As search, social and AI continue to reshape discovery, publishers are looking for more reliable ways to connect with readers directly. Apps are playing an increasingly important role in strengthening owned channels and supporting subscriber relationships.

The Pugpig 2026 Media App Report offers a clear picture of what’s working, what isn’t and what the top-performing apps have in common. Combining analytics from more than 440 apps with survey responses from 140 publishers, it’s our most data-rich edition yet. 

The post The super user effect: what the Pugpig Media App Report tells us about reader engagement in 2026 appeared first on Audiencers.

For its fifth edition, the “Tech Stack” study, conducted by the association of the same name in partnership with the Sciences Po Journalism School, paints the most complete picture to date of the tools that French news publishers rely on to produce, distribute and monetise news. Four tool families, 118 contributions, nearly 5.5 billion monthly page views described: the findings of the 2026 edition are now available to download.

Which tools do French news publishers actually use to produce, distribute and monetise their digital content? Since 2021, the “Tech Stack” survey has answered this question by drawing directly on the voices of the professionals who work with these tools day to day: chief technology officers, newsroom managers, product managers, marketing managers and ad sales house directors. Between in-house solutions and external vendors, they all administer a technical apparatus in constant recomposition. The very word “stack” captures the iterative nature of this accumulation, driven by the evolution of technologies and the transformation of usages.

Launched in 2021 on the initiative of Marion Wyss, an online-media professional and specialist in subscriber-acquisition strategies (and Audiencers’ Publisher), the Tech Stack reaches its fifth edition in 2026. As early as 2022, Sciences Po joined the project to ensure its longevity in the form of an annual update. Its founding principle remains unchanged: to consolidate the full range of practices in order to draw up a complete overview, while guaranteeing each respondent strict confidentiality over the solutions they report using.

A survey of unprecedented scope

The 2026 edition is based on four separate questionnaires: marketing, editorial, advertising and technical tools. Completed by the managers of the relevant teams, each solution cited was analysed through a twofold approach: its market share among respondents on the one hand, and an assessment of its quality on the other. Beyond listing the tools they use, respondents rate them: each professional gives their solution a satisfaction score from 1 to 10 and specifies, in free-text comments, what wins them over or frustrates them in terms of quality and everyday use. It is the aggregation of these scores that makes it possible to measure whether, in France, publishers feel well served by their CMS, their subscription manager or their adserver. And it is this cross-analysis of equipment rate and satisfaction that makes the study a genuine decision-support tool, allowing each publisher to guide its own equipment choices by drawing on the experience of its peers.

Measured against the combined audience of all participating titles, the study describes the Tech Stack underpinning more than five billion monthly page views. Contributors include the majority of national daily press titles, several audiovisual brands, magazine titles, regional and trade press groups, as well as numerous pure players. In keeping with the confidentiality commitment made to respondents, all responses were consolidated and processed anonymously, but the list of respondents is set out in the study’s introduction and in each section.

Publishers now properly equipped

The first takeaway from the 2026 edition lies in the convergence of scores. The four tool families obtain closely aligned averages: 7.1/10 for marketing, 7.2 for editorial, and 7.4 for both advertising and technical tools. The message is clear: French publishers are now properly equipped. No category collapses, and none reaches excellence. The gaps lie at the extremes, from the success of digital advertising audio to the struggles of the subscription manager — the backbone of the subscriber relationship, still largely inherited from the print era. Over three years, the trend is one of slow improvement as stacks stabilise.

This maturity shifts the challenge. Everywhere, value no longer lies in the tool itself but in its ability to connect to others. Marketing calls for a unified data layer; editorial dreams of a CMS turned cockpit, linking planning, publishing, social media and measurement; the technical side seeks observability and orchestration; and advertising, the reconciliation of its fragmented signals. The 2026 stack is not under-equipped: it is under-orchestrated. To this integration tension is added, among legacy press groups, a persistent divide between print-inherited foundations and digital building blocks — a divide that dreaded migrations still struggle to close.

