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.

I’ve been there, I’ve built those pages too.

So I ran an experiment whilst working on this article.

I asked Claude to design a “classic subscription landing page” for a publisher, just to see what it would come up with. Here’s what it gave me:

Three columns, a “MOST CHOSEN” label in the middle, Digital / All Access / Patron (whatever that means), monthly prices, bullet lists of features. Claude didn’t really invent anything here, it just reproduced what it had learned from crawling the entire web, which tells you something about how standardized the media pricing pages are.

What is interesting is that it means that there is so much potential for publishers.
Why? Because when we studied 100 subscription businesses, we noticed that the best performers don’t really do this anymore.

Forget “acquisition vs retention”, think micro-conversions

Before we get into the pricing side of things, we need to revisit something we talked about in episode 3: 

When it comes to converting users into subscribers, the classic “attract → convert → retain” model doesn’t really hold up when you look at the best performers. Their customer journey is actually a series of micro-conversions, each one with its own goal and each one unlocking the next. The first micro-conversion might just be creating an account, then comes a cheap first subscription, then an upsell, then a bundle, then another upsell, and it goes on from there. It’s a long series of small steps that never really ends.

This matters for pricing, because the “acquisition price” and the “retention price” aren’t really two different things. They’re just two points in a longer sequence, each one adapted to what you know about the user at that specific moment.

I borrowed a sentence from INMA that captures this well: “Acquire with one simple offer, retain with many.” 

In our micro-conversion language, what this really means is one offer at a time, always.

And tailored to the user needs and interest (tailored to what you learn at each micro-conversions).

What are the best performers doing? One or many offers?

When you go through the first paid conversion step of Spotify, Headspace, Apple Music or most of the top subscription businesses we looked at, the pattern is pretty consistent. You see one offer clearly highlighted, sometimes with a secondary option tucked next to it, but always with a hierarchy that makes the decision essentially binary: you take it, or you don’t.

Spotify, for instance, still pushes “Premium, 1 month free” as the primary entry point on most of their pages. The other plans (Student, Duo, Family) are technically available somewhere, but they’re not what you see first: you only find them if you scroll or click around a bit.

Apple does this almost perfectly, I think. Whether it’s Apple Music, Apple TV+, or Apple One, the page pushes one offer prominently (usually the standard individual plan with a free trial), while the rest is deliberately tucked behind a small “See all plans” link. The whole layout is engineered around a single decision, and the other options only really exist for people who go looking for them.

And if you look at the NYT, they are doing it too. Depending on the context you’re in (and I imagine the profile you have) they push one offer (the same offer) with different arguments and design. Then if you scroll down you can find the print offers, or the cooking offer

And this connects to something we already covered in episode 3, which applies just as much to pricing as it does to the rest of the journey: the goal isn’t really to make money at this moment. It’s to get the user inside the product long enough to start building a habit. That’s why these first offers tend to be cheap, sometimes free (trial), and almost always presented as one simple choice. At this step of the journey, the job is to get the user through the door, not to explain the full menu of everything your product can do.

The next micro-conversions: same logic, different offers

So where do all the other offers actually show up?

They show up later in the journey, once the user has made that first paid conversion, once they’ve spent enough time inside the product to see its value, and once you know something concrete about how they actually use it.

The New York Times is probably the clearest example of this playing out at scale. At their 2022 Investor Day, they explicitly framed their growth model as: push one offer, then upsell, then bundle, with the conclusion that ARPU is the end game, not conversion. That single sentence captures most of what we observed across the 100 businesses. With the NYT, you get the basic subscription first, and over the following months and years they progressively introduce you to Games, Cooking, The Athletic, Wirecutter, each one a potential upsell or bundle presented when the data suggests you might actually care about it.

Each of these is a different price and a different offer, but you never actually see them all at once on the same page. You see the one that fits where you are in your life right now.

