You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #99 sent out on September 30th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

We held our Festival in Paris yesterday with over 400 professionals coming from across the French-speaking world. This slide pretty much speaks for itself

I am however writing this newsletter before the Festival, given that my Tuesday will be a little busy, so a full résumé of the event to follow!

In today’s newsletter:

• The trend is leaning towards smaller, more loyal audiences
• The Economist’s onboarding journey shows exactly where their strategic priorities lie
• How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public
• Links to add to your reading list

The trend is leaning towards smaller, more loyal audiences

For years, publisher growth strategies were governed by mass reach. But with search engine referrals collapsing under the weight of AI overviews and 40% of desktop visitors no longer scrolling past the fold, the vanity-metric era has officially hit a wall. The reality of modern media consumption is that volume no longer guarantees sustainability. Instead, true financial sustainability rests on a power law: a tiny fraction of highly engaged readers drives a quarter of all pageviews and up to 75% of digital revenue. The strategy needs to shift from chasing passive scrollers to cultivating lasting relationships with active, returning community members.

This transition requires a complete overhaul of how newsrooms define success, shifting focus from raw pageviews to depth of engagement, multi-format consumption, and long-term retention, even if that is from a smaller number of readers. As Wired editor Katie Drummond recently put it: “Ultimately, I am very comfortable with the idea that Wired’s audience in the future is a smaller audience, but we want that audience to be loyal.”

This sentiment is echoed across the industry, with publishers moving beyond simple community features to building habit-forming product ecosystems.

The commercial payback of this shift is already proving itself, with The Economist being a brilliant case in point. By expanding into exclusive Insider videos led by journalists, audio formats, personalisation & more, they’ve driven subscriber retention to industry-leading levels.

Nada Arnot, EVP of Marketing at The Economist, shared that “just getting someone to consume 50 pieces of content of whatever format might not actually be useful. What’s more useful is the depth of that engagement and how many different formats they are engaging with, even if it means a fraction of that volume.”

And we can see this strategic move playing out in their onboarding journey alone…

The Economist’s subscriber onboarding journey shows exactly where their strategic priorities lie

Late 2025, The Economist launched Insider, a premium feature that brings subscribers into the newsroom through editor-led shows, biweekly newsletters, and news-making interviews with global leaders.

At Audiencers’ Festival in London, Principal Product Manager Diana Babei shared that insider is already proving to build loyalty and trust in ways that article text doesn’t, including high engagement with this product (75% of subscribers) and lower churn among Insider viewers.

In June of this year, the brand launched Play, a separate subscription offer that uses the same human-first AV formats that drive Insider’s loyalty, but packages them at a lower price point to build habits and acquire audiences who haven’t yet subscribed (interview with Nada Arnot here).

This pivot to relationship-building, with formats bringing audiences closer to journalists, is clear in their subscriber onboarding journey (I’ve found that you can tell a lot from a publisher’s onboarding journey!)

> New subscribers are asked about their interests, preferred format & when they usually consume content, with a final screen pushing the app

> This ticks off a variety of requirements for encouraging return visits. Holly Johnson of Condé Nast put this perfectly into a 5-part return trigger loop.

Importantly though, successfully encouraging audiences to return and build deeper relationships requires more than a single community product, such as comments. It should be the entire infarstructure of your product.

FIPP World Media Congress is back in Madrid!

In its 101st year (!!) the FIPP team are back in Madrid this October 13-15th with an impressive 500+ senior media executives from around the world for three days of insights, innovation, and networking. Some of the sessions I’m looking forward to in particular: 

• Getting Paid in the Age of Answer Engines: People Inc.’s AI Model
• From the BBC to Specialist Media: The Next Evolution of the User Needs Model
• How HBR Is Turning Audience Focus into Growth
• Pivot to Premium: Taking Subscriptions Upmarket with The Economist

Use the code AUDIENCERS! for 15% off at checkout here

See you there? 

How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public

Journalism has to be right the first time. Product work learns more from what doesn’t work.

Frank Bi, AI Strategy and Product Advisor at Hacks/Hackers, argues that when products are held to the journalistic bar, nothing half-baked ever launches, so nothing ever teaches you anything…

So how do you hold the line on credibility while building products you’re willing to let fail?

> Build a public sandbox. A labelled subdomain (beta, labs) resets the expectations readers bring to the homepage while still producing real behaviour data. Frank launched the Minnesota Star Tribune’s AI restaurant guide Culinary Compass on the main domain instead, where readers judged a four-week experiment as a Star Tribune guide

> Set the end date before launch, ideally by picking something with a natural start & end. Frank’s Fair Bot ran only the 12 days of the Minnesota State Fair, so nobody ever had to make the call to shut it down

> Show your work. Newsrooms already have a practice for issuing corrections, so extend a version of it to experimental products and publish what the team believed and why, before that thinking disappears at launch

“We work in an industry that expects transparency from the people and institutions we cover. Holding the products we build to some version of that standard is a reasonable place to start, and it’s the part of the journalistic mental model that experimental products should look to keep.”

> Full article from Frank on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• What publishers can learn from creators: be audience, not platform, obsessed
• Steal this strategy: paywall and subscription trends to test to increase conversion rates
• Wired launches new global app

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #99. The Economist’s onboarding reveals their strategic priorities appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #98 sent out on September 16th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter: 

• Do you have enough recurring value for subscriptions? The questions to ask yourself
• Immediate Media: growing to 1.2 million paid subscribers without cannibalising their core print business
• Paywall trends spotted whilst benchmarking: countdowns, signalling free content & personalised text
• Links to add to your reading list

Do you have enough recurring value for subscriptions?