Two underlying forces: AI and sovereignty

Two dynamics run through all the chapters. First, artificial intelligence, now present in almost every use case (nearly nine publishers out of ten on the marketing side) but still confined to assistance and individual productivity. Its industrialisation, plugged into data, is shaping up to be the next front of differentiation. Second, sovereignty, which is emerging as a structuring criterion in the face of dependence on the major US players, from web analytics to the adserver, from cloud to language models, and in the face of rising costs (licences, cloud, tokens) that everyone is seeking to keep under control.

One constant remains, a common thread throughout the study: in-house solutions, when designed together with the teams, consistently earn the best scores. Proof that satisfaction stems less from a tool’s power than from its right fit with needs. That is where the 2027 challenge lies: not in accumulating new building blocks, but in the art of connecting them.

Download the study

The full results — a detailed analysis of the four tool families, equipment rates, satisfaction scores and publisher verbatims — are available in the complete summary of the “Tech Stack 2026” survey.

→ Download the Tech Stack 2026 study (PDF)

A study by the Tech Stack association, in partnership with the Sciences Po Journalism School.

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For the past three decades, the digital playbook for media companies has shifted with the technology landscape. We have marched through the mass-market era of controlled distribution, the search intent era of optimizing for keywords, and the platform era of chasing feed visibility.

According to the inaugural Future Newsrooms Study 2026, a global benchmark report produced by FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA, supported by Arc XP, surveying 448 newsroom leaders across 86 countries, we have firmly entered the Community Era.

As generative AI makes generic, commodity content effortless to produce, reach alone is no longer a viable baseline for economic survival. Instead, competitive advantage has swung decisively toward what is hardest to replicate: relationships, original reporting, and building trusted networks around specific niche audiences.

To help publishing teams bridge the gap between audience-first rhetoric and daily operational reality, here is a practical operational breakdown of the study’s four core pillars – strategy, audience trust, capability & skills

The post Navigating the community era: key takeaways from the 2026 Future Newsrooms Study appeared first on Audiencers.

By Selma Stern, Independent Advisor, and Pete Doucette, Senior Managing Director, Mather

Mather’s inaugural German News Media Audience Benchmark recorded a staggering result: German news brands grew audience +13% year-over-year in April, while US brands fell more than 17% in the same window. Built on Similarweb, Listener and Sophi data across 44 German news brands, the benchmark found the majority of them posting positive year-over-year growth. The gap between Germany and the US widened through the first quarter of 2026.

Since the report launched, we’ve been analyzing why this is happening. There are a few structural reasons: a different election cycle, a later arrival of AI overviews, more Android phones (and therefore more Google Discover traffic). But these macro trends don’t explain why the recovery is concentrated in regional publishers, why it shows up in engagement and not just reach, or why Germany rebounded inside the same platform environment US media blames for its own decline.

An independent INMA analysis of DACH publishers’ own first-party data points the same direction as ours. INMA’s Grzegorz Piechota put it best when we compared notes: “They are lucky in a way, but they also do something with their luck.”

We have four hypotheses for what’s actually going on. One is sheer luck, one has to do with good choices made in the past, and two might travel.

The post “Do something with your luck”: What German news brands are doing right appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the last episode in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
> Episode one: 100 subscription business, 15 industries, 1 moodboard
> Episode two: What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-off
> Episode three: Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1
> Episode four: The subscription pricing page we've all built at least once
> Episode five: The first 100 days: why most of what we call retention is really just micro-conversions (again)

Why we’re ending with this

Over the past five episodes, we’ve gone deep into how the best subscription businesses do things to scale, using examples from the NYT, Spotify, Figma, L’Équipe, Jeune Afrique, and many others.

This last episode is different. It’s the one where we show you the weird stuff from our moodboard. The examples that made us smile, made us think, and sometimes made us wonder “wait, people actually subscribe to that?”

The answer is yes. People subscribe to pretty much anything and everything. And no matter how bizarre the product, the same principles from the previous five episodes keep showing up.

