to 3.50$ when suggesting 6$. Each time we changed the suggested amount, we saw an increase in the number of users choosing to go with the suggested amount.

There are even some new subscribers that paid more than the regular price of a subscription!

Another really encouraging fact: 84% of these new subscribers had never subscribed before! This is probably one of the most encouraging findings of this adventure. It means that there is still room for us to grow.”

What’s next?

“This kind of campaign is a little more complicated than one with a fixed set of promotional prices. But the results we got were pretty impressive.

The fact that the user sets the initial price does add a layer of interactivity however, and it lowers the entry bar to a level where they feel comfortable. The core of the challenge remains though: to convince newly converted subscribers that our offer is worth the regular price.”

What should another publisher make sure of before testing this same project? 

“They should immediately get the buy-in from all important stakeholders as the impact on ARPU can be unpredictable. In our case, we feel that we were quite lucky to get an average ARPU of more than 3$ despite the fact that the minimum amount required was 1$. But that is still below the average ARPU we got with fixed price promotions and way below our regular numbers. Make sure that you manage everyone’s expectations. Even your own! 

That being said, as we have been galvanized by the nomination we got for this project at the INMA Global Media Awards, we will reactivate the Pay what you can promotion for two weeks in order to see if we can get similar, or even better, results this time around.”

The post Les Coops de l’information “Pay What You Can” Campaign appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the third in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
If you haven't read the first one yet, start here. 
And Episode 2, focused on product and media, is here.

What we expected to find vs. what we actually found

When we started building our subscription moodboard, we structured our analysis around 4 areas: product, conversion, offers & pricing, and retention.

Episode 2 covered the product (and was focused solely on media brands).
This one covers conversion, and we’re back to cross-industry.

For the past 10 years, whether in e-commerce, Saas or media, I’ve seen the same customer journey model everywhere. Attract → convert → retain. 

A linear, finite sequence. And that’s what we expected to analyze in this series: how the best subscription businesses optimize the 3 steps in this sequence.

What we found was fundamentally different.

When we looked at the NYT, Figma, Miro, Calm, Masterclass (and 95 others), 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.

We saw this pattern everywhere.

The journey we observed doesn’t look like a line. It looks like a loop. 

Attract → Convert at level 0 (ex: account) → Onboarding & discovery → Engage → Convert at level 1 (trial or cheap offer) → Onboarding & discovery → Engage deeper → Convert at level 2 (full price, bundle)… and it keeps going.

One step, one job. And for some, it’s almost a religion

The critical principle behind this model: each step has one single goal.
Not two. Not three. One.

Let me show you what that looks like in practice.

Look at the homepage of the New York Times (I mean, when I looked at it when building the moodboard). Arguably the biggest digital newspaper in the world. The only action button in the top right corner says “LOG IN.” Not “Subscribe.” Not “Try for $1/week.” Log in. Because at this stage, the goal is registration, not subscription.

And this discipline is consistent everywhere. In their registration flow: zero* subscription CTAs. In their onboarding: they ask which areas of The Times you want to explore, they recommend newsletters, they push the app download. Zero subscription CTA. The only goal is to understand who you are and start personalizing.

This sounds obvious when you write it down. But look at most media registration walls: they almost always push a subscription offer at the same time. Most onboarding flows try to sell and educate simultaneously. Same for the homepage, if you spend more than 20 seconds there you will probably be asked to do 5 different things in one session (register, signup for newsletter, subscribe, …)

*if you look closely, you’ll find spot where you can see subscription CTA, but you have to look closely

Not just media: Figma, Miro, Calm, Masterclass do the same

This isn’t a media-only pattern. That’s the whole point of this episode.

Figma: $12.5B company.
Homepage: “Sign up for free.” You click, you give your email. 

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.
Look at the wording: “Which plan would you like”? 

(Image: Figma onboarding flow – from homepage to personalized workspace, 8 steps)

What Figma adds to the picture (that the NYT doesn’t show as clearly) is that the product itself adapts in real-time during the onboarding. On the right side of the screen, you see your workspace evolving with each answer. It’s not a form. It’s a first preview of the value you’re about to get (to make you stay onboard).