Before locking content or products behind a paywall, every digital publisher should stop and ask whether you actually have enough recurring value for a recurring charge…

> Start with frequency: what do people already come back for? Then use registration as the halfway test, because if your most engaged readers won’t create an account, a payment step will not fare better. It’s a strategy used by Broadsheet Media to prove assumptions 

> Build the paid tier around a behaviour that already exists, giving people materially more of it. If the pricing page needs six unrelated benefits to feel substantial, no single benefit is strong enough

> Be deliberate about what stays free. A story that brings in thousands of first-time visitors has a different job from a specialist product consumed repeatedly by known users, and should be treated differently

> Forecast before you keep building. Apply realistic registration, free-to-paid and retention rates to your own segments, and if the range falls short of what the business needs, stop before the pricing conversation starts

A brilliant article by Jonathan Gupta-Buckley on Audiencers

How do you grow to 1.2 million paid subscribers without cannibalising your core print business?

Instead of forcing print readers onto digital, UK publisher Immediate Media (Good Food, Radio Times, HistoryExtra) built standalone digital utility products that target completely new audiences.

> Print subscribers were never migrated. Immediate built and bought digital products for people who had never bought a magazine: the Good Food app is at just under 200,000 from a 2022 standing start, Nutracheck at 580,000 since its 2023 acquisition

> Paywalled articles only sell if the content is genuinely must-read, and evergreen lifestyle content isn’t. Good Food charges for utility instead: cook mode, planning tools, and app takeovers exclusive to subscribers

> There’s no single Immediate paywall. Stickiness, response rates and build costs differ by brand, so each gets its own model, and Immediate only builds where it leads the category

> A separate commercial team holds the budget and funds products against fixed thresholds: 40-55% trial-to-paid conversion, 65-80% at the next renewal, monthly retention above 90%, and 3:1 lifetime value to acquisition cost within two years

Full interview with Managing Director of Customer Marketing and Subscriptions, Jess Burney, on Audiencers

Paywall trends: spotted whilst benchmarking

Personalising based on the article being read

Like The Cut and SCMP where the text on the paywall includes the title of the article that I was trying to access.

Highlighting content available for free

Like The Verge and NYT who have a dedicated section of their website for this content, and The Independent who tagged a newsletter on the homepage to signal a free month trial.

Countdowns, everywhere!

The number of countdowns that I’ve seen… But I really like Vogue’s version, with a side banner displaying after X amount of time on the subs offer page.

Links to add to your reading list

 Discount for WAN-IFRA Digital Media Europe in London, 22-23 Oct

Digital Media Europe invites product & revenue professionals to come together this 22-23rd October in London, this year focusing on reader revenue strategies on day one, and revenue diversification on day two.

Audiencers benefit from a 20% discount using the code: Audiencers20DME

• The User Ladder: Why Knowing More About Your Readers is Your Newsletter’s Next Unfair Advantage
• Lessons from music industry: how to monetise super users
• How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #98. Do you have enough recurring value for subscriptions? appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #97 sent out on September 2nd, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

It’s September!? Hope you had a great summer and are surviving the return to work ok!

In today’s newsletter: 

• The next engagement shift: from strong products to experience systems
• Why Hearst-owned SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall, and called it “Friends”
• Findings from the 2026 Media App report: super users, non-text formats and measuring the value of your app
• Links to add to your reading list

The next engagement shift: From strong products to experience systems

The bridge connecting audience value to commercial value is experience, and many publishers are skipping it according to Dina Shatner, co-author of The Age of News Experience.

> A crossword, newsletter, live blog, or short-form video series can each create a strong experience. But strong product-level experiences don’t automatically add up to a strong outlet-level experience. Each may work well on its own while the audience still encounters the publisher as a fragmented collection of products

> Social platforms do this well: experience isn’t a feature added to the product. Experience is the product

What are publishers doing wrong then? 

Publishers often move quickly from an audience goal to an output.

“We need to reach younger audiences” becomes “we need more vertical video.”

“We need stronger habits” becomes “we need a daily newsletter.”

What’s the solution? 

The book introduces the AXR framework: audience > experience > revenue

AXR connects audience strategy to revenue through the experience layer. That layer defines the audience moment, the promise, how the product fits into a routine, and the behaviour it should create.

For example, “a daily video briefing for younger audiences” is still mainly a format description.

A stronger definition would describe the audience moment, why the briefing is worth returning to, what should follow it, and which elements, such as the host, pace, promise, or format, must remain recognisable across the sequence, beyond this particular item.

What’s different? Formats produce outputs. Experiences create behaviours. Repeatable behaviours (staying longer, returning more often, and moving to the next item) connect audience value to commercial value.

For Dina, the shift from strong standalone products to interconnected experience systems will mark a critical evolution in reader engagement and retention for media organisations.

> An article that will definitely get you thinking about how to hit the ground running after summer! From Dina Shatner on Audiencers

Why SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall, and called it “Friends”

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. Hearst-owned SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. Instead, the website stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been, whilst their new app, focused heavily on relationship-building, is paid.

Introducing, “Friends of SFGATE”

> The name “Friends of SFGATE” beat “subscription” and “membership” in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund

> The offer includes pop-up newsrooms, live journalism events, California-themed mini crosswords, audio content and personalization options to match the app to a user’s interests

> Nearly 90% of readers who have taken the 7-day free trial so far have converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it’s still early days

> The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time

> Of course, the move to subscriptions and relationship-building has required org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming

Full interview with Grant Marek, Editor-in-Chief of SFGATE, and Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer across Hearst Newspapers, on Audiencers

Findings from the 2026 Media App report

Drawing on 440 apps and 140 publishers, The Pugpig Media App Report finds engagement is wildly concentrated. 15% of monthly users generate 75% of all sessions, and 6% account for 75% of screen views…

> Games, audio and video are the engagement multipliers. Game players open the app 2.7 times more often, video watchers spend 3.3 times longer in it, and audio listeners 2.5 times longer

Search, save and share tell a similar story.