So here’s a tour of some of our favorites, organized not by industry but by what makes each one compelling for the person who’s paying. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it always comes back to: 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: £45.5M in UK revenue alone in 2024, over 1M subscribers globally, and over £10M donated to charities since launch. For toilet paper.

It’s toilet paper. There’s not much you can do to make toilet paper exciting. But they donate 50% of profits to sanitation charities, they have a brand identity that genuinely makes you smile, and their packaging is designed to be posted on Instagram (which, for a product you use in the bathroom, is quite the branding achievement).

The result: you don’t just buy Who Gives a Crap, you become a Who Gives a Crap customer and participate in something that is bigger than you (or at least you think you do). It’s an identity statement. You probably mention it at dinner parties (I mean, the name alone guarantees that). And that emotional connection is what makes people stay, because cancelling doesn’t just mean switching brands, it means giving up a small part of how you see yourself.

We Are Here does something similar with coffee: personalized beans, your choice of grind and delivery frequency, a custom sticker on the bag, and a donation to a different charity depending on which sticker you choose. It’s a coffee subscription that makes you feel like you’re expressing your personality every time you order.

This raises two questions that I think are worth thinking about for media:

First, are there publishers with a brand identity/voice so strong that people subscribe for what it represents, not just for the content? I can think of a few, and they’re not necessarily the biggest ones. Mediabask (you probably don’t know them) is an interesting example: people bought subscriptions before the website even launched, because of what the brand stands for and the community around it.

Second, could this become a model for media? Buy a subscription, and X% of the price (or profits) goes to a charity. Maybe subscribers even get to vote each month on which cause receives the donation. Green Got, a French bank, does exactly this with banking. Why not with a news subscription?

“I don’t have to think about it anymore”: when the value prop is friction removal

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.

What surprised me when building the moodboard is that even companies you wouldn’t expect are doing really sophisticated subscription work. Walmart+ and Instacart+ are grocery delivery services, but they have trials adapted to usage patterns, bundles to create lock-in effects (Walmart+ with Paramount+ and Burger King; Instacart+ with Peacock and NYT Cooking for annual members), and upsell paths that follow the exact same micro-conversion logic we described in episodes 3 through 5.

For media, the question this raises is not really about content. It’s about the experience around the content. What does a media subscription simplify in someone’s daily routine? The friction of hitting paywalls? The 30 minutes of browsing to find something worth reading? A curated morning briefing that replaces scanning 5 different sources? I think we could try build our subscription product that way as medias: what does our subscription remove from someone’s day?

“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.

You receive things you would never have chosen on your own, and the engagement comes from the anticipation and trust you build with the curator over time. The lock-in isn’t in the product (you could order Japanese snacks online anytime), it’s in the relationship with someone who knows your taste.

FindMyPast takes discovery in a completely different direction: you pay for access to billions of genealogy records, and every answer you find generates new questions. You discover a great-grandmother, now you want to know her parents. You find a marriage certificate, now you want the newspaper from that week. The product creates its own engagement loop naturally.

It’s the same mechanism that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly so sticky, but applied to family history and physical goods. For publishers with decades of archives, there’s something genuinely worth exploring here: how do you turn a static archive into a discovery-driven experience that keeps subscribers curious and engaged?

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

Strava is an app for runners and cyclists that tracks your activities, shows your routes, and lets you compare with friends. The more you run, the more valuable the app becomes, because your entire history, your segments, your social connections, your training patterns are all there. Switching to another app means starting from zero.

It’s the same personalization lock-in as Spotify (episodes 4 and 5), applied to physical activity.

Claude (the one helping me write this series, full transparency) and ChatGPT push this even further with a model that barely existed a few years ago: 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.

Two things about AI subscriptions that I think are worth watching closely for media:

First, they all let you try the product for free almost immediately, because the product is powerful enough that the fastest path to conversion is to just let you use it (everything starts with engagement). Which is exactly the registration-as-the-first-micro-conversion logic we described in episode 3.

