The 10 commandments of subscriber acquisition and digital reader revenue models

The Audiencers Festival Paris 2024 The Audiencers Festival Paris 2024

The Second Audiencers’ Festival in Paris, this November 21st, 2024, brought together the crème de la crème of French media digital marketing directors (and not only).

From identifying user needs and adapting formats, to finding the right price and retention, digital publishing professionals shared their tips on audience acquisition and monetization. To share these wider than the Festival attendees, I’ve summed them up in 10 commandments! Enjoy!

1. Know your audience

Les Echos, represented by Violaine Degas, created no fewer than 12 personas from their reader surveys on both B2C and B2B audiences.

The very precise personas detail centers of interest, as well as preferred information channels and timeframes.

Les Echos subscriber personas
Subscriber personas

This allows them to better target sales offers and marketing messages to each reader. For instance, why line up all 50 subscriber benefits on the offers page when only three are relevant to that specific user? Listing them all could even be a deterrent…

As for the newsroom, four or five personas can be used to identify reader needs and priorities to target each article, ensuring all published work has a clear goal.

Les Echos went even further, creating its own panel of 4,000 subscribers (60%) and prospects (40%) via the Alida platform. Young people and women are under-represented, but the group is working on it!

Les Echos survey
“A panel of readers, possible to activate with just a click of the fingers!”


This allows them to regularly send panelists short quizzes, studies or videos, or even to spend a quarter of an hour chatting with them, to better identify reader needs and adapt editorial products (formats, distribution channels, publication timing).

2. Define and measure (your own type of) engagement