> Between 11% and 94% of a news publisher’s subscribers open its app in a month. Yet only 26% of publishers say the app’s main job is acquiring subscribers

> Publishers agree on what matters: retention, acquisition, time spent. Far fewer can measure it consistently, which makes it easy for the app’s contribution to be undervalued internally

> The biggest blocker is not budget or technology. Half of publishers name product team capacity

But the best-performing apps are usually the ones publishers have consistently given time, resources and attention to, rather than those with technical sophistication.

Full article summary from the Pugpig team on Audiencers.

Links to add to your reading list

• One model proposes using three audience signals to decide which stories deserve more investment
• Beyond Reader Revenue: Interview with Aled John, Group Strategy Director at the Financial Times
• Your industry event calendar (that we’ll keep updating as more dates get announced)

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #97. Why Hearst-owned SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #96 sent out on August 19th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter: 

• The Economist launches new audio & video subscription offer to build deeper relationships with readers
• What are synthetic audiences? Can they replace real ones in research? How can you benefit from them? Khalil provides the guide
•  Audiencers’ industry event calendar
• Links to add to your reading list

The Economist launches new audio & video subscription to build deeper relationships

The Economist recently launched Play, an audio and video subscription tier priced lower than the core digital subscription to attract new audiences & build deeper relationships.

Why? A growing audience across all age ranges is consuming news in audio and video form, specifically in the in-between moments of a day: commuting, walking a dog, running errands. The Economist wanted a way to show up at this moment without asking people to pay full price for a format mix they didn’t want yet

What? Subscribing to Play gives you every piece of audio and video content that’s also available to full Premium subscribers, curated through an editor-shaped homepage, plus access to the subscriber-only newsletter. What it doesn’t give you is the written journalism; those articles remain visible but paywalled, with an upgrade to Premium as the unlock. It’s not a separate app or standalone product, rather a subscription tier inside the existing economist app

How is this performing? First results show an uptick in core Premium sign-ups. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product acts as an anchor, nudging undecided visitors to pay a little extra for the full suite. What’s more, conversions through Play have been driven almost entirely by brand-new readers rather than existing subscribers trading down

Our view: This launch is just one piece of a long-term move toward human-centered publishing, from podcasts to  short-form video, Insider (a premium feature launched in late 2025 that brings subscribers into the newsroom through editor-led shows, biweekly newsletters, and newsmaking interviews with global leaders, building retention & loyalty), and now Play. 

In an AI-saturated information environment, the publishers who win will be the ones readers feel some kind of human connection to, whether that connection starts with an audio tier or a premium interview

Full article interview with Nada Arnot, Co-Managing Director, on Audiencers

Can synthetic audiences replace real ones in audience research?

Many assume that synthetic audiences means we can skip audience research entirely

But consultant Khalil A. Cassimally argues that they’re for narrowing decisions, never making them.

> They can rank, not measure. A synthetic panel will reliably tell you which of six newsletter concepts is weakest, but it won’t tell you willingness to pay, adoption rate, or satisfaction score. These require a real number, not a ranking

> Accuracy depends entirely on what you feed it. An LLM asked to “act like a 35-year-old subscriber” is guessing. A “digital twin” built from an actual interview transcript or cancellation email carries real signal. Stanford found these twins hit roughly 85% of a human’s own test-retest consistency

> Another challenges is that they skew WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) and cluster toward agreement, meaning they’ll flatten the edge cases (at-risk subscribers, superfans etc) that usually matter most

> The workflow that Khalil recommends: fix the decision first, ground the panel in real reader material you already have (old interviews, cancellation reasons, unread survey comments), ask it to compare or analyse rather than just count responses, then validate whatever survives with real people

Full guide on how to where they help, where they stop, and how to run one from Khalil on Audiencers

Your industry events calendar

Starting to plan the next few months of conferences for mastering your digital reader revenue model? Look no further than our new Audiencers’ event calendar!

P.s. If you speak French, you should definitely be coming to our Festival in Paris this September, featuring L’Équipe, Future PLC, Le Temps, Mediahuis, Le Monde & more.

Links to add to your reading list

• What makes subscribers churn – and how the tech industry will keep them
• Publishers’ biggest tech problem is no longer missing tools but disconnected ones
• Designing a more accurate subscription funnel for news media

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #96. The why behind The Economist’s new audio & video subscription appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #95 sent out on August 5th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter: 

• A little Audiencers website refresh is happening
• How the team at Funke Media make better decisions with a KPI tree
• Broadsheet is yet another publisher proving the value of registration in a subs model
• Links to add to your reading list

 A little website refresh 

I don’t know about anyone else, but with fewer emails and no events, summer is always the best moment to dig into some of the projects that have been on the sidelines for months. For me, one such project has been to spruce up the website

The goal: to be as useful to you as possible

How: by helping to surface the right case studies, benchmarks and best practices when you need them, instead of having to dig through pages of articles

The solution (or at least one of them): a tidier menu, with a stronger focus on tools and community over articles

And something I’ve been dreaming of for a while, a filtered case study list  

There’s still a lot of work needed to continue to build out these pages, and our products, but I’d really appreciate your feedback, thoughts and ideas already! Just hit reply to this newsletter:)

(And if you’ve been working on something that would make for a good case study to add to this database, I’d also love to hear from you!)