Second, hybrid pricing (fixed subscription tier + usage-based layer) is interesting as a concept. Imagine a media subscription with a base access fee, and a premium layer that adapts based on how much you consume or which features you use. It doesn’t really exist yet in media (as far as I know), but given how fast AI pricing models are spreading to other industries, it might not be far off.

Yes, even cars

SIXT+: a car subscription from $679/month. You pick a car category, a location, a pickup date. You subscribe monthly, cancel anytime, maintenance and roadside assistance included. You can even switch to a different vehicle or pause through the app.

I’m mentioning this one not because the model applies directly to media, but because it shows just how far the subscription model has spread. And even here, the same principles show up: try before you commit (24-hour notice), one clear offer per category, flexibility to upgrade or downgrade over time (micro-conversions, again), and the value proposition is friction removal (no ownership, no maintenance, cancel anytime).

What the toilet paper confirmed (love this title)

Over six episodes, I’ve talked about the NYT’s dynamic meter, Figma’s onboarding, L’Équipe’s first-100-days data, Jeune Afrique’s dynamic pricing, Spotify’s personalization, and now toilet paper and car subscriptions.

If I had to summarize everything in one statement, it would be this:

The subscription businesses that will thrive (media included) are the ones that combine a strong brand identity, a clear value proposition, and an obsession with user engagement with an infinite loop of micro-conversions.

This is true for media. It’s true for every subscription business. Because the moment you charge someone on a recurring basis, you need to keep earning their attention every single month. There’s no way around it.

Engagement drives everything: better conversion rates, better retention, higher lifetime value, better advertising revenue. We saw it in the data from the best performers, and … we saw it in toilet paper, and coffee, and cars (it’s the last episode, let me enjoy it)!

And maybe the most practical takeaway from the entire moodboard: some of the best ideas for your subscription business will come from industries that have nothing to do with yours. A coffee company, a fitness app, a toilet paper brand. The principles are the same. The execution is just different enough to spark something new.

What we’re building to make all of this possible

If you’ve read all six episodes (thank you, seriously), you’ve probably noticed that orchestrating all of these micro-conversions, from anonymous visitor to loyal subscriber, across every touchpoint, is complex work. Registration flows, onboarding sequences, dynamic paywalls, personalized offers, engagement actions, anti-churn triggers, cancellation optimization. Across web, app, and print.

That’s exactly why we’re building the solution with Poool and Darwin CX: the end-to-end subscription platform to master each of these micro-conversions, at every step of the journey. Everything we’ve described in this series, from episode 1 to episode 6, is what our platform is designed to help publishers execute.

If that resonates, or if you’re currently thinking about your subscription platform, let’s talk.

If you have questions, disagreements, or examples that contradict what we saw, we’re genuinely interested. This has been a conversation, not a lecture.

And if you’d like to see the full analysis, you can download the complete Subscription Masterclass presentation (Link here).

PS: yes that’s actually a “book a meeting link”

The post Toilet paper, wine, cars, and what they teach us about subscription: episode 6 appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the fourth in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
> Episode one: 100 subscription business, 15 industries, 1 moodboard
> Episode two: What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-off
> Episode three: Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1

If you’ve ever worked on a subscription business, chances are the pricing page you’ve built looks a lot like the pricing pages I’ve seen across the industry. You know the one: three columns with a “recommended” plan in the middle, a monthly/annual toggle at the top, and a comparison table at the bottom with feature checkmarks. The kind of page where you end up spending weeks arguing about whether the middle plan should be the best offer, and A/B testing the color of the CTA button.

The post The subscription pricing page we’ve all built at least once: episode 4 appeared first on Audiencers.

In Germany, most readers do not pay for news, but a few strategies could change that: at least, that’s the conclusion of the study “Navigating German News: topics, formats and willingness to pay,” published by FT Strategies at the end of 2025.

According to the study, based on a sample of 1,957 participants representative of the German population (49% women, 50% men, and 26% under 35), a clear paradox emerges: while German readers are very attached to traditional sources of information, the majority of them (59%) do not pay for news.