Across all examples we’ve seen (Apple, Spotify, + 97 others), the underlying logic is the same: each micro-conversion comes with its own offer, and the complexity of the catalog lives in the sequence of steps rather than crammed onto a single landing page.

Ideal world vs real world: the “Jeune Afrique middle ground”

In an ideal world, you’d build this entire journey end to end. Every user would get their own path, and every offer would be personalized based on what they read, how often they visit, which device they use, and what they’ve already subscribed to. At any given moment, the user would see exactly one offer, and it would always be the right one for where they are in their relationship with your product.

(I would love to live in an ideal world, everything seems always so perfect)

The problem is that building this kind of journey is genuinely hard. Most publishers don’t have the tech stack, the data infrastructure, or the resources to orchestrate dozens of personalized micro-conversions in real time, and for most teams it’s still pretty far out of reach.

So there’s an interesting in-between approach worth considering: keep the classic pricing page with its multiple offers, but make that page itself dynamic.

That’s exactly what Jeune Afrique did a couple of years ago (full disclosure: they’re a Poool client). Their situation was pretty specific, because their audience is spread across many different countries, with very different propensities to subscribe, different payment methods, and different engagement patterns. Pushing the same static pricing page to all of those audiences was clearly leaving money on the table.

So in 2024, they rebuilt their offer page around dynamic segmentation, combining two layers of logic: a user engagement score (an RFV calculation based on recency, frequency, and the number of articles read) and a country segmentation (5 groups based on propensity to subscribe, conversion rate, and dominant payment method, including “mobile money” countries where even the currency symbols and the payment icons adapt automatically).

The results speak for themselves: a 30% increase in conversion on the dynamic paywall, and a doubled conversion rate on the dynamic subscription offer page.

And there’s one detail from this story that I find particularly telling. When they started, the team had assumed that low-cost offers would work best for “mobile money” countries, because lower purchasing power should mean lower prices, right? But after running the tests, they actually discovered that these audiences preferred longer-term annual offers, contrary to assumptions. That kind of counterintuitive insight is pretty much impossible to uncover when you’re serving the same page to everyone.

It’s obviously not the fully personalized journey we described earlier, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction compared to pushing the same static pricing page to every visitor regardless of who they are or where they come from.

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

Do the Claude test. Ask Claude (or any other LLM) to design a classic subscription pricing page for a publisher, and compare the result with your own. If they look suspiciously similar, that’s a signal worth sitting with. Not a judgment, just a signal. The classic three-column model became the default for a reason, and it’s also become increasingly stale and predictable.

Think in micro-conversions rather than in acquisition vs retention. Next time you design a pricing step, ask yourself which single offer fits this exact moment of the user’s journey, given what you already know about them. The question isn’t really “what are all of our plans?”, it’s “what’s the right offer to show right now?”.

If you can’t build a fully personalized journey end to end, at least make your offer page dynamic. Jeune Afrique’s approach is a solid middle ground, with different offers for different segments based on engagement and profile. Doubling conversion on the offer page is really not a marginal win, and it’s within reach even if you haven’t rebuilt your entire customer journey yet.

And keep in mind what the NYT shared at their 2022 Investor Day (and still true): “ARPU is the end game, not conversion.” The first paid conversion is just the starting point. The real game is growing the user’s lifetime value over many small, well-timed steps.

Next week, episode 5: what happens after the first paid conversion, and why the first 100 days are basically your only window to shape the user’s long-term relationship with your product. Or I should say, almost the only window.

PS: After writing this article, I went back to Claude and asked it to redesign the landing page based on what we just discussed (one offer, micro-conversion logic, the whole thing). Here’s what it came up with. A bit more interesting than the first version, I’d say.

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. 

Mapping topics based on their value/revenue

TLDR: The number of page views doesn’t necessarily equate to conversions, and audiences are less inclined to pay for certain types of content.