Miro: 600M€+ in revenue
They push this even further on the personalization side.
Email → role → needs → team size → personalized interface → guided tour.
The subscription offer only shows up when you try to access a paid feature. At a moment when you already understand the value. Not before.

Calm goes somewhere else entirely. Before any trial or payment, they ask 10+ questions. Not about your job or your team. About your feelings. What can we help you with? How have you been feeling? What’s your biggest source of stress? They build a custom experience around your emotional state before asking for anything. For a meditation app, I found that pretty remarkable.

And Masterclass adds another layer: even from a paid Google ad (so, a user they’re paying to acquire), they don’t send you to a checkout page. They ask about your interests, build a personalized path of 36 classes (“Building your custom results…” appears on screen), and only then do they present the offer. They’re willing to add friction to a paid acquisition channel because they want to get you hooked first – making money is a second goal.

The cheap first offer: same goal, different method

Not every company goes through registration first. Some skip straight to a paid offer.
But when they do, the logic is the same: the goal isn’t to make money. It’s to get the user inside the product.

The NYT at $1/week. Peloton at $2.49/month. Washington Post, The Pioneer. These prices aren’t designed to generate meaningful revenue. They’re designed to let the user experience the product long enough to build a habit. The bet is that over 6 months, a year, 18 months, through bundles, new products, and price increases, the average revenue per user will grow significantly.

That’s why some media companies offer subscriptions at $20/year or even less. It sounds crazy if you think about it as revenue. It makes total sense if you think about it as product discovery with long term revenue as a goal.

And some companies stack both approaches. The NYT does registration first (zero subscription CTA), THEN aggressive trial pricing. They sequence the micro-conversions. As their own data shows, registration alone increases subscription conversion by more than 40%.

Others go with pure free trials: 7, 14, or 30 days. Headspace, Amazon Prime, Walmart+, Audible. Same logic: get the user inside long enough to build a habit. Free trials work especially well for products with daily usage. For the media industry, it depends on consumption patterns. A daily news publisher, maybe. A B2B publication or a monthly magazine? A 7-day trial probably isn’t enough to build anything valuable.

Let’s be honest, everything here sounds simple but it’s reaaaaaaally hard to do.
Complexity here is not about revenue tactics, but it stands in alignment within the organization.
You need a strong alignment between vision, long term goals (shared by all teams) and operations (plus a huge capacity to resist short term revenue, which is hard nowadays).

What you can take away from this (and test tomorrow)

Count the goals per step in your current journey. If any step tries to do two things at once (like a registration wall that also pushes a subscription CTA), that’s the first thing to fix. One step, one job.

Consider adding a “level 0” conversion before the paid one. A registration step gives you data, personalization, and engagement. The NYT showed that this alone increases conversion rates to subscription by more than 40%. That’s exactly why Poool makes it easy to set up and test registration modules (registration walls, onboarding sequences) and micro-conversions without dev, putting the data and engagement to use further down the funnel.

Rethink your first paid offer. The goal isn’t revenue on day 1. It’s getting the user inside long enough to build a habit. If Nieman Lab’s research is right and habit formation drops off after 100 days, design the duration around that.

Go sign up for Figma, Calm, or Masterclass. Not to use the product. To observe the journey. Take screenshots. I promise you’ll come back with ideas. (We did, and that’s how this whole series started.)

Next week, episode 4: offers and pricing. Why do the best performers acquire with one simple offer and upsell/retain with many. And why a single price means you’re designing for an “average user” who doesn’t exist.

The post Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1: episode 3 appeared first on Audiencers.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft, a leading German science journalism publisher, embarked on a multi-phase journey to optimize its digital subscription model, Spektrum+. Facing the challenge of engaging a broad audience with “deep, heavy, nerdy science content,” and understanding the limitations of resources, the publisher turned to a rigorous, data-driven testing strategy to build a product based on actual user behavior rather than internal assumptions (what a crazy thought, I know!).