How the team at Funke Media make better decisions with a KPI tree

Product decisions at most news organisations get made by whoever’s loudest in the room, or by instinct built from experience. Stefan Schneiderbauer, Senior Product Manager, FUNKE, built a framework to replace that with more structured, evidence-led decision-making instead. 

Introducing, the KPI tree: 

The goal is to ground product decisions in evidence, not to take judgment out of the process. And luckily for you, the tree is pretty easy to replicate in your team.

 Start with one metric (not dashboard) at the top. Funke picked Engaged Time, then broke it down layer by layer: what drives sessions, what drives active users, what drives new vs. returning. Each layer down gets more specific, until you hit a movable metric, one a single product decision can actually shift.

 One of the most useful things a completed tree enables is simple calculation.

Once you have even a partial tree, you can start to model the relationships between metrics. Take any KPI in the tree that is influenced by two variables below it. Increase each of those variables by five percent in isolation and see what happens to the KPI above. Which one has the bigger effect? A basic sensitivity analysis like this tells you quickly where the highest-leverage opportunities are in your product, and where effort is likely to be wasted.

Only after the tree exists, build the org around it. Funke’s four pillars (Reach, Engagement, Monetisation, Infrastructure) came directly from the tree’s branches

 Don’t start with the whole tree. Stefan’s advice is to instrument one branch, show your team what it reveals, and let that build the internal case before you expand

> Find Stefan’s full piece here, originally shared at Audiencers’ Festival London

Broadsheet is yet another publisher proving the value of registration in a subs model

The team at Broadsheet, Australia’s leading cultural publisher, now with a London edition, chose to implement a registration wall a few months ahead of their subscription launch. 

Aside from setting the tone for a value exchange and guiding product strategy, the goal of this strategy was to:

1. Unlock engagement features to increase user exposure to the upcoming paywall

2. Secure marketing permissions to establish direct communication channels which heavily influence later conversion to subscription. 

Despite being in the early stages of the paywall rollout, Broadsheet data has already brought in key insights on user behavior, and the value of this model on the reader revenue funnel:

• Registration captures high quality readers: Superfans register at a rate 127x higher than casual readers, making them prime target for direct relationships
• Newsletters initiate the conversion journey: registered newsletter subscribers over-index on paywall hits by 10x compared to the average user

• The newsletter is the core conversion engine: a daily newsletter serves as an automated nudge that yields 3.5 paywall hits per unique visitor, a 35x higher exposure rate than anonymous readers.
• The compounding effect drives the majority of subscriptions: the micro-segment of registered, newsletter-engaged users (just 0.7% of total audience) drives a massive 43% of all digital subscriptions (a 61x over-index).

• Registration unlocks direct offer emails: Registration captures critical marketing consent, enabling direct sales offer emails to convert warm leads. At Broadsheet, immediate sales emails successfully account for 18% of all subscription conversions

It’s certainly the kind of data that should encourage you to consider a registration wall strategy!

> Find the full summary of Ross Wilmot’s, Direct of Reader Revenue, session at Audiencers’ Festival London on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• The Observer UK, a 233-year-old title, launched its first-ever digital subscription. Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer, explains why simplicity beat segmentation at launch, and why the hardest part hasn’t been the tech.
• 3 acquisition tactics from Foreign Policy, a publication offering near-to-zero free articles
• In Sweden, VK Media has blended marketing and newsroom to increase its audience

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #95. Make more informed decisions with a KPI tree appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #94 sent out on July 22nd, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

It’s mid-July and I feel like I’m mainly speaking with automated OOO replies Still, the newsletter goes on! At the very least, I hope it helps you to catch up once you’re back!

In today’s newsletter: 

• Information fatigue: why Les Echos are betting on « La Sélection » rather than unlimited access
• Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free
• Before you bundle: how to find out what your subscribers actually want
• Links to add to your reading list

P.S. If you’re an avid Audiencers’ reader and have a bit of time to spare over summer, I’d love 15 mins of your time to improve on what we do! Just reply to this email and we’ll find a slot:) Thank youuu! 

Why Les Echos are betting on “La Sélection” rather than unlimited access

How do we deal with information fatigue? 

With research suggesting that consumers are becoming increasingly more overwhelmed by too much information, the question is an important one for an industry selling access to it.

At the French daily business newspaper, Les Echos, the answer isn’t unlimited access, but a daily, deliberately limited but highly curated “selection” subscription offer.

“La Sélection” rests on three core criteria.

• Balance: the goal is no longer breaking news at all costs (others do breaking news better than Les Echos), but information that is useful for understanding the world and taking a step back
• Calm: plural voices and op-eds, but grounded in evidence-based, balanced arguments
• Impartiality: the title’s historic value

These break down into three guiding axes:

• Reason over ideology: an economic DNA that calls for a rational, almost mathematical reading of the world
• Optimism over fatalism: giving room to success stories and to solutions that work
• Ambition over declinism: investigations and analysis to handle professional and personal challenges

On the production side, it is a genuine editorial discipline, run by a dedicated team (two full-time journalists, according to our information). Each day, the newsroom produces between 120 and 150 articles; this team selects 9 to 15 of them, spread across a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) with fixed quotas per category, several times a day. Concretely, “develop” accounts for around 20% of topics, while “get inspired” and “unwind” are capped at 10% each.

> Find the full article on Audiencers, and come back in a few months for the first results!

Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free

When you’re working to continuously optimise your paywall strategy and sell access to content, it’s crazy to think about how The Guardian has convinced 1.4M to pay when anyone can read it, whether they pay or not. 

But even if you’re a paywalled publisher, Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth, reminded us at the Audiencers’ Festival in Montréal that access doesn’t need to be the thing you’re selling. For The Guardian, it’s their story of ownership. 

