Jess Burney is the Managing Director of Customer Marketing and Subscriptions at Immediate, the publisher behind Good Food, Radio Times and Nutracheck. She runs a team of 50 and has spent five years pivoting from a print subscription business to a digital one. Immediate now has more than 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital-only, and a mission to reach 3 million by 2030. The majority of the remaining 1.8 million are expected to come from the US, from products not yet launched and from bundling.
> UK publisher Immediate (Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra) has over 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital, against a company target of 3 million by 2030 > 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
Print was working. That was the constraint.
Immediate publishes Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra and around 50 other brands, and by the early 2020s its print business was thriving. Magazines still sold well, and lockdown had been good to them, with a steep uptick in demand for copies by post. Instead of needing to rescue subscribers from a collapsing format, as many other publishers did, Immediate’s existing subscriber base was profitable, loyal, and not going anywhere fast. As Burney put it, print is still a robust format, and one the brand needed to continue to commit to. But growth is in digital, a development necessary to achieve their 3 million subscriber target.
What’s more, the bet was that the expertise from years of building subscription expertise in print – pricing, renewals, retention, and direct marketing to a known customer file – would carry into digital even though the format would not.
New products for audiences that print never reached
“We didn’t look at this as let’s substitute one for another. Why would you? That’s leaving cash on the table,” Burney says. Print subscribers are highly profitable, the volume decline is gentle, and their engagement is incredible. So, the apps were sold to people who had never bought a magazine. “What we’ve done is create a new audience which previously did not exist. So our growth has been genuine, rather than simply substituting one channel for another.”
- The Good Food app came first, launching around 2022. It now sits just short of 200,000 paid subscribers, from a standing start
- Nutracheck, a diet and nutrition tracking app, was acquired in 2023 and cross-sold to the Good Food audience. It is profitable, has roughly doubled since then, and currently has 580,000 subscribers
- Radio Times followed with its own paid products, including What to Watch, alongside HistoryExtra.
How Immediate decides which brands get a paid product
Importantly, the team hasn’t built a digital product for every brand. Key questions need to be asked before anything is built:
- Is the audience large enough, and will it return regularly rather than just twice a year?
- Will people habituate to the brand, or is the relationship occasional?
- What can you realistically charge, measured against whoever else already meets that need?
Then the maths: how many subscribers at what acquisition cost, what happens at the first renewal, and what happens at every one after that?
Categories that clear the bar are the ones where Immediate can lead and defend. Food and Wellness through Good Food and Nutracheck, and entertainment through Radio Times. Because each audience answers those questions differently, no two products are priced or packaged the same way.
The same questions explain why paywalling the magazines was never the plan. “If you’re just paywalling content, it doesn’t really take you far enough, unless it’s real must-read content to get people to subscribe and stick around.” Evergreen lifestyle content lacks the urgency of news, so unlocking it alone is not enough. The value has to come from utility instead: cook mode features, prep and planning tools, celebrity takeovers and app-exclusive material.
The websites became the marketing machine
A product that clears the test still has to reach people cheaply enough for the maths to work. Immediate’s answer was already sitting in the business. It kept the free, ad-funded websites that Radio Times, Good Food and the rest already ran, and gave them a different job. They are now the top of a funnel that ends in an app subscription.
“We’ve got big websites for Radio Times, for all of our brands, and we use that to market the products that are appropriate for those audiences,” Burney says. “So it’s a marketing machine, really.” Recipe traffic is directed to the Good Food app, and TV listings to What to Watch. Social reach feeds the same funnel, and paid campaigns run off the back of it.
The machine also runs on creator and influencer talent. Immediate is home to a roster of chefs, presenters and social-first creators, with a dedicated ‘Faces and Voices’ team to cover talent management, including both staff and external names.
“It would be misleading to say that the talent is just going to drive subscribers. The talent is ultimately top of funnel,” Burney says.
