> Scottish publisher DC Thomson (The Courier in Dundee, the Press and Journal in Aberdeen) had one of its biggest content areas by engagement producing almost no subscriptions. Match reports and team news are commodity content any reader can find free within minutes

> The fix was a digital-only Sports Pack cut from content already in the full pack. Nothing new was commissioned and editorial was not asked to change anything. It sells in-article at £1 for the first month then £4.99, and around 95% of sales happen there rather than on the subscribe page

> Trial conversion and retention both beat the full pack. 15-20% of buyers upgrade, half of them within a month, and the rest stay on the cheaper pack. A reverse test settled the cannibalisation worry: offered both packs on the same sport articles, readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster

> Exclusives did the converting. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the Press and Journal sent a reporter to his home country and nobody else had the story. The sports desks dropped Saturday match reports and Friday team news for what readers could not get elsewhere

> No deep discounts anywhere. Every trial is one paid month, the price has risen from £3 to £4.99, and readers who try to cancel are offered an annual contract paid monthly rather than a percentage off. Graham McDougall, Head of Trading and Retention: "If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it's going to be a lot harder"

Competition and reader feedback pushed DC Thomson to act. Football-only websites were appearing in Scotland, focused on the big Glasgow and Edinburgh clubs, with Aberdeen an obvious next stop. And viewers of Highland League Weekly, a highlights show for the north’s semi-professional league, kept saying that content was all they wanted. “We assumed that everybody would want their local news as well.”

Existing content, sold on its own

The Sports Pack is the sports section of the full digital pack. Nothing new was commissioned. “We just took what we had and tried to package it up in a way that our Potential subscribers were going to like.” Each title’s pack follows its audience: The Courier’s is football (Dundee, Dundee United, St Johnstone, Dunfermline); the Press and Journal’s adds the Highland League and shinty, a traditional Highland team sport similar to field hockey.

Sport readers buy through an in-article payment screen and rarely see the subscribe page. Around 95% of Sports Pack sales happen in-article, so the pack is often left off the subscribe page entirely; its three slots go to whatever needs volume that month.

> Another regional publisher acing subscriptions: How Irish News is growing digital from a strong print legacy

Exclusive reporting made it grow

Once the pack showed sport readers would pay, growth came from exclusives. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the P&J sent a reporter to his home country to find out who he was. Nobody else had the story. “All of a sudden we started to see huge success,” McDougall says. “It started to teach the journalists what kind of content would really resonate, and what people would be willing to pay for.”

The sports desks stopped writing Saturday match reports and Friday team news, and started reporting what readers could not get elsewhere: youth players coming through, a different lens on the club. “It heroes the journalists. If they create great content, it will convert and retain subscribers.”

It retains better than the full pack, and most buyers never upgrade

Trial conversion and retention are both significantly better on the Sports Pack than on DC Thomson’s other products. Drop-off comes after months one and two, then flattens. McDougall credits the focus: a Dundee United fan goes to one page, finds everything, and follows a team with a passion that general news does not attract.

Around 15-20% of Sports Pack subscribers upgrade to the full pack, with half of them doing so in the first month. The other 80% stay. Internally, that raised the cannibalisation question. A recent reverse test answered it: DC Thomson offered both packs on the same sport articles, and readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster than those who chose the Sports Pack. “Sure, they might have gone onto the web pack, but maybe they would not have enjoyed paying for all the content they weren’t wanting to read.”

A smaller product at a rising price

The Sports Pack launched at £3 for three months, about half the price of the full pack, purely to find out whether sport readers would pay anything. They did, so the question became what a credible price looked like. Over the last year, DC Thomson has switched from chasing volume to growing revenue. Every trial is now one paid month, and the Sports Pack costs £4.99 after a £1 first month. When the main pack’s trial was cut, the cheap pack’s trial was cut with it.

Win-backs exist in the cancel flow, but there is no 90%-off deal for anyone who phones and asks; on a £4.99 pack it would be pennies. Instead, subscribers who try to cancel are offered an annual subscription paid monthly: a lower monthly price in return for a twelve-month commitment. McDougall says it makes far more money than a large percentage discount.

“If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it’s going to be a lot harder. We’ve got to get people to see that the product is worth something.”

DC Thomson is now looking at the same idea by geography: packs for Aberdeen or the Moray coast, built on data about what people read. “We’ve got to be really careful that we don’t offer another pack at £4.99 when people could be paying £9.99 for the content and getting more.”

What this means for you

Find the section that gets the most engagement and the fewest subscriptions, then try selling it on its own. DC Thomson didn’t need new content, nor an app and editorial mandate. The product succeeded with existing articles, a simple payment screen and a lower price. How far that travels depends on what you publish.

• Regional and local publishers: Football is the obvious choice where a club has a real fan base, but build the pack around what your readers actually follow: the P&J’s includes shinty, a sport rarely covered elsewhere. Sell it in-article, keep the trial identical to the main pack, and run the reverse test before anyone asks about cannibalisation.
• Nationals: a sport-only pack competes with dedicated sports subscriptions. The transferable part is the method: pick an under-monetised segment (a section, a region, a day pass), test it against the full product on the same pages and judge it on retention as well as conversion.
• Magazine and specialist publishers: your product is already a niche, so slicing it thinner is risky. Take the pricing rules instead: one trial length across products, a term commitment in the cancel flow rather than a percentage off, and retention tracked for every offer cohort.
• Single titles and small teams: if no section is big enough for its own pack, the cheapest thing to copy is an annual contract paid monthly.

McDougall’s warning is to ask first what problem the pack solves and which readers it is for. DC Thomson had readers asking for it and reporting nobody else had, and the pack needs both.

