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

This is the last episode 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
> Episode four: The subscription pricing page we've all built at least once
> Episode five: The first 100 days: why most of what we call retention is really just micro-conversions (again)

Why we’re ending with this

Over the past five episodes, we’ve gone deep into how the best subscription businesses do things to scale, using examples from the NYT, Spotify, Figma, L’Équipe, Jeune Afrique, and many others.

This last episode is different. It’s the one where we show you the weird stuff from our moodboard. The examples that made us smile, made us think, and sometimes made us wonder “wait, people actually subscribe to that?”

The answer is yes. People subscribe to pretty much anything and everything. And no matter how bizarre the product, the same principles from the previous five episodes keep showing up.

So here’s a tour of some of our favorites, organized not by industry but by what makes each one compelling for the person who’s paying. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it always comes back to: why would someone pay for this, every month, and not cancel?

“I feel good about buying this”: when the value prop is identity

Who Gives a Crap: £45.5M in UK revenue alone in 2024, over 1M subscribers globally, and over £10M donated to charities since launch. For toilet paper.

It’s toilet paper. There’s not much you can do to make toilet paper exciting. But they donate 50% of profits to sanitation charities, they have a brand identity that genuinely makes you smile, and their packaging is designed to be posted on Instagram (which, for a product you use in the bathroom, is quite the branding achievement).

The result: you don’t just buy Who Gives a Crap, you become a Who Gives a Crap customer and participate in something that is bigger than you (or at least you think you do). It’s an identity statement. You probably mention it at dinner parties (I mean, the name alone guarantees that). And that emotional connection is what makes people stay, because cancelling doesn’t just mean switching brands, it means giving up a small part of how you see yourself.

We Are Here does something similar with coffee: personalized beans, your choice of grind and delivery frequency, a custom sticker on the bag, and a donation to a different charity depending on which sticker you choose. It’s a coffee subscription that makes you feel like you’re expressing your personality every time you order.

This raises two questions that I think are worth thinking about for media:

First, are there publishers with a brand identity/voice so strong that people subscribe for what it represents, not just for the content? I can think of a few, and they’re not necessarily the biggest ones. Mediabask (you probably don’t know them) is an interesting example: people bought subscriptions before the website even launched, because of what the brand stands for and the community around it.

Second, could this become a model for media? Buy a subscription, and X% of the price (or profits) goes to a charity. Maybe subscribers even get to vote each month on which cause receives the donation. Green Got, a French bank, does exactly this with banking. Why not with a news subscription?

“I don’t have to think about it anymore”: when the value prop is friction removal

Dollar Shave Club doesn’t really sell razors, it sells the fact that you never have to think about buying razors again. And HelloFresh doesn’t sell meals, it sells the fact that you don’t have to decide what to eat or go grocery shopping.

What surprised me when building the moodboard is that even companies you wouldn’t expect are doing really sophisticated subscription work. Walmart+ and Instacart+ are grocery delivery services, but they have trials adapted to usage patterns, bundles to create lock-in effects (Walmart+ with Paramount+ and Burger King; Instacart+ with Peacock and NYT Cooking for annual members), and upsell paths that follow the exact same micro-conversion logic we described in episodes 3 through 5.

For media, the question this raises is not really about content. It’s about the experience around the content. What does a media subscription simplify in someone’s daily routine? The friction of hitting paywalls? The 30 minutes of browsing to find something worth reading? A curated morning briefing that replaces scanning 5 different sources? I think we could try build our subscription product that way as medias: what does our subscription remove from someone’s day?

“I discover things I’d never find on my own”: when the value prop is surprise

TokyoTreat sends you Japanese snacks, Kube sends you books, Le Petit Ballon sends you wine. Different products, same model: the value proposition is discovery itself.

You receive things you would never have chosen on your own, and the engagement comes from the anticipation and trust you build with the curator over time. The lock-in isn’t in the product (you could order Japanese snacks online anytime), it’s in the relationship with someone who knows your taste.

FindMyPast takes discovery in a completely different direction: you pay for access to billions of genealogy records, and every answer you find generates new questions. You discover a great-grandmother, now you want to know her parents. You find a marriage certificate, now you want the newspaper from that week. The product creates its own engagement loop naturally.

It’s the same mechanism that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly so sticky, but applied to family history and physical goods. For publishers with decades of archives, there’s something genuinely worth exploring here: how do you turn a static archive into a discovery-driven experience that keeps subscribers curious and engaged?

“This product gets smarter the more I use it”: when the value prop is personalization over time

Strava is an app for runners and cyclists that tracks your activities, shows your routes, and lets you compare with friends. The more you run, the more valuable the app becomes, because your entire history, your segments, your social connections, your training patterns are all there. Switching to another app means starting from zero.