> The organisation’s value proposition comes down to three words – global, independent, free. Owned by the Scott Trust, their sole purpose is to ensure The Guardian can keep publishing. It’s this that’s sold to readers.

> One email, built entirely around that pitch, generated $2 million!… When The Washington Post and LA Times pulled their 2024 election endorsements, The Guardian sent readers a simple message – we published ours, and always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to.

> But it’s the method that’s worth noting rather than the moment: The Guardian surveys readers right after they give, with the goal of understanding supporter motivations. The top answers include protecting the free press, editorial independence, or the journalism itself.

> These surfaced motivations don’t just become a slide that’s presented once to the team, they’re used to build every single message that asks for support. They keep telling the story, deliberately and repeatedly.

Thanks to this blend of mission + motivation + benefits, people don’t pay for access, they pay to support The Guardian’s story. 

For The Guardian, the story is ownership. For your publication, it might be something else entirely, a specific beat, a founding mission, a community it serves. One method Emilie shared is to survey people right after they convert while the reason is still fresh. You can then build your marketing copy around what they tell you, something that works regardless of what that story turns out to be.

> Find the full summary on Audiencers

Before you bundle: how to find out what your subscribers actually want

When you start testing value props and benefits, it’s easy to mix and match features, and try to cram everything onto one page to make subscription “worth the cost”…

But as audience research leader Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines, Director of Subscriptions at Skift, shared at Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, research has proven that the biggest driver of loyalty isn’t usually price or feature count. It’s a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn’t get anywhere else

Your team can answer this easily, but the real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you’re trying to reach. Emily said that, at a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already. You’ll walk away smarter from even one conversation, and people will even thank you for simply asking for their perspectives.

Once you know your differentiation, packaging decisions get easier. Rachel’s 3-question test before bundling anything: does it strengthen or dilute each product’s identity? Are the audiences actually converging? Can your ops hold it together without the seams showing?

 Sometimes the research tells you to do nothing. One of Skift’s four products stayed untouched, on purpose, and it’s now one of their steadiest, best growing subscriptions.

> Full session from Emily and Rachel on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• The Publishers’ Tech Stack Study: findings from the 2026 survey 
• The reality check of user needs: “Update me” drives most demand for news
• How publishers are winning back the direct reader relationship
• In Spanish: Los medios tienen audiencia, pero no siempre comunidad: cómo activar a los lectores que siguen las noticias en silencio / The media has an audience, but not always a community: how to engage readers who follow the news silently

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #94. Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #93 sent out on July 8th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

After a packed-to-the-brim month of events, and more networking than I thought was possible in such a short space of time, I’ve resurfaced with a (surprisingly?) positive outlook for the industry. Conversations and recent articles are increasingly agreeing with the necessary direction that the industry needs to take. The connection economy, the community era, whatever we call it, the priority today should be about building relationships with audiences.

So, in my enthusiasm for the topic, it’s taking over today’s newsletter: 

• The traditional attention economy is being replaced by a connection economy 
• Is frequency the most concrete, easily-measurable metric to build these relationships?
• What does this all look like in practice? How Financial Times already prioritises belonging
• Don’t just take our word for it: other useful links on the topic

The traditional attention economy is being replaced by a connection economy

Back in March, at our Festival in Hamburg, Heiko Scherer, CEO and co-founder of tchop, took to the stage to discuss belonging, advocacy and trust, and how you define, measure and build relationships that last. 

What was clear from the conversation was that the traditional attention economy is being replaced by a connection economy. Reach & traffic are now merely necessary, surface-level foundations rather than the end goal. Instead, publishers should be moving towards belonging, measured by return, participation and sharing. 

The challenge with these connection metrics is that there are such a wide variety of definitions, as well as emotional and functional layers of a reader’s relationship with a brand.

For Heiko, it could look something like this:

But these types of metrics pose interesting questions about measurement and optimisation…

Is frequency the most concrete, easily-measurable metric to build these relationships?

Whilst belonging, advocacy and trust are hard to define and measure, RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) has been a customer-analytics staple for decades. Recency tells you when someone last showed up. Volume tells you how much content they consumed while they were there. But of those three letters, frequency is the one that quietly does the heavy lifting, because frequency tells you whether you have a business.

Frequency is the metric that tracks habit formation, that signals brand loyalty. It’s the leading indicator of customer lifetime value, registration propensity, and subscription conversion. And in an environment where AI is steadily eroding the casual, search-driven visit, frequency is the only metric that compounds in your favour.

What’s more, in an era where AI can summarise, paraphrase and serve without ever sending a click your way, content is increasingly a commodity. Community, however, is not. This is where Frequency lives.

AI can’t replicate the experience of debating a local election with your neighbours in a comment thread moderated by your newsroom. It can’t replicate a live Q&A with the reporter who broke the story. It can’t replicate the feeling of being recognised, replied to, and known by a brand you trust.

When publishers invest in community-building experiences like these, readers stop coming back for the content alone. They start coming back for the conversation. This shift is what Mark Zohar, President & CEO of Viafoura, calls the Frequency Loop.

Readers come for the content > they stay for the conversation > they get notified of replies and live events > they return > they register > they subscribe. Every loop tightens the bond, increases the visit count, and unlocks more revenue per user.

As Mark highlights, whilst AI is going to keep getting better at answering questions, it’s not going to get better at being a community. It’s this asymmetry that provides the single largest strategic opening for publishers right now, and frequency is the metric that tells you whether you’re walking through it.

So the next time your board asks how you’re future-proofing the business against AI disruption, don’t show them a traffic chart. Show them your frequency curve.