Despite the fact that the most viewed topics are not necessarily those that interest subscribers the most, such as politics or current affairs, there is still a willingness to pay. To better identify this, the study maps the popularity of topics against the revenue they can generate.

We can see 4 categories emerge that might inform content & product strategies:

• Paid-for-niche: Topics that are low popularity/high willingness to pay which signals a B2B opportunity or a niche vertical for engaged audiences 
• Experimental niche: Topics that are low popularity/low willingness to pay which signals high commodification of this type of news. Highly differentiated coverage is the only way to cut through the noise
• Paid-for-mass market: Topics that are high popularity/high willingness to pay signalling an obvious first-mover advantage where brands can reap benefits for becoming known to be the go-to source
• Experimental mass market: Topics that are high popularity/low willingness to pay signalling their importance as ‘service journalism’ stories to put in-front of the paywall

Contrary to assumptions, the most viewed topics are not necessarily those that generate the most subscriptions: topics related to politics are those that interest participants the most (55%), but few of them (14%) are willing to pay to view them.

On the other hand, certain mainstream topics, which are more likely to be funded by readers, should likely be blocked by paywalls to encourage conversion. For example, 21% of participants are willing to pay for sports and 16% for climate-related topics.

The same is true for niche topics that are particularly likely to attract subscriptions, such as fashion and beauty (23%) and finance (16%).

Finding the right format

TLDR: Short videos, breaking news and in-depth text stories are the preferred formats, but younger generations shift towards audio & long video content, and the format should ultimately be adapted to the content itself.

In addition, media outlets wishing to generate subscriptions for this content must adapt to the formats favored by their audiences, which differ according to age: the majority of participants prefer long-form written content (81%, rising to 84% among subscribers), while those under 35 prefer long videos (76%) and podcasts (78%). 

Some German media outlets have already grown their audience by adapting to these habits:

• Bild, which offered 12-15% of its content behind paywalls in early 2024, has developed long-form content reserved for subscribers and has become the German newspaper with the most subscribers (over 700,000).
• Die Zeit has developed 27 podcasts, some of which are accessible with a specific podcast subscription, including “Was Jetz?” (What now?) and “Rhonzeimer,” which are among the most listened to podcasts in the country.

It is by adapting the format to the subject matter that media outlets can distinguish themselves and convert the undecided. 

Certain uses stand out:

• The short format is valued for topics related to business, finance, fashion, beauty, and trends.
• The long format is more suited to topics related to science, nature, technology, and sports.
• Visual storytelling and data visualization make topics related to science, nature, and technology more concrete.

In terms of emerging formats and content opportunities, participants are most interested in solution-based, positive stories, while video documentaries offer a potential new way to engage audiences. 

Balancing AI and the human touch

TDLR: AI provides an immediately adapted user experience, but maintaining the human element through contact with journalists can help build subscriber loyalty.

A large proportion of participants would like to see AI developed to improve the user experience. In addition to the ability to summarize and translate, other more interactive features stand out, such as searching for and selecting the most relevant articles (44% of subscribers and on-the-fencers) and the question-and-answer function (37% of young people and 31% of subscribers). 

However, the study also suggests the importance of maintaining a human connection with journalists for discussion or moderation, as some media outlets have implemented in recent years:

• Der Spiegel has set up a discussion tool reserved for subscribers, in which journalists sort, select, and sometimes publish certain comments in the print edition.
• After Welt journalists increased the number of responses to user comments under their articles, the number of departures due to a lack of “community” decreased between 2022 and 2023.

Conclusion

To convert readers into subscribers, German media outlets should therefore:

• Optimize their paywall strategy, differentiating between the most viewed topics and those that generate the most subscriptions.
• Provide information in different formats depending on the topic, giving subscribers the choice between long-form written articles, short podcasts, and long videos on platforms.
• Create a strong user experience by combining artificial intelligence with contact with editorial journalists.

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: “Sign up 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.