By filtering their relationship to the financing of news, the study distinguishes between subscribers (41%), The On-The-Fencers (29%), and The Maybe-Next-Timers (30%). The 29% representing the On-The-Fencers are the most interesting – they support the idea that media should be funded by its readers, even though they don’t yet pay. 

The post Navigating subscriptions in Germany: topics, formats and willingness to pay appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the third in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
If you haven't read the first one yet, start here. 
And Episode 2, focused on product and media, is here.

What we expected to find vs. what we actually found

When we started building our subscription moodboard, we structured our analysis around 4 areas: product, conversion, offers & pricing, and retention.

Episode 2 covered the product (and was focused solely on media brands).
This one covers conversion, and we’re back to cross-industry.

For the past 10 years, whether in e-commerce, Saas or media, I’ve seen the same customer journey model everywhere. Attract → convert → retain. 

A linear, finite sequence. And that’s what we expected to analyze in this series: how the best subscription businesses optimize the 3 steps in this sequence.

What we found was fundamentally different.

When we looked at the NYT, Figma, Miro, Calm, Masterclass (and 95 others), we noticed that conversion almost never happens in one step. It happens through micro-conversions, each with its own objective. And more importantly, even conversion itself seems secondary. The real priority for those companies is to create value for their user as a first goal. To build engagement. To make the product feel indispensable before asking for money.

We saw this pattern everywhere.

The journey we observed doesn’t look like a line. It looks like a loop. 

Attract → Convert at level 0 (ex: account) → Onboarding & discovery → Engage → Convert at level 1 (trial or cheap offer) → Onboarding & discovery → Engage deeper → Convert at level 2 (full price, bundle)… and it keeps going.

One step, one job. And for some, it’s almost a religion

The critical principle behind this model: each step has one single goal.
Not two. Not three. One.

Let me show you what that looks like in practice.

Look at the homepage of the New York Times (I mean, when I looked at it when building the moodboard). Arguably the biggest digital newspaper in the world. The only action button in the top right corner says “LOG IN.” Not “Subscribe.” Not “Try for $1/week.” Log in. Because at this stage, the goal is registration, not subscription.

And this discipline is consistent everywhere. In their registration flow: zero* subscription CTAs. In their onboarding: they ask which areas of The Times you want to explore, they recommend newsletters, they push the app download. Zero subscription CTA. The only goal is to understand who you are and start personalizing.

This sounds obvious when you write it down. But look at most media registration walls: they almost always push a subscription offer at the same time. Most onboarding flows try to sell and educate simultaneously. Same for the homepage, if you spend more than 20 seconds there you will probably be asked to do 5 different things in one session (register, signup for newsletter, subscribe, …)

*if you look closely, you’ll find spot where you can see subscription CTA, but you have to look closely

Not just media: Figma, Miro, Calm, Masterclass do the same

This isn’t a media-only pattern. That’s the whole point of this episode.

Figma: $12.5B company.
Homepage: “Get started for free.” You click, you give your email. 

Then the onboarding starts: What’s your name? How do you plan to use Figma? What do you do for work? Where do you work? Have you used Figma before? What do you want to make first?

Six questions before you see anything about pricing. And when the plan page finally appears, it includes a free Starter option, so even the pricing step isn’t a hard sell.
Look at the wording: “Which plan would you like”? 

(Image: Figma onboarding flow – from homepage to personalized workspace, 8 steps)

What Figma adds to the picture (that the NYT doesn’t show as clearly) is that the product itself adapts in real-time during the onboarding. On the right side of the screen, you see your workspace evolving with each answer. It’s not a form. It’s a first preview of the value you’re about to get (to make you stay onboard).

Miro: 600M€+ in revenue
They push this even further on the personalization side.
Email → role → needs → team size → personalized interface → guided tour.
The subscription offer only shows up when you try to access a paid feature. At a moment when you already understand the value. Not before.

