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.”