> Mark’s article is definitely in line with Heiko’s conversation above, maybe adding a more accessible angle given that frequency is (hopefully) already part of your KPIs

What does this all look like in practice? How Financial Times already prioritises relationship-building

Lucy Alexander, Director of Analytics & Insights at FT,  described how belonging, trust and advocacy sit at the center of the brand, and importantly, are business drivers:

• 58% of subscribers chose the FT specifically because they needed a reliable news source they could trust
• 15% of readers start their journey with the FT through articles shared on ft.com
• Another 11% of new readers begin consuming FT content based on direct recommendations from friends or colleagues.

How is the FT building belonging, trust & advocacy?

> The shift from physical to digital advocacy – historically, the physical pink newspaper served as a visible, integral part of reader advocacy, acting as a badge of identity. As the industry shifts, the FT is replicating this “outward expression” through digital means:

• The emotional layer: Advocacy is defined as the “outward expression” of a reader’s relationship with the brand.
• Signaling identity: Readers share FT content because it “signals who I am” to their professional and social networks.

> Strategic “Trusted Voices” – to deepen this advocacy, the FT launched the Trusted Voices marketing pilot in 2025.

• Personal branding: By elevating individual writers and creating personal brands, the FT encourages readers to defend and promote specific journalists, which in turn reinforces their loyalty to the parent publication.
• Broadening inclusivity: Initiatives to make the FT feel less like a “gendered entity” (moving from 80% male in 2016 to 92% non-gendered perception in 2025) have been essential in making more people feel they belong, thus empowering a more diverse group of advocates.

> Cultivating “evangelical” communities – the FT fosters advocacy by creating spaces for “authentic” and “nerdy” interactions that go beyond standard corporate communication.

The FT Alphaville section for instance has developed a core of evangelical fans by maintaining an authentic tone that appeals to readers on a personal level.

These micro-communities focus on specific niches where belonging forms most naturally.

Ultimately, whilst content is the trigger, interaction and participation are the product. Looping back to Heiko’s discussion, it’s in this area that we have a lot to learn from social platforms.

Don’t just take our word for it…

Other links on the topic of trust, advocacy and belonging:

• The rise of explainers as an audience growth strategy: CNN, Bloomberg, Vox and the Financial Times are proving that helping audiences understand complex issues can drive engagement, trust, and sustainable business growth
• In Spanish: ‘La confianza no se automatiza’: humanización del periodismo para fidelizar audiencias 

“At The Athletic, individual journalists are usually the main point of contact with readers. In a subscription model, trust is built directly with the reporter as much as with the publication. That’s why we don’t see personal brands as something to resist. Our approach is to align them with the strengths of the company,” – Claudio Cabrera, Vice President of Audience.

• Navigating the Community Era: key takeaways from the 2026 Future Newsrooms Study

See you in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #93. How is the FT building belonging, trust & advocacy? appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #92 sent out on June 24th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

London is a serious contender for our best Festival to date. Brilliant sessions that went right into the operational, nitty-gritty details, great questions & conversations from attendees, and an atmosphere that felt like industry friends coming together to support one another. 

Barely down from the high after London, we’re already onto the next with our Montréal Festival happening tomorrow! 

But before we jump into Montréal, today’s newsletter. A London Festival special 

The Festival TLDR: The future of subscription growth needs to be focused on building relationships that don’t depend on traffic, nor standard subscriptions that require commitment. We need to build sideways (Le Monde in English), own audiences to bridge the ads vs subs gap (registration), allow for flexible access (Washington Post’s one-time, daily & weekly passes) and create community-focused products & offerings that retain our most loyal audiences (The Economist Insider & WIRED’s subscription relaunch). 

Le Monde in English: Already profitable, but it’s about more than just translations

Arnaud Aubron, Director of Diversification at Le Monde

> The why: Le Monde has wanted to launch an English edition for 50+ years, but technological advances (AI translations) and digital subscriptions (delivering value internationally with ease) finally made the project possible in 2022. It’s also an important move for the brand to continue to grow beyond the limited French market

> Content: Le Monde in English doesn’t create original content; it exclusively translates a curated selection of the French edition (30% of all articles from Le Monde). 

> Pricing: Because an international reader is highly likely to already hold a primary subscription to a domestic title like The New York Times or The Guardian, Le Monde in English positions itself as a “second read,” with a highly accessible pricing structure (starting at €2.50/month for the first year)

 > Performance so far: 

• Le Monde in English has around 16,000 active subscribers
• A staggering 50% of all subscribers come from the US. Aubron attributed this to a stark cultural difference in the propensity to pay for news: while only roughly 10% of French consumers pay for digital news, closer to 20% of Americans do
• Approximately 5 million monthly visits
• Subscriptions are the core business driver, representing 66.2% of revenue, followed by licensing (16.9%), B2B (12.3%) and advertising (4.6%)

> “It’s not about translation”: success comes down to content market fit, product distribution, and understanding the distinct profile of your international audience. And whilst AI has driven productivity gains on this front, it’s also created journalism jobs – AI handles the mechanical translation, freeing human journalists to focus purely on editing, nuance, and curation.

> Full article summary on Audiencers

Registration: can we finally agree that ads and subs can work together

Shirin Shity, Senior Marketing Manager at Project Syndicate, Ross Wilmot, Director Reader Revenue at Broadsheet & Patrick Rademacher, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Ringier

> The myth disproven: Historically, publishing teams worked in separate silos: advertising teams fought for reach while reader revenue teams fought for paywall exclusivity. But data from Ringier Media Switzerland, and a holistic CLV combining revenue from ads & subs, proves this conflict is artificial

> Registration increases CLV: Ringier found that a logged-in user delivers a total CLV well over 30 times higher than a reader who only gives cookie consent. What’s more, securing marketing consent during registration allows publishers to bypass algorithmic platforms and send direct sales/offer emails. Broadsheet found that these targeted sales campaigns drove an immediate 18% of all subscription conversions.

