At the Audiencers’ Festival in London 2026, Patrick Rademacher, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Ringier Media Switzerland, shared how breaking down internal silos and calculating holistic Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is transforming their revenue model, and informing decision making across the entire organisation.
For the first time, the publisher has the hard data to prove that investing heavily in deep, direct user relationships is entirely worth the effort.
> Publishers have long treated one reader as two entities: the ads team chasing reach, the subs team chasing exclusivity. Ringier built a single Customer Lifetime Value combining both, and found the conflict doesn't exist > Subscribers keep generating strong advertising value precisely because they're the most engaged. Exclusivity doesn't cost you ad revenue the way the org chart assumes > On Blick.ch, a logged-in user is worth well over 30 times a consent-only one, and a Brand Lover over 50 times a casual reader > But logging in isn't the magic. The value comes from what follows: more page views, and an email address that cuts churn. Ringier built "Follow My Team" so registering buys something, and doubled daily logged-in users in a year
“One reader is not two different entities”
For a long time in the media industry, publishing teams have worked in silos. Users were treated as entirely separate entities depending on the department looking at them:
- The advertising side: Focused purely on maximising reach and ad impressions to drive advertising revenue.
- The reader revenue side: Focused on exclusivity and conversions to drive subscriptions.
This division creates a constant conflict: advertising teams demand more reach to scale ad revenues, while subscription teams countered by demanding more exclusivity to lock content behind paywalls.
However, in reality, one reader is not two different entities, it is one and the same person. A single user can generate both advertising and reader revenue simultaneously, meaning the perceived target conflict doesn’t actually exist.
What’s more, publishers have long suspected that registered audiences hold a significantly higher value than anonymous users. But without the concrete data to prove it, this debate remains stuck in opinion-based, gut-feeling discussions.
So, Patrick and the team set about establishing a holistic, comprehensive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that combines both revenue streams.
