This summary from The Audiencers' Festival in London 2025 was originally published in John's The Media Stack newsletter.
At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, a recurring theme emerged from sessions with executives across leading publishers, audience strategy is undergoing a fundamental redefinition. In an era where platform referral traffic is declining, and digital advertising economics remain volatile, subscription models are under pressure not only to grow but to endure.
Speakers from FT strategies, The Telegraph, Business Insider, the BBC, Mediahuis Belgium, and others offered a common diagnosis, scale alone is no longer a sufficient business objective. Instead, publishers are shifting towards models built around perceived value, user agency, and emotional connection. In this new calculus, belonging is no longer a soft ideal it is fast becoming a core business metric.
From Metrics to Meaning: The Rise of Reader Relationship Models
Madeleine White, VP Marketing at Poool and co-founder of The Audiencers, framed the challenge succinctly: traditional indicators such as pageviews, open rates or app downloads offer little insight into user loyalty or retention. Publishers, she argued, must now focus on fostering durable relationships that can withstand choice fatigue and subscription churn.
This shift is visible in the changing nature of engagement strategies. Personalisation, community interaction, and seamless off boarding options are being tested not merely to optimise the funnel but to maintain trust. Substack’s referral leaderboards, The Washington Post’s extra family accounts, and user rewards for commenting are all examples of value-enhancing initiatives rooted in behavioural economics.
Functional Engagement Over Frequency: Lessons from L’Équipe
Louis Faure, Head of Strategic Marketing at L’Équipe, detailed a pivot away from linear content delivery towards what he termed “functional engagement”. New tools legislation trackers, AI-generated transcripts, and subscription tiers based on service layers were designed not to increase daily visits, but to maximise perceived utility.
Interestingly, uptake of these services was strongest not among long-term subscribers, but newer users, unconstrained by legacy consumption habits. Over 60% of sign-ups opted for the higher-value tiers far surpassing internal forecasts. The implication is clear, relevance, not routine, drives willingness to pay.
Redesigning the Newsletter Lifecycle: Tactics That Work
The BBC’s Zoe Tabary described “The Upbeat” newsletter offers a case study in targeted editorial design. Built to engage so-called “news avoiders” younger, often female, and underserved readers it leverages mood-based segmentation and CRM data to deliver positive stories. The result: high engagement rates and a younger, more diverse audience profile.
At the Toronto Star, former newsletter editor David Topping found that clarity consistently outperformed curiosity. Links that clearly stated what readers would find (“Here’s how…”, “Here’s what…”) drove significantly more clicks than vague alternatives. The most effective feature? A visually dominant call-to-action labelled the “big stupid button”, which generated record-breaking click-through rates in the Star’s seasonal campaigns.
Product Thinking and Subscriber Experience
The Telegraph’s approach, outlined by product manager Dean Attil, reveals a strategic emphasis on feature discovery and early engagement. During the first 100 days of a subscription, users are exposed to contextual prompts, interface tours, and onboarding content that aim to build habit. The goal is not simply to reduce churn but to embed the product into daily routines.
Metrics such as comment time (17 minutes per user on average) and article gifting behaviour inform roadmap decisions. A lack of recipient data capture for gifted articles was identified as a missed opportunity underscoring that retention, acquisition, and product design must be treated as parts of a unified system.
-> Developing community beyond commenting, with The Telegraph and The Times
Reducing Friction, Increasing Control
At Business Insider, Sabrina Cesar Tolomei presented a retention model grounded in behavioural data and operational control. Simplifying the cancellation journey while counterintuitive reduced service enquiries by half and recovered 6% of would-be cancellations. Dynamic pricing, tailored to cohort tenure and sensitivity, outperformed flat-rate offers.
Crucially, Tolomei stressed the value of early intervention. Onboarding emails, plan explanations and usage nudges are now seen as preventive medicine making churn mitigation at exit less necessary.
Segmenting the Funnel: Condé Nast and the Decline of Platform Dependence
With search visibility declining and Facebook’s distribution influence waning, Sarah Marshall of Condé Nast outlined a shift away from top-of-funnel acquisition towards nurturing “the happy middle”: repeat users not yet converted. Vanity Fair’s renaming of a newsletter from “Cocktail Hour” to “Financial Fair Daily” yielded a tenfold increase in paid conversions.
Content now serves dual roles. Shopping verticals and travel guides attract consistent traffic while feeding affiliate commerce. Meanwhile, newsletter redesigns and evergreen strategies aim to create habitual, direct audiences untethered from platform algorithms.
Utility as Strategy: The Mediahuis Belgium Approach
Katia Bebusschere, Manager of Acquisition and Conversion at Mediahuis Belgium, offered a restrained but effective model. The team focuses on the conversion journey between registration and payment arguably the most neglected segment of many publisher funnels.
Bebusschere introduced the idea of “average intervention time” the typical delay between registration and conversion as a crucial indicator. Small, testable experiments are favoured over sweeping initiatives. Their strategy hinges not on invention, but on improving service clarity and removing user friction especially during onboarding and paywall interactions.
Direct-to-Audience Journalism: The Bureau’s Transformation
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s pivot toward direct audience engagement reflects deeper structural changes in media. Previously focused on syndication, The Bureau has introduced user needs mapping to tailor content formats from explainers to first-person narratives—to different engagement motives: to know, understand, feel or act.
Internal buy-in has been central to this evolution. Journalists were encouraged, not instructed, to adapt formats preserving editorial autonomy while improving accessibility. The redesigned newsletter Uncovered now reports significantly higher open rates and feedback loops between audience data and editorial teams have become a fixture of the workflow.
Conclusion: Towards Sustainable Attention
Across markets and models, a clear pattern is emerging. The next phase of digital publishing is not about the largest audience, but the most resilient relationship. Subscription businesses will rise or fall not on acquisition alone, but on retention, functionality, and user trust.
Belonging, once relegated to the margins of editorial strategy, is now being reinterpreted as core business value. As recurring revenue replaces pageview advertising, and as readers demand more relevance, usability and agency, the industry must recalibrate accordingly.
What binds the success stories shared at the Audiencers Festival is not technology or scale it is clarity of purpose. The publishers moving fastest are not chasing novelty, but rediscovering something more enduring, audience as relationship, not reach.
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