> Handelsblatt Media Group, Germany's leading business publisher, had a paywall conversion problem that wasn't a product problem. Its four H+ tiers were each well-positioned. The mistake was showing all of them at once, at the moment of highest reader impatience

> Step one was removing the higher-priced products from the paywall entirely. It felt like hiding revenue. Conversion rose significantly instead, because the reader no longer had a package comparison to work through before checkout

> The new default is a single offer: H+ Standard digital access, with a trial or a three-month commitment at 30% off the monthly price

> Step two put choice back selectively. A Likelihood-to-Subscribe score decides who sees Premium, on the hypothesis that high-scoring users have both a higher willingness to pay and genuine use for the extra features

> The decisive metric was never initial conversion. Premium converts from trial to paid less reliably than Standard, so a failed Premium trial doesn't just underdeliver, it replaces a Standard subscriber you would have kept. The question became which offer generates the highest sustainable revenue per segment, not which offer converts best

Step 1: Cutting complexity at the paywall 

The first meant shortening the time between “I want to read this article” and checkout. Removing the higher-priced products from the initial paywall felt risky and seemed, on paper, like we’d be hiding potential revenue. But we did it anyway, betting that getting users into the product experience fast mattered more than upselling them right at the door.  

By eliminating the need to choose between several packages, we initially achieved a significantly higher conversion rate. 

Our new default paywall offer became H+ Standard digital access. In addition to a trial,  we offered users the option to commit to a three-month subscription at a 30% discount  compared with the monthly price. 

The effect became apparent quickly. With no package comparison to work through,  conversion rose significantly. Communicating less information turned out to be the clearer message and simplifying the offer helped remove friction. 

Step 2: Moving from a one-size-fits-all paywall to propensity segmentation 

During our tests, we observed that H+ Premium was also in strong demand. The product clearly appealed to a high value group of users.  

So, we reviewed the paywall flow again with a different question: how do we keep the simplicity of a single-offer paywall without showing every reader the same single offer. 

We started by splitting our audience into two groups: 

• Users with a low likelihood to subscribe 
• Users with a high likelihood to subscribe

Our hypothesis was that users in the high-likelihood segment might have both a higher willingness to pay more and genuine use for the extra Premium features. To test this assumption, we used our Likelihood-to-Subscribe (LTS) score to decide which users would see the Premium offer. The central question was where to set the cut-off and how to present Premium without smuggling complexity back in. 

Step 3: Optimizing for revenue, not just conversion 

Finding the right cut-off took more than looking at the initial conversion rate comparison. We tested different thresholds and evaluated several downstream metrics: 

• Initial trial conversion 
• Trial to paid conversion 
• Resulting subscription revenue 
• Retention and subscription lifetime  

This broader perspective was essential because H+ Premium generally converted less reliably from trial to full price than H+ Standard. So, a paywall variant that wins on initial conversions was not automatically the better commercial option and can still lose on revenue. Premium trials that never convert to paid don’t just underdeliver, they replace the potential Standard subscriber that we would otherwise have kept.  

Our analysis therefore focused on the entire revenue stream rather than on the initial  conversion alone. The decisive question was therefore never “which offer converts  best?” but:  

“Which offer generates the highest sustainable revenue per user segment?” 

What we have learned

Our experience showed that paywall optimization is not necessarily about presenting more choice. In our case, offering less choice raised conversion and segmentation then allowed us to reintroduce a higher-priced product selectively, targeting users who were more likely to value and pay for it. 

The result is a more differentiated paywall strategy: 

• A simple, low-friction entry for users with a lower likelihood to subscribe
• A higher-value Premium offer for users with a stronger likelihood to subscribe
• A measurement framework that considered both conversion and downstream  revenue 

The most important change was moving away from a one-size-fits-all paywall. Instead of asking every user to choose between several products, we used user-level signals to decide which offer was most appropriate. 

For us, ARPU growth did not start with raising prices. It started with reducing complexity, understanding user intent and matching the right product to the right audience. 

About the authors 

Ann-Kathrin Wind is a Performance Marketing Manager in Marketing and Sales at  Handelsblatt Media Group. 

Marvin Suder is Topic Owner Conversion in Product and Technology at Handelsblatt  Media Group. 

Together they work in a cross-functional team on onsite optimization for Handelsblatt  and WirtschaftsWoche, from paywall design and audience segmentation to conversion  optimization. 

About Handelsblatt Media Group 

Handelsblatt Media Group is Germany’s leading publishing house for business and  financial journalism. With brands including Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche, a  growing portfolio of digital information products and a strong live events business, the  company delivers independent, reliable business intelligence to decisionmakers in  business, politics and society.

> UK publisher Immediate (Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra) has over 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital, against a company target of 3 million by 2030

> Print subscribers were never migrated. Immediate built and bought digital products for people who had never bought a magazine: the Good Food app is at just under 200,000 from a 2022 standing start, Nutracheck at 580,000 since its 2023 acquisition

> Paywalled articles only sell if the content is genuinely must-read, and evergreen lifestyle content isn't. Good Food charges for utility instead: cook mode, planning tools, and app takeovers exclusive to subscribers

> There's no single Immediate paywall. Stickiness, response rates and build costs differ by brand, so each gets its own model, and Immediate only builds where it leads the category

> A separate commercial team holds the budget and funds products against fixed thresholds: 40-55% trial-to-paid conversion, 65-80% at the next renewal, monthly retention above 90%, and 3:1 lifetime value to acquisition cost within two years

Rather than migrating print customers to digital and putting the magazine websites behind a standard paywall, Immediate built and bought standalone digital products, each sold on its own terms, and each aimed at people the print magazines had never reached.

“We didn’t look at this as let’s substitute one for another. Why would you? That’s leaving cash on the table,” Burney says. Print subscribers are highly profitable