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

1. The strategy gap: moving engagement to the heart of the business

Newsrooms are recognizing that deep audience engagement is the primary lever to unlock long-term financial sustainability. In fact, audience engagement was the most frequently selected top-three goal for 2026.

However, a significant execution gap remains: 25% of newsrooms still make daily editorial decisions purely on instinct or reactivity, and 42% operate with only loose structural alignment.

Furthermore, the data proves that editorial growth stems directly from operational discipline. Newsrooms that systematically review and discontinue low-impact initiatives are nearly twice as likely to experience budget growth compared to those that manage portfolios on an ad hoc basis (50% vs. 28%).

What your team can do:

• Diversify the strategy table: Break down the church-and-state silos. Include audience engagement and platform leaders directly in your long-term strategy and investment conversations. Structurally aligned newsrooms over-index significantly on bringing these non-traditional roles to the table.
• Implement “portfolio discipline”: Set up a formal quarterly review to audit your newsletters, verticals, and content formats. Be ruthless about killing initiatives that fail to build a loyal public so you can redirect scarce editorial resources toward high-impact journalism.
• Shift from destination-first to audience-led commissioning: Currently, 64% of newsrooms still design stories for a single primary legacy channel (like print or a homepage template) and adapt them later. Instead, adopt commissioning frameworks—potentially assisted by internal AI tools—that force editors to identify a defined user need or specific audience group before a story is assigned.

2. The audience trust gap: rethinking participation and storytelling

Trust has evolved from rigid, institutional authority into relatable, relational signals. While newsroom leaders heavily prioritize audience relationship building, their workflows tell a different story: reporters spend a staggering 38% of their week on technical production drag, but a meager 11% on post-publication work like community building and responding to reader feedback.

When it comes to distinctiveness in an abundant content ecosystem, the ‘evergreen explainer’ of the past is being disrupted. Publishing teams are pivoting toward deep background reporting (+6pp in structurally aligned newsrooms) while actively steering away from low-margin daily breaking news (-10pp).

What your team can do:

• Bring community in-house: Stop relying on volatile, algorithmic social media comment sections to house your audience network. Take inspiration from pioneers like Newpress (building algorithm-free spaces for co-creation) or the Financial Times (leveraging interactive digital forums like “Ask an Expert”) to turn passive readers into highly engaged, recurring subscribers.

• Lean into service-oriented co-creation: Consider launching a reader-initiated reporting vertical. New Zealand’s Stuff Digital launched “Solving Stuff,” an interactive project prompting readers to submit local problems for journalists to actively investigate. This approach generated massive reader investment, with average time-on-page and completion rates soaring well above site averages.
• Be candid and transparent: Build ‘Behind the Story’ formats into your editorial mix to pull back the curtain on how your journalism is sourced and verified. Relational trust relies on showing your audience your journalistic motivations and methods.

3. The capability gap: shifting AI from efficiency to strategic maturity

Publishers are widely trapped in a Level 1 AI maturity mindset: 42% use time savings as their primary KPI for AI success, focusing strictly on automating existing administrative tasks like transcription or copyediting.

However, the biggest barriers holding back AI integration are people-based rather than technical, namely skills gaps (61%) and cultural skepticism (52%). Crucially, the study found that 57% of organizations do not have explicit AI representation in the newsroom, which directly correlates to the lowest literacy and adoption rates.

What your team can do:

• Embed AI roles directly in editorial: Do not leave technology procurement solely to isolated corporate IT or CTO functions. Move your tech budget closer to production by placing editor-coders, hybrid technologists, or dedicated newsroom engineers directly within your reporting desks. High AI usage and literacy jump dramatically (to 46%) when technical leads are embedded in the newsroom.
• Modernize backend metadata: Your AI tools are only as powerful as your archive. Publishing teams that systematically structure and tag their content assets with robust metadata report exponentially higher levels of successful AI integration and content retrievability.
• Reframe the AI conversation: Move beyond generic, mandatory tool-click training. Adopt a strategy like Bonnier News, which ran voluntary, playful workshops focusing on demystifying what AI fundamentally is and cannot do. This organically transforms open-minded early adopters into internal ambassadors who win over newsroom skeptics by proving how technology frees up capacity to do more investigative work.

4. The skills gap: transitioning from generalists to sharper specialists

Confidence in the future readiness of editorial talent drops sharply when media leaders look three years ahead. To thrive in a visually and technically demanding landscape, the industry is transitioning from broad generalism to a tightly bundled set of hybrid skills.

The primary skills priorities identified for future readiness include tech-enabled journalism (e.g., open-source intelligence, AI prompting), audience data fluency, and production expertise (short-form video editing, visual design). Yet, 61% of newsrooms still provide no formal training for these vital new competencies.

What your team can do:

• Formally define hybrid reporting profiles: Modern reporting roles require a multi-disciplinary approach. Audit your hiring pipeline to look for cross-functional profiles, such as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) reporters who combine coding with investigative craft, or “Podcast Correspondents” capable of owning a niche category across written text, audio recording, and visual presentation end-to-end.
• Invest heavily in creator-like on-camera training: 41% of newsrooms want to upskill existing staff into multi-platform visual creators, yet 68% of them offer no formal video or presentation coaching. If your strategy relies on launching visual content on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, you must systematically allocate budget to presentation, vocal coaching, and platform algorithm fluency.
• Evolve compensation models to retain niche talent: Because audience affinity is increasingly shifting from legacy institutional corporate brands to recognizable individual personalities, media companies must rethink retention. A dominant 78% of media executives agree that alternative payment structures, such as bespoke revenue shares, hybrid contracts, or performance-linked bonuses, are becoming essential to protect and incentivize your most prominent, community-driving journalists.

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Download the full Future Newsrooms Study 2026 report from FT Strategies here.

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.

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.

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

The post Benchmarking donation and support models appeared first on Audiencers.

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.

The post Benchmark ideas to increase newsletter subscribers appeared first on Audiencers.

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.

The post Subscription offer page benchmarks appeared first on Audiencers.