It’s the same personalization lock-in as Spotify (episodes 4 and 5), applied to physical activity.

Claude (the one helping me write this series, full transparency) and ChatGPT push this even further with a model that barely existed a few years ago: a base subscription with tiers, plus usage-based pricing on top. The more you use the product, the more you pay, but also the more value you get.

Two things about AI subscriptions that I think are worth watching closely for media:

First, they all let you try the product for free almost immediately, because the product is powerful enough that the fastest path to conversion is to just let you use it (everything starts with engagement). Which is exactly the registration-as-the-first-micro-conversion logic we described in episode 3.

Second, hybrid pricing (fixed subscription tier + usage-based layer) is interesting as a concept. Imagine a media subscription with a base access fee, and a premium layer that adapts based on how much you consume or which features you use. It doesn’t really exist yet in media (as far as I know), but given how fast AI pricing models are spreading to other industries, it might not be far off.

Yes, even cars

SIXT+: a car subscription from $679/month. You pick a car category, a location, a pickup date. You subscribe monthly, cancel anytime, maintenance and roadside assistance included. You can even switch to a different vehicle or pause through the app.

I’m mentioning this one not because the model applies directly to media, but because it shows just how far the subscription model has spread. And even here, the same principles show up: try before you commit (24-hour notice), one clear offer per category, flexibility to upgrade or downgrade over time (micro-conversions, again), and the value proposition is friction removal (no ownership, no maintenance, cancel anytime).

What the toilet paper confirmed (love this title)

Over six episodes, I’ve talked about the NYT’s dynamic meter, Figma’s onboarding, L’Équipe’s first-100-days data, Jeune Afrique’s dynamic pricing, Spotify’s personalization, and now toilet paper and car subscriptions.

If I had to summarize everything in one statement, it would be this:

The subscription businesses that will thrive (media included) are the ones that combine a strong brand identity, a clear value proposition, and an obsession with user engagement with an infinite loop of micro-conversions.

This is true for media. It’s true for every subscription business. Because the moment you charge someone on a recurring basis, you need to keep earning their attention every single month. There’s no way around it.

Engagement drives everything: better conversion rates, better retention, higher lifetime value, better advertising revenue. We saw it in the data from the best performers, and … we saw it in toilet paper, and coffee, and cars (it’s the last episode, let me enjoy it)!

And maybe the most practical takeaway from the entire moodboard: some of the best ideas for your subscription business will come from industries that have nothing to do with yours. A coffee company, a fitness app, a toilet paper brand. The principles are the same. The execution is just different enough to spark something new.

What we’re building to make all of this possible

If you’ve read all six episodes (thank you, seriously), you’ve probably noticed that orchestrating all of these micro-conversions, from anonymous visitor to loyal subscriber, across every touchpoint, is complex work. Registration flows, onboarding sequences, dynamic paywalls, personalized offers, engagement actions, anti-churn triggers, cancellation optimization. Across web, app, and print.

That’s exactly why we’re building the solution with Poool and Darwin CX: the end-to-end subscription platform to master each of these micro-conversions, at every step of the journey. Everything we’ve described in this series, from episode 1 to episode 6, is what our platform is designed to help publishers execute.

If that resonates, or if you’re currently thinking about your subscription platform, let’s talk.

If you have questions, disagreements, or examples that contradict what we saw, we’re genuinely interested. This has been a conversation, not a lecture.

And if you’d like to see the full analysis, you can download the complete Subscription Masterclass presentation (Link here).

PS: yes that’s actually a “book a meeting link”

The post Toilet paper, wine, cars, and what they teach us about subscription: episode 6 appeared first on Audiencers.

Le Nouvel Obs is one of France’s most iconic media brands, with a unique editorial legacy. But for years, its digital strategy was largely driven by audience volume. When Sandro Martin arrived as CEO in September 2024, traffic had already been declining for nearly two years. Rather than chasing more content and more clicks, the team chose a different path: fewer articles, stronger editorial choices, and a renewed focus on reader value.

In this interview, Sandro Martin explains how Le Nouvel Obs reshaped its editorial production, data culture, newsroom organization, newsletters, and reader relationship strategy to build a more differentiated and sustainable digital model.

Le Nouvel Obs is a prestigious publication with a unique place in French history, but for a long time digital strategy was based solely on audience numbers. When you arrived, those numbers had been declining for nearly two years. How did you respond?

In 2024, our digital strategy was based primarily on two metrics: overall audience and subscriber growth, with no real prioritization. However, our audience had indeed been in steady decline for nearly 24 months, and our ability to recruit new subscribers had plateaued at levels lower than those of our direct competitors.