> Newsletters are a core conversion engine: Once a reader registers, getting them onto a newsletter acts as a massive automated nudge. At Broadsheet, registered readers on newsletters accounted for less than 1% of the total audience but drove 43% of all digital subscription conversions. 

> Avoid the vanity metrics: Project Syndicate reminded us that registration volume is meaningless without engagement to follow. An active onboarding experience that keeps readers engaged during the critical first 30 to 90 days is essential.

Patrick’s session summary, on their holistic CLV is here, and a summary of Ross’ session, on launching registration pre-subscription, is here (Shirin’s coming soon!) 

Flexible access: addressing the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to commit

Anjali Iyer, Global Head of Subscriptions at The Washington Post

> Traditional hard paywalls face a brutal bottleneck: out of 100 anonymous readers who hit one, 74% abandon the site. Only 1% subscribe, and of that tiny fraction, 13% churn on day one because they only wanted that single article

> The data exposes a massive gap between the willingness to pay and the willingness to commit. As Anjali put it, modern readers, particularly younger cohorts, operate in a fragmented digital landscape shaped by streaming services, search loops, and social algorithms. They demand short-term choices and are often willing to pay a premium price for temporary access over a recurring subscription package.

> The Washington Post’s solution is flexible access models. By testing micropayments (weekly and pay passes, as well as pay-per-article with an in-paywall mobile payment module), they’re uncovering an untapped market:

• 42% of flexible access buyers are brand-new, anonymous users outside the existing ecosystem
• While core subscribers buy for politics and opinion, transactional buyers over-index heavily on lifestyle, wellness, and investigative deep-dives
• These users arrive via search/social, and 50% checkout via Apple Pay (compared to just 30% of standard subscribers)

> Interestingly, this also serves as a nurturing mechanism for long-term subscriber growth. Over a 180-day period, up to 8% of week-pass buyers, 4% of day pass buyers, and 3% of pay-per-article buyers eventually became full subscribers

Full article coming soon!

A few extra links if you’re in need of yet more insights;) 

• Sun Club at One: what The Sun learned from a year of freemium
• The Digital News Report 2026 is out
• Premium video has boosted subscriber retention for The Economist

See you tomorrow if you’ll be at our Festival in Montréal! Or in 2 weeks for our next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #92. WashPost addresses the gap between paying and committing appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #90 sent out on June 10th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

It’s our London Festival tomorrow! Very exciting line up of speakers, incredible slides being sent to me ahead of the day, and Audiencers coming from 12 countries (still in awe of people travelling for our events!) – Can’t wait to see many of you there! 

In today’s newsletter: 

• Lessons from Marseille: some slides that caught our attention at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress last week
• We have officially entered the Community Era, how can you make sure you’re keeping up? 
• What can we learn from non-media subscriptions? Wine, toilet paper, coffee, AI… we analyzed 100+ subscription businesses to help you improve yours
•  Links to add to your reading list

Lessons from Marseille

Last week we had the pleasure of attending the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille. Aside from beautiful sunsets overlooking the ocean (not too bad at all) we also saw some brilliant presentations from media brands around the world. Plenty of article summaries coming your way soon, but in the meantime, here are a couple of our fave slides…

This first one speaks for itself.

The takeaway: don’t put all your eggs in one (revenue) basket.

A powerful slide from Bonnier below, reminding us of the Pareto Principle, and that ads & subs revenues can work together rather than against each other.

VG has a dashboard showing reports solely on what they call “Super content”, i.e. content that can’t be replaced by AI.

Another reminder that you are what you measure (as we saw here with Amedia’s search for younger audiences)

We have officially entered the Community Era

In the age of content abundance, relationship strength is the differentiator. 

Thankfully, FT Strategies just released a report to help you bridge the gap between the classic audience-first rhetoric and actual operations, split into 4 core pillars:

1. The strategy gap: moving engagement to the heart of the business

Whilst 73% of newsroom leaders state audience engagement is their top priority, 25% of newsrooms still make daily editorial decisions purely on instinct or reactivity

Move away from destination-first publishing (where 64% of newsrooms design content for a single legacy channel first) to consider user needs. Bring audience and platform leaders directly to the strategy-setting table to align daily commissioning with genuine user needs

2. The audience trust gap: rethinking participation and storytelling

Trust is shifting to personal, relational signals. Yet reporters currently spend 38% of their week on technical production drag, and a meager 11% on post-publication community building

Reallocate capacity by automating production workflows. Bring audience participation back in-house through dedicated forums, reader-led investigative verticals, and formats that showcase authentic journalist expertise

3. The capability gap: shifting AI from efficiency to strategic maturity

 42% of newsrooms measure AI success strictly by ‘time saved’, trapping them in low-risk administrative use cases. And 57% of newsrooms have absolutely no AI representation embedded in their editorial teams, resulting in low literacy and cultural resistance

To build a high-literacy AI culture, embed technical leads directly within reporting desks, upgrade backend metadata, and offer specific, voluntary workflow training

4. The skills gap: transitioning from generalists to sharper specialists

The ecosystem demands sharp specialization (including tech-enabled reporting, data fluency, and visual format mastery), yet 61% of newsrooms offer zero formal training for new skills

Invest in structured talent upskilling, especially on-camera training for journalists expected to compete on visual platforms. Consider compensation models to retain your most prominent, community-driving editorial voices

> We’ve summarized the report on Audiencers here

> And you can download the full FT Strategies & WAN-IFRA report here

Toilet paper, wine, coffee, cars, AI… What can we learn from non-media subscriptions?

