Rachel Shields, UK Editorial Director at The Sun, and Sarah Ransome, Principal Product Manager at The Sun, explain the commercial logic behind Sun Club, what a year of subscriber data has revealed, and where the product goes next.
TL;DR
- Sun Club launched in 2025 as a freemium membership product at £1.99 per month, layering subscription revenue and first-party reader data on top of The Sun’s existing free audience. A growing proportion of content is now members-only.
- One year in, 65% of members are women, and Sun Club has opened a route to an entirely new audience: TikTok-acquired subscribers are 85% female and 15 years younger than the average Club member, engaging with content created specifically for them.
- First-week app activity is the strongest predictor of long-term retention; the most loyal members read over 100 articles a week, almost entirely via the app.
- Sun Club has exceeded its initial targets; the team has several retention projects underway to build on that momentum and deepen early-life engagement.
Key lessons:
- Value-driven perks sit at the heart of Sun Club’s membership proposition; for this audience, they are a vital retention tool.
- A freemium model can serve advertising and subscription goals simultaneously; a known, logged-in audience is a commercial asset that strengthens both.
We thought people would pay for quality journalism, and they did
Like most news publishers, The Sun had been challenged by the decline in referral traffic. That brought the loyal core digital audience into sharper focus. The question was whether tabloid readers could be persuaded to pay for digital journalism, and what the product would need to look like to make that happen.
Rachel Shields says: “We were confident that UK readers were far more willing to pay for quality content now than they were a decade ago. At the same time, while we had huge reach, we wanted to turn those anonymous clicks into known users, and create a richer experience based on their preferences.”
Research indicates that as audiences feel swamped by AI-generated content, the perceived value of verified, quality journalism is rising. The launch of Sun Club a year ago was well timed.
“We’re still ‘the People’s Paper’ and are conscious that there is a strong proportion of our journalism which should remain free online, around big health or political stories, for example,” says Shields.
A year on, Sun Club has exceeded initial targets. Part of that success is down to the value-driven membership proposition, which combines Sun content and a raft of unique money-saving offers.