In recent years, Le Nouvel Obs had undertaken a major overhaul of its platforms, which is already a positive step, but without completely rethinking how they align with the editorial and marketing strategy.

So, when I arrived, Editor-in-Chief Cécile Prieur and I sought to realign these three dimensions—editorial, marketing, and user experience—around shared priorities. My arrival as the new CEO allowed us to revisit issues with the editorial team and make it a central pillar of our transformation. This initiative was launched in late 2024, following a study trip to the United States, which served as the catalyst.

To get started, you brought in an outside consultant. What was the idea behind that. To get an outside perspective, or to speed things up?

We did indeed decide to work with Max Leroy, an Audience and Product Strategist. Having spent the early part of his career in the US—notably at CNN and The New York Times—and later at POLITICO Europe, Max brought a wealth of international experience. Our goal wasn’t to outsource the strategic thinking, but rather to save time, structure our approach, and objectively validate our intuitions through macro-level data analysis and international benchmarks.

This collaboration allowed us to quickly identify our true priorities and rule out several false leads. Four central objectives emerged:

• Showcase our editorial value-add more effectively in the digital space, where the flood of breaking news often diluted our core offering
• Support the evolution of editorial production to better meet our readers’ changing needs
• Strengthen reader relationships by moving beyond the mere logic of traffic and pageviews
• Evolve our organization to focus more energy, expertise, and decision-making power on digital platforms

We opted for a highly pragmatic approach that combined data analysis, team feedback, and strategic planning workshops. The goal was to arrive at actionable outcomes and shared decisions in order to begin implementation.

The post Fewer articles, more value: Le Nouvel Obs’ transformation to reconnect with its readers appeared first on Audiencers.

Broadsheet, Australia’s leading cultural publisher, is embarking on a bold new chapter. Founded 16 years ago, the brand has become synonymous with the best in food, drink, fashion, and design across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. Now, they’re taking their successful model to London whilst also moving towards a reader revenue strategy.

We sat down with Nick Shelton, Founder & Publisher of Broadsheet, and Ross Wilmot, Director of Reader Revenue, to discuss their international expansion strategy and the development of a subscription revenue stream, layered on top of their advertising model.

A consistent lens for diverse markets

For Broadsheet, the move from Australia to London is built on a repeatable editorial framework. Nick Shelton describes Broadsheet’s core product not as a list of recommendations, but as a specific lens that can be applied to any global city.

“The way we think about Broadsheet editorially is that it’s a framework,” Nick explains. “What you see through that lens differs depending on the city, but the values of the lens itself – quality, celebration, and curation – remain constant.”

Rather than relying on local intuition alone, Broadsheet uses this framework to solve a universal problem for urban audiences: the paradox of choice. By applying the same rigorous standards in London that they do across Australia, they maintain brand integrity while respecting local nuances. This city-agnostic strategy allows the brand to:

• Curate rather than catalog: Instead of exhaustive listings, they use a highly curated approach where they “don’t write about things we don’t like.”
• Prioritize the premium enthusiast: By maintaining high editorial standards, they attract a specific high-value audience cohort regardless of geography.
• Operationalize local reporting: By treating London as just another “market” within a proven system, they can scale quickly without reinventing their brand identity.

“We learned this lesson in Australia long ago,” Nick notes. “Sydney and Melbourne are fundamentally different markets with different behaviors. Going into London wasn’t about having expectations of what the city would look like; it was about reporting on it through that consistent, high-definition lens.”

Engagement: the common thread between ads and subscriptions

One of the biggest challenges in the publishing industry today is the perceived conflict between advertising and subscription revenue. Broadsheet, however, sees these models as complementary, with engagement being the common thread. 

“We’re not a traffic-based model, we don’t sell programmatic advertising. It’s not about more people equals more money; it’s about the depth of engagement. And we’ve long had the muscle and mindset in the business of engagement. The better engaged the audience, the better we do as a business, something that applies across both advertising and subscription revenue goals.” 

In short: by focusing on engagement, everybody wins. 

Ross, Director of Reader Revenue at Broadsheet, who recently joined Broadsheet after working at a legacy media publication, explained that by moving even a small subset of their flyby audience into a medium-engaged cohort, they see an exponential increase in page views, the currency of traditional commercial models. This approach is useful for showing teams the clear benefit of engagement to the advertising side of the business while simultaneously building a base for subscriptions.

Whilst they measure a collection of engagement metrics, focused very much on quality over scale, frequency is their most important, north star metric. 