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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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Newsletters are a powerful engaging, habit-forming and loyalty-building tool for publishers employing a reader revenue model. And there are a huge variety of ways that you can convince a reader to convert.

To inspire your efforts, we’ve created this collection of benchmarks, categorized by format-type.

Landing page

Banner

Side module

Within the article

At the bottom of the article

Pop-up

Newsletter wall

Newsletter quiz

Special section for The Washington Post who built a newsletter quiz for readers to discover the newsletter best suited to their interests.

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Your subscriptions offers page is a convincer moment – it’s there to sell your product, show its value, and encourage a reader to click through and subscribe.

Of course, this makes it pretty important! Which is why we’ve built a collection of subscription landing pages to be inspired by other publishers around the world, test new ideas and improve conversion rate.

Click on the image to enlarge and swipe through the examples.

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Tightening regulations might be making it easier for subscribers to cancel, but this doesn’t mean you can’t build a cancellation journey that helps to change their mind, highlighting loss aversion, provide alternative subscription options and gaining feedback.

These publishers are already doing it, and you too can do the same!

Click on the images to enlarge and swipe through the benchmarks.

In need of some best practices to accompany these examples? Check out this article.

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Engage and retain subscribers from the moment they click pay with an on-site onboarding journey, inspired by some of the leading publishers in the business.

Click on the image to enlarge and swipe through the examples.

In need of some best practices to accompany these benchmarks? Check this article out.

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User needs, personalization, dynamic experiences… The move to being more audience-centric is (finally) happening! But what about the article itself? Despite so many innovations across publishing products, articles still tend to look the same as they always have – very text-heavy and focused on form-over-function. 

What we really should be doing is flipping this on it’s head, considering first and foremost the function of the article, and adapting the form accordingly.

It means asking ourselves how we can make the content even more useful to our readers, helping them to fulfill a certain need, through the form as well as the content itself. 

And in doing so, we often help ourselves too, in the form of higher user engagement and propensity to subscribe.

To give you some ideas of what this looks like, and inspire your newsroom to do the same, here are 5 examples of articles where form follows function. 

Interactive map at LA Times

One of my favorite examples is from LA Times who have built interactive “places” lists, providing an excellent demonstration of Integrated Utility Design – the interactive features eliminate friction and deliver immediate value to a local audience.

Instead of a static list of top restaurants, this interactive map format transforms the article into a powerful, real-time decision-making tool.

• Eliminate user pain points

The interactive map that moves as you scroll eliminates the most common pain points of a list: location and proximity. As the user reads about Restaurant X, the map instantly highlights its location. This allows the user to judge factors like neighborhood, parking, or proximity to their current location without opening a new tab.

• Provide as much usable information as possible

For food writing, the menu description and the geographical reality are equally important. The synchronized map connects the author’s text (the food) with the real-world utility (the location), making the entire proposition easier to visualize, share, and act upon.

• Make it actionable

The design often includes action buttons—like “Visit Website,” “Call,” or “Make Reservation”—embedded directly next to the map marker. This design respects the user’s intent: they aren’t just reading, they’re planning a meal, and the article facilitates that action immediately.

• Allow for personalized browsing 

Instead of forcing a linear read (top to bottom), the user can toggle between the list and the map. A user can find a restaurant on the map first (e.g., “I need a place in Santa Monica”) and then click the marker to jump directly to the editorial review in the list, catering to different planning habits.

• Data collection

The publisher can track which areas on the map are being viewed and clicked the most. If users consistently interact with restaurants in, say, Koreatown, the editorial team gains valuable data for covering future food and neighborhood trends.

Check out the article on LA Times

Debating at DER SPIEGEL

Commenting on articles is a well-recognized way of engaging readers. But ultimately the value of conversations are diluted across the many articles discussing a single topic.

At Der Spiegel, they built a new format of content that brings value to both readers and the publisher – debating. The debate format offers users a structured and respectful platform for co-creating content, making participation feel more meaningful than a typical comment thread.