Calm goes somewhere else entirely. Before any trial or payment, they ask 10+ questions. Not about your job or your team. About your feelings. What can we help you with? How have you been feeling? What’s your biggest source of stress? They build a custom experience around your emotional state before asking for anything. For a meditation app, I found that pretty remarkable.

And Masterclass adds another layer: even from a paid Google ad (so, a user they’re paying to acquire), they don’t send you to a checkout page. They ask about your interests, build a personalized path of 36 classes (“Building your custom results…” appears on screen), and only then do they present the offer. They’re willing to add friction to a paid acquisition channel because they want to get you hooked first – making money is a second goal.

The cheap first offer: same goal, different method

Not every company goes through registration first. Some skip straight to a paid offer.
But when they do, the logic is the same: the goal isn’t to make money. It’s to get the user inside the product.

The NYT at $1/week. Peloton at $2.49/month. Washington Post, The Pioneer. These prices aren’t designed to generate meaningful revenue. They’re designed to let the user experience the product long enough to build a habit. The bet is that over 6 months, a year, 18 months, through bundles, new products, and price increases, the average revenue per user will grow significantly.

That’s why some media companies offer subscriptions at $20/year or even less. It sounds crazy if you think about it as revenue. It makes total sense if you think about it as product discovery with long term revenue as a goal.

And some companies stack both approaches. The NYT does registration first (zero subscription CTA), THEN aggressive trial pricing. They sequence the micro-conversions. As their own data shows, registration alone increases subscription conversion by more than 40%.

Others go with pure free trials: 7, 14, or 30 days. Headspace, Amazon Prime, Walmart+, Audible. Same logic: get the user inside long enough to build a habit. Free trials work especially well for products with daily usage. For the media industry, it depends on consumption patterns. A daily news publisher, maybe. A B2B publication or a monthly magazine? A 7-day trial probably isn’t enough to build anything valuable.

Let’s be honest, everything here sounds simple but it’s reaaaaaaally hard to do.
Complexity here is not about revenue tactics, but it stands in alignment within the organization.
You need a strong alignment between vision, long term goals (shared by all teams) and operations (plus a huge capacity to resist short term revenue, which is hard nowadays).

What you can take away from this (and test tomorrow)

Count the goals per step in your current journey. If any step tries to do two things at once (like a registration wall that also pushes a subscription CTA), that’s the first thing to fix. One step, one job.

Consider adding a “level 0” conversion before the paid one. A registration step gives you data, personalization, and engagement. The NYT showed that this alone increases conversion rates to subscription by more than 40%. That’s exactly why Poool makes it easy to set up and test registration modules (registration walls, onboarding sequences) and micro-conversions without dev, putting the data and engagement to use further down the funnel.

Rethink your first paid offer. The goal isn’t revenue on day 1. It’s getting the user inside long enough to build a habit. If Nieman Lab’s research is right and habit formation drops off after 100 days, design the duration around that.

Go sign up for Figma, Calm, or Masterclass. Not to use the product. To observe the journey. Take screenshots. I promise you’ll come back with ideas. (We did, and that’s how this whole series started.)

Next week, episode 4: offers and pricing. Why do the best performers acquire with one simple offer and upsell/retain with many. And why a single price means you’re designing for an “average user” who doesn’t exist.

The post Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1: episode 3 appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This article is the first in his 6-part series following an analysis of 100 subscription businesses. He'll share trends, best practices and lessons for media brands with a reader revenue model. 

It started with a simple idea. 

We (at Poool – an awesome customer journey builder for publishers) wanted to build a “subscription moodboard”. Not a strategy, not a benchmark report. A moodboard. Like designers do when they start a project – they look at everything that exists, take screenshots, and see what patterns emerge.

So last year, we went on a little adventure: we subscribed to things.

A LOT of things. We created accounts, tested products, downloaded apps, clicked on paywalls, went through onboarding flows, tried to cancel (which is always a lot less simple). And we did this across 100 subscription business models in 15+ industries.