At Audiencers’ Festival in Hamburg, Ann-Kristin Ebert, ecommerce Manager at Spektrum, shared their two phases of getting started with segmentation. 

TLDR: lessons from Spektrum’s journey

- Start by testing everything to understand audiences and prove the importance of segmentation

- Then test what matters based on learnings. Prioritize based on valuable, large and underutilised segments 

- Let go of perfectionism! Accept that some things that can’t be done now, and maybe not next month, maybe not even this year. “We can’t bake big pretzels with tiny ovens!”

Phase 1: “Testing Everything” (test like Darwin was watching!)

In the initial phase, Spektrum adopted an exhaustive testing philosophy, described as “testing as if Darwin was watching”. The goal wasn’t necessarily to find a single winning variation immediately, but to build a comprehensive understanding of how different tests performed across diverse user segments.

Strategy and implementation

Spektrum focused on rapid, lightweight tests at the beginning of the purchase funnel to gain quick-win insights while minimizing cross-team dependencies. They initially targeted user groups they already knew well or could reach directly.

Key learnings from phase 1:

• Free trials: A banner promoting a free trial across all user groups had a significantly smaller impact on conversions compared to blocking walls in any usergroup. This led Spektrum to shift its focus toward testing its “hard paywall”.

• Contextual messaging (Facebook): Testing informal vs. formal language for Facebook referrals revealed that informal messaging (“Du” instead of “Sie”) nearly doubled click-through rates (CTR) for these audiences.

• Paywall design: Spektrum tested walls with one, two, and three offers across the 4 engagement groups defined in Poool’s dynamic paywall dashboard. While a single offer proved least effective across all segments, a three-offer wall with a central “Best Offer” highlight emerged as the strongest performer for the general audience.

• Text density: On the subscription offer page, most segments preferred shorter, concise text. However, a notable exception was print magazine subscribers, who converted better when presented with more detailed information.

Ann-Kristin shared that this first batch of testing proved very helpful for understanding the behavior of different segments, convincing the team that dynamicity is essential, and that they should start adapting to actual user needs, not just team assumptions.

“Evolution is a perfect way for the perfect adaptation for everyone – if you have some million years of time (spoiler: we didn’t).”

Phase 2: “Testing What Matters” (Test as if Marie Kondo could knock on your door at any time)

Recognizing that they lacked the “million years” required for total evolutionary adaptation, Spektrum moved into a more focused phase: “testing what matters”. This phase prioritized high-impact user groups rather than every possible variation for every segment.

Priority segments

Spektrum identified four key segments for prioritized testing:

• Biggest Group: currently “Volatiles” on mobile devices.
• Most Overall Conversions: currently “Volatiles” on desktop devices.
• Best Converting Group: currently newsletter subscribers.
• “Hidden Gems”: High-potential audiences, a segment that’s hard to identify. Ann-Kristin described this as like playing poker! At the moment, they think these audiences are those receiving mailings already

Device-based segmentation

A critical finding in Phase 2 was the difference in behavior between desktop and mobile users. While an “Unlock article now” prompt outperformed “Continue reading with Spektrum+” on desktop (raising both CTR and purchase rates), the same prompt on mobile increased CTR but dropped the purchase rate. It wasn’t so much the variations that were important here, but simply the proof that mobile and desktop users need to be treated differently. 

Operational framework and final lessons

To maintain this rigorous testing loop with a relatively small team, Spektrum implemented several organizational priorities:

1. Alignment through OKRs and RACI: They used three-to-four-month Objective and Key Results (OKR) cycles to define focus and RACI matrices to establish clear accountability for who is responsible, consulted, or informed for every task.
2. Data visualization: Spektrum emphasizes that seeing user segments visualized (e.g., in donut charts) makes it impossible to ignore the importance of the largest and highest-value groups.

3. Pragmatism over perfectionism: The team adopted “Zen mode,” accepting that “we can’t bake big pretzels with tiny ovens”. They focused on what could be accomplished immediately rather than future ideals.

Spektrum concludes that there is no “final version” of their product, only the next iteration, as user behavior and opportunities constantly evolve.

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