• Structured dialogue

By separating the Debatte section from regular article comments, Der Spiegel established a clear “safe space” for discussion. Strict moderation ensures the conversation is constructive, focusing on the content (E.g. horror film recommendations) and not descending into trolling or hate speech.

• Ritualized interaction

Users can vote, share their views and discover articles discussing the same topic. By creating a weekly or regular “Debatte”, the publisher creates a ritualized interaction. Loyal users return to the site not just for news, but to actively participate in the ongoing conversation, leading to high visit frequency and sustained loyalty

• User Generated Content (UGC)

For a question like “Which horror film do you recommend?”, the audience provides the content itself. This crowdsourcing approach leverages the collective expertise of thousands of readers to create a dynamic, useful, and diverse list of recommendations that a single author couldn’t replicate

Check out the debates on DER SPIEGEL

> Read more on how they built this unique format

Sub-categories at Wired

Wired’s “AI of a thousand faces” article is fantastic example of a content strategy known as Layered Storytelling. This dual “bitesize” and “full article” format is highly effective, especially for complex topics like AI, and provides distinct value to both the casual and the deeply engaged audience.

• Adaptable discovery

Each card shares a brief introduction to this ‘possible reality’, linking to an article diving deeper into the topic, accommodating the skim-reader and deep-reader equally. Skimmers can quickly browse the entire issue to see what interests them, while divers can transition to the comprehensive text with a single click, fulfilling their curiosity.

• Low barrier to entry

Complex topics, especially in tech and science, can be intimidating. The creative, interactive wrapper and bitesize snippets lower the barrier to entry. The user isn’t faced with a massive wall of text; they get an accessible, visually engaging appetizer before committing to the main course.

• Can be controlled by the user

It’s almost like a tool that the reader can control – it respects the their time and attention span by allowing them to choose their level of commitment.

Check out the article on Wired

Interactive check list at The New York Times

The NYT’s interactive checklist format is a prime example of how digital design can transform content utility into a powerful driver of audience engagement.

• Personalized utility

Any list is useful in itself, but a checklist instantly transforms the static text into a form of ‘progress’ bar (“I’ve seen 75 of 100 films”) shifting the ownership to make the content instantly more valuable and relevant to a user’s life

• Gamification

The gamification element builds a sense of accomplishment as well as a challenge to go try to watch more of the listed films. Think Duolingo and the value of their ‘goal setting’ element.

• Optimized for engagement

For the publisher, this is priceless for engagement – unlike a static article where a user scrolls once and leaves, the checklist requires multiple actions (reading, clicking, checking, scrolling, filtering), increasing the amount of time spent on page.

• Social sharing potential

The team have also made sure to build a personalized list summary at the end that readers can download and share. It makes me think of Spotify Wrapped and how users are proud of their ‘performance’.

Check out the article on The New York Times

Interactive health quiz at The Telegraph

This article from The Telegraph uses an Assessment Calculator format, one of the most effective types of interactive content for health and lifestyle publications. This structure is designed to transform complex, sometimes intimidating, health metrics into a simple, personalized, and actionable score.

• Instant personalized self-assessment

Users input personal data (age, diet, exercise, habits) and receive an immediate, unique result. This moves the experience from reading a generic article (e.g., “7 Ways to Get Healthier”) to getting an assessment score (“Your health age is X years old”), creating a powerful, personal “hook.”

• Actionable insights (not just information)

The interactive element forces the user to actively consider their habits one by one. By showing the input directly affecting the output, the quiz implicitly educates the user on which behaviors have the largest impact on their health, making the advice feel more tangible and relevant.

• Conversion potential

Not in this case, but health calculators are also prime candidates for strategic gating. The publisher can ask for an email address to “receive your full, personalized health report” or “save your score and track your progress.” This turns a casual visitor into a valuable, qualified lead at a high conversion rate.

Check out the article on The Telegraph

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