And we had a lot of fun doing it (not for the cancellation part, as you’ve understood)

Because when you start looking at subscriptions outside of media, you quickly realize that people subscribe to pretty much everything. Toilet paper (yes, Who Gives a Crap has over 40M$ in revenue, and a lot through subscription). Japanese snack boxes (TokyoTreat). Wine (Le Petit Ballon). Razors (Dollar Shave Club). Personalized coffee with a charity donation included (We Are Here). Genealogy research (FindMyPast). Cars (yes, cars). Even Walmart has a subscription now that bundles grocery delivery, Paramount+, and Burger King discounts. I’m not making this up.

Of course we also looked at the usual suspects: Netflix, Spotify, The New York Times, Financial Times, Masterclass, Calm, Miro, Xbox, and many others. To be clear: we didn’t interview anyone. We didn’t get access to internal dashboards. We simply observed, as if we were a user. We subscribed, we tested, we unsubscribed. We took a lot of screenshots.

We then presented this moodboard to some of our clients. And their reaction was so enthusiastic that we thought: OK, let’s turn this into a series for Audiencers.

So here we are.

This is the first article of a series of 6. And the goal of this first article, is to give you a taster of what you will find in the episodes to come.

Let dive in!

What surprised us most: it’s all about engagement

OK so here’s the thing.

Historically, media companies have always been focused on page views.
More page views, more ads, more revenue. Simple.

Over the past five years, the industry shifted to subscriptions. The new priorities became conversion rates, subscriber counts, churn. That makes sense. If you’re building a subscription business, you measure subscription metrics.

But when we looked at these 100 business models, we noticed something different about the top performers.

We can’t know for sure what Spotify, Netflix or Calm measure internally. We don’t have access to their dashboards. But when you look at how their product is designed, how they onboard users, how they structure the experience, everything seems built around engagement first. Not conversion. Not retention. Engagement.

And when you think about it, it makes sense. Because the more you engage a user, the better they convert. The more engaged they are, the longer they stay. The more engaged they are, the higher their lifetime value. And the more engagement, the more money you make through advertising (volume of page views, and quality of data).

The data we have access to confirms this. INMA data shows that a quarter of subscribers churn in the first month, and half are gone by the fourth month. Nieman Lab published a study from The Wall Street Journal showing that the probability of adopting a new habit drops dramatically after 100 days.

El País shared internal data on this at an INMA event, and it’s very clear: subscribers who use editorial newsletters churn 24% less. App users churn 15% less. Premium newsletter users churn 29% less.

The pattern is consistent.

Engagement isn’t a consequence of conversion. It seems to be the cause of everything else.

Just look at the homepage of one of the biggest newspapers in the world (you know the one) – they don’t have a single call to action here. It’s all about engagement.

From a linear subscription journey to an infinite cycle

Over the past 10 years, whether in e-commerce or in media, I’ve seen the same model everywhere. Literally everywhere.

Attract traffic → convert → let them discover the product → retain.
Aaand, we’re done.

A linear, finite sequence. It is was in every strategy deck, every conference talk, every blog.

What we observed in the best-performing subscription businesses is fundamentally different. Their journey looks more like a series of loops, with baby conversion step:

Attract → Convert at level 0 (ex: create an account) → Discover → Engage through a personalized experience → Convert at level 1 (trial) → Discover new features → Engage → Convert at level 2 (subscription level 1)… and it keeps going until it NEVER ends

What’s critical in this model is that each step has one single objective. Not two, not three. One. If the user is at the “discovery” stage, you don’t show them a subscription CTA.

Take the New York Times. This one blew our minds a bit. When you look closely at their registration flow, there is not a single subscription CTA anywhere. Zero. None. Nada. At that stage, the only goal is to create an account, understand the user’s interests, and start personalizing the experience.

During registration, they ask which areas of The Times you want to explore. They recommend newsletters based on your selections. They let you pick games. They prompt you to download the app.

(click on the images to enlarge)

Subscription CTAs come later.

But look at Miro, a 600M€+ subscription based company, pushing a “signup for free” on the homepage. Same pattern here.