Good Food works with talent, including Chetna Makan, Max La Manna, Sophie Wyburd and Angela Hartnett, fronting social campaigns for recipes such as chocolate cake, marry me meatballs and, randomly, rhubarb, at very low cost per order. “I think our best campaign got about 20,000 subs in January.” The same names then run app takeovers that are exclusive to subscribers, so the talent that pulls people in also gives them a reason to stay.
Not all of the talent is bought in. Alex Horne of the UK comedy show Taskmaster featured in an app takeover campaign, and Ricky Gervais did the same for the Radio Times app. So did Perry, a community manager on Burney’s own organic social team, who is massively into musicals. One of his posts about Wicked was retweeted by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and passed a million views.
The talent stays the same down the funnel, but the message changes, from inspiration at the top (cook this dish, here is your Christmas plan, here is what is on TV) to utility at the bottom, the closer someone gets to paying.
One platform, and the commercial discipline underneath it
A funnel that runs from a free recipe page to a paid app subscription needs a technical stack that can manage the entire journey, and Immediate’s stack had grown incrementally. They spent 18 months replacing it. Paywall, billing, revenue platform, and first-party data now sit in a single system driven by a customer data platform (CDP), which was bought and extensively configured rather than built internally. “Building something in-house of this complexity would be out of the means of most publishers,” Burney says.
The result is an AI-driven paywall that the company expects will significantly boost numbers, as well as enable print and digital packaging options which were previously impossible. A separate commercial analysis team holds the budget on what gets funded: acquisition cost against lifetime value, three to one on a digital product over a couple of years. “People either overinvest and see a very poor return and then get disheartened and give up, or see a really good result but then don’t realise that it’s not replicable.”
What good looks like
Subscription only works if you know what a healthy product looks like. “Talk to some subs people, they can get lost in the detail that sits behind it,” Burney says. “But it’s a science and an art at the same time.” A free or low-priced introductory trial would be expected to achieve a 40-55% conversion to paid status. Below that, the return will not be there. The next renewal period should land between 65 and 80%. For monthly retention, anything under 90% is a problem, with 95% as the target.
“Typically, people don’t invest enough in retention. When you’re in growth mode, acquisition is the lifeblood, and that’s also the thing that everyone loves because it’s all high numbers coming in.”
Where the next 1.8 million comes from
The 3 million target rests on international expansion for Good Food and Nutracheck, particularly in the US, as well as organic growth, new products in markets Immediate already knows, and bundling. On bundling, she personally is more sceptical than many other publishers that this has to be one-size fits all. Nutracheck’s growth came from cross-selling into the Good Food audience and applying industrial subscriptions expertise to a small startup. She notes, “While we are now experimenting with bundling, it’s actually cross-selling.”
“Your success in the current year hasn’t got a lot to do with what you’re doing in the previous year, because the subscribers you acquire are really building future value. What you’ve done in previous years is what’s making today work,” Burney says. “It massively increases the predictability of future earnings. Massively.”
What this means for you
Most of what worked here is separable from Immediate’s scale. The company refused to trade print for digital revenue, so nothing had to be cannibalised. It ran a product test before a content test: would people use the product repeatedly? And was the commercial model tight enough to identify a repeatable win from a one-off?
Publishers should take different things from their experience.
- Single-title magazines: the portfolio logic does not apply, but the product test does. Ask honestly whether your audience would habitually use an app, and whether the utility you could build is worth paying for. If not, an advertising model might be a legitimate answer.
- Regional and local news groups: the estimation discipline and the retention benchmarks travel directly. So does the argument for protecting a profitable print budget rather than forcing migration to a digital solution, and creating something new for audiences
- Large portfolios and media houses: the transferable strategy is refusing a single payment model across brands. Segment by whether the audience is sticky, whether the brand leads its category, and what the build costs, then invest only where all three hold.
- Nationals and news publishers: Burney’s exception is your advantage. News is one of the few categories where paywalled content alone converts, which makes utility a retention question for you as well as an acquisition one.