The five pillars of a successful subscription strategy

Broadsheet’s transition to reader revenue is built on five key pillars, as outlined by Ross:

• An audience-centric approach: A laser focus on the most engaged readers, understanding their motivations, pain points, and what adds value to their lives.
• Compelling value proposition: Ensuring the subscription product addresses the needs of engaged readers. Initial research at Broadsheet showed that their readers would be prepared to pay for high-quality content, but that it needed to be combined with unique experiences like exhibition tickets, and perks like free coffee as well as tools to help them curate their Broadsheet experience.
• Cross-departmental alliance: Moving beyond a traditional marketing-led view of subscriptions to ensure buy-in across the entire business, from editorial to product, data, and CRM. At Broadsheet, they already had established ‘Squads’ associated to 90-day, one-year and three-year goals, so when moving to subscription, a new audience monetization squad was formed.
• Culture of test and learn: Continuous experimentation with subscriber journeys, funnels, pricing, and offers to drive sustainable growth.
• End-to-end lifecycle marketing: Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, supported by a robust data infrastructure and access to the right platforms.

“There are of course many other aspects to consider, but in my opinion, these 5 are the ones that move the dial the furthest”

Building a value exchange through registration

A crucial component of Broadsheet’s reader revenue model is the registration wall. Launched in Australia in December 2025, a few months before their subscription model, the registration wall has already outperformed industry benchmarks: 

Specifically, a conversion rate (% of unique visitors who encountered the reg wall and converted) of 5.5% on the registration wall, compared to the industry benchmark of 3-5%.

“Registration serves us on several different levels,” Ross says. “It gives us the ability to communicate more directly with our most engaged audience, gather insights into their needs, and personalize their experience. And of course, it helps us reduce the reliance on third party platforms for our audience, which is going to be more and more crucial.”

Crucially, the registration wall introduces a clear value exchange on the site. “Previously, people were completely free to browse the site as they wished,” Ross explains. “The registration wall helps set the tone for the eventual introduction of a paywall, ensuring it’s not a shock when certain content becomes paid.”

Registration has also built confidence internally ahead of their paywall launch

“The insights from our research proved that there was definitely an appetite to pay as long as it’s the right proposition and that a subscription adds significant value to an individual’s life. And that’s where we’ve been focused on these three aspects of the subscription proposition, the content being the inspiration, the experiential side of things, and the utility aspects as well, pulling all those different ingredients together.”

Nick added that, ultimately, the team believed in the strength of their brand. 

“We’ve been running this for 16 years. We know we have a strong brand. We know we create a product worth paying for. So let’s do it. Having a reg wall in place was valuable for validating our assumptions on conversion rates through the steps in the funnel. We exceeded every single one of those assumptions. Of course, more people provide data for registration than handing over a credit card, but we consistently exceeded benchmarks since the launch, so we didn’t feel we needed to wait around for subscription. We just had to go for it, with confidence.”

London: building a cultural footprint, Australia: Broadsheet digital subscription

Currently, Broadsheet’s London operation is focused on audience acquisition and brand awareness. Before switching on monetization features, they are busy establishing themselves as the ultimate London city guide.

While London is about growth, Australia is the testing ground for the brand’s most ambitious move yet: Broadsheet digital subscription. Launched just days ago (April 2026), this membership program represents the official transition from a free-to-read model to a premium value exchange.

Ross highlights that early data from Australia has been “very strong,” already exceeding industry benchmarks for conversion. The model isn’t just about a hard paywall but rather an integrated experience:

• Exclusive experiences: Members get early access to ‘Readers’ Preview’ dinners at the city’s hottest new restaurants
• Perks and rewards: The program includes ‘The Vault’ (high-value giveaways) and daily rewards like free coffee or discounts at local partners
• Journalism access: Unlimited access to Broadsheet’s trusted journalism for A$1/week

The current content access model is a static meter, where audiences have access to a set number of articles per month before being asked to register and then subscribe, but the goal is to move towards a dynamic model adapted to a reader’s level of engagement via Poool.

What’s next?

Of course, the launch is just the beginning! Ross shared that the team is already focusing on:

• Identifying optimisation opportunities that exist within their key conversion journeys and subscription checkout funnel
• Leveraging those insights to inform a cross-departmental working group focused on CRO, building a roadmap of experimentation and executing
• Introducing new forums to share actionable insights with editorial: what content is driving conversion (last click and participation) and engagement to inform content and commissioning strategy; identifying opportunities to potentially convert a higher proportion of readers below the superfan engagement cohort 
• Building CRM muscle through talent acquisition and data engineering: unlocking capabilities within their Customer Engagement Platform (Braze) and Customer Orchestration Platform (Poool) to become more personalised and dynamic across owned channels 
• Building further value into the subscription proposition through product development of utility tools

The post From Melbourne to London: how Broadsheet is scaling culture and reader revenue appeared first on Audiencers.

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.