Calm does the same. Before you can start a free trial, they ask you more than 10 questions. How have you been feeling? What’s your biggest source of stress? What are your goals? They literally build a custom experience for you before asking you for log in or money. I found that pretty remarkable for a meditation app.

Masterclass goes even further. Even when you arrive from a paid Google ad, they don’t send you to a checkout page. They ask about your interests, build a personalized path of 36 classes (“Building your custom results…” appears on screen), and only then present the offer.

Each step, one job. Discover first. Sell later.

These companies have probably iterated dozens of times to get to these journeys.
And they keep iterating (I strongly guess).

That’s actually why we built Poool in the first place: to allow publisher to build, AB test and improve each stage of your their journey (registration flow, onboarding flows, conversion flow and many more) without needing a dev team every time you want to try something new.

Check out how Irish News grew subscriber base by 15% in 6 months using Poool (published on Audiencers, of course)

What’s coming in this series

As I said, this is the first article in a six-part series.

We have a lot to share, so here’s a quick overview of what’s next:

Article 2: Product. From manual paywalls to intelligent paywalls: the 6 levels of sophistication we identified. This is the only article in the series focused exclusively on media, because the product question (what’s behind a paywall) is very specific to our industry and not comparable to other sectors.

Article 3: Conversion. Why the best performers replaced the linear funnel with an infinite cycle. And why they don’t try to sell too early, or too expensive on day 1.

Article 4: Offers & Pricing. “Acquire with one simple offer, retain with many.” What we saw on pricing, and why a single price means optimizing for an average user who doesn’t exist.

Article 5: Retention. The first 100 days are your only window. Product adoption vs. anti-churn, and the 3 lock-in effects we observed.

Article 6: Bonus. The fun one: Toilet paper, Japanese snack boxes, razor blades, wine, genealogy: the most surprising subscription models we came across, and what they teach us about engagement.

What you can take away from this (and test tomorrow)

We don’t have a single truth, nor claim to have found it (sadly). We looked at 100 business models and took a lot of screenshots. But here’s what we think is worth considering (we will try to include this at the end of each article):

Ask yourself: what is the one goal at each step? If your registration wall also pushes a subscription CTA, you’re trying to do two things at once. The best performers we observed don’t do that. Every step has one job.

Start measuring engagement alongside conversion. Not instead of. Alongside. Track which product features your subscribers actually use. El País showed that each additional touchpoint (newsletter, app, loyalty program) reduces churn by 15 to 30%. That’s concrete and measurable.

Look outside media for inspiration. Some of the most interesting things we saw came from companies that have nothing to do with content: Calm’s onboarding, Miro’s registration flow, Dollar Shave Club’s friction removal. The principles are the same.

If you have questions, disagreements, or examples that contradict what we saw, we’re genuinely interested. This is a conversation, not a lecture.

Drop me (Max, CEO at Poool) an email.

See you next week for Article 2.

This article is part of the series “We studied 100 subscription business models. Here’s what we learned.” published on The Audiencers.

The post 100 subscription business, 15 industries, 1 moodboard: episode 1 appeared first on Audiencers.

Whilst donation models revolve around voluntary support and often don’t involve blocking content with a paywall, this doesn’t take away from the need for dedicated landing pages as well as banners, pop-ups or closable walls to gain financial support.

In particular: a strong value proposition. No more “Support us today!” Instead, convince readers of your value, highlight your unique take on a topic and prove that you’re worth supporting.

To inspire the designing of these modules and definition of your value proposition, we’ve collected screenshots from leading donation-led publishers around the world.

Below the main benchmarks, we’ve shared a variety of examples from The Guardian, the British publisher who is widely recognized for their success in a donation model. What works particularly well for them is their work on continuously changing and testing the messaging on promotional modules, adapting to news cycles and key moments in their readers’ diary. You can read more about how they’ve developed their proposition over the years in this summary from our London Festival in 2024.

Donation landing pages and promotional modules

The Guardian

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