It always comes back to the same thing: 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 toilet paper subscription: £45.5M in UK revenue alone in 2024, over 1M subscribers globally, and over £10M donated to charities since launch. They have a brand identity & voice so strong that people subscribe for what it represents. This is definitely something publishers could learn from.

> “I don’t have to think about it anymore” – when the value prop is to remove friction or effort

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.

> “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.

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

Claude and ChatGPT have 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. (hybrid pricing (fixed subscription tier + usage-based layer) is actually a very interesting model for publishers to consider…)

 What do they all have in common?

They combine a strong brand identity, a clear value proposition, and an obsession with user engagement with an infinite loop of micro-conversions.

And it’s also true for media subscriptions…

> Max Moné (CEO at Poool) shares his analysis in the final episode of his 6-part Subscription Moodboard series

Links to add to your reading list

• Why the Freemium subscription model is emerging as the definitive way to keep growth in ads and subs
• “Do something with your luck”: What German news brands are doing right
• From WAN-IFRA’s Congress in Marseille: A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher atThe New York Times, calls AI’s founding act a theft (full video of his hard-hitting speech here) 

See you in 2 weeks for the next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #91. We have officially entered the Community Era appeared first on Audiencers.

You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #90 sent out on May 27th, 2026. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

Hope you enjoyed the long weekend and didn’t melt in this heat!!

(record-breaking May temperatures in Europe for those of you not over this side of the world!) 

In today’s newsletter: 

• From Melbourne to London: how Broadsheet is scaling culture and reader revenue
• Is The New York Times becoming the ultimate subscription infrastructure for the media industry?
• Should you care about your newsletter open rates?
•  Links to add to your reading list

From Melbourne to London: how Broadsheet is scaling culture and reader revenue

“by focusing on engagement, everybody wins”

One of the biggest challenges in the publishing industry today is the perceived conflict between advertising and subscription revenue.

For the team at Broadsheet Media, however, these models are complementary, with engagement being the common thread. And it’s been one of the key elements in the recent launch of their reader revenue model.

> 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.
Importantly, engagement is a key focus across the whole business, something that applies across both advertising and subscription revenue goals

> Culture of test and learn: Continuous experimentation with subscriber journeys, funnels, pricing, and offers to drive sustainable growth. A big part of this has been the launch of a registration model prior to paywalls, helping to build confidence internally ahead of their subscription launch

> 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.

> Full article interview with Founder & Publisher, Nick Shelton, & Director of Reader Revenue, Ross Wilmot, on Audiencers

Is The New York Times becoming the ultimate subscription infrastructure for the media industry?

According to FIPP’s latest data, the media landscape is shifting. The NYT is moving beyond just selling its own news, it’s increasingly positioning itself as a foundational product bundle layer for other publishers.

By partnering with international outlets (like El País and Corriere della Sera) and exploring domestic collaborations, they are bundling high-engagement products like NYT Games, Cooking, and The Athletic into external subscription models.

> Beyond news: High-utility lifestyle products are the ultimate top-of-funnel conversion tools (Mediahuis has started bundling beyond journalism too)

> Bundling: As single-product subscriptions hit a saturation point, multi-publisher bundles drive higher engagement and lower churn

> Infrastructure over competition: Scale allows giants like the NYT to act less like traditional competitors (not that this is a highly competitive industry anyway…) and more like a platform economy for smaller publishers

> Great write up by John Rahim on the topic

Should you care about your newsletter open rates?

Yes

Should you care about other people’s newsletter open rates?

No

That’s pretty much the TLDR of Lennart Schneider‘s recent discussion on Audiencers

For Lennart, there’s no such thing as a “good” open rate, and an open rate really says nothing about the quality of your newsletter.

> Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, it’s often difficult to track who actually opens an email
> And you can actually simply improve open rate by sending an email to fewer people (given that open rate is a fraction, calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the total number of recipients). The quality of your newsletter doesn’t improve, but open rate (quality of your distribution system) does

However, since we don’t have many metrics for email, it’s still a valuable signal, as long as you’re aware of what it tells you, and what it doesn’t.

What you shouldn’t do is compare your absolute open rate with competitors who use completely different tools and whose lead generation works differently.

What you can do instead:
> Remove contacts who don’t open your newsletters, or at least ask them if they still want to receive your emails
> Observe long-term trends, comparing your own newsletters with each other
> Optimize your open rate with A/B testing
> Examine outliers: Were there any particular issues that were opened more or less frequently than average? What can I learn from them?
> Consider re-contacting those who didn’t open the email
> Use net reach (recipients x open rate) as the basis for advertising deals
> Compare segments: When running different lead generation campaigns, you shouldn’t just focus on the short-term cost per lead (CPL), but also consider whether the campaigns generate active recipients in the long run.

> Find Lennart’s discussion on Audiencers

Links to add to your reading list

• The micropayments topic is back (again), with 2 contradicting views:
  • Why micropayments can’t save news (some great points here, particularly on relationship-building. I’d add that subs products also go beyond the value put on a single article, they’re about community, features & having continued access)
  • Meanwhile, at Washington Post: Unlocking growth with flexible access: A new paradigm for customer-centric strategy

“If we want to be customer-obsessed as an industry, then we should not ignore the customer signals. More options lead to more opportunities. By introducing flexible ways to read and engage, publishers can strengthen customer relationships, diversify revenue streams, and make journalism more accessible to more people.”

• “Affiliation, not just access”: Newsrooms try to move beyond membership to a focus on “belonging”
• Steal this strategy: 4 membership models succeeding for publishers (and how to learn from them)

See you in 2 weeks for the next newsletter,

Madeleine

The post #90. Is The New York Times becoming subscription infrastructure for the media industry? appeared first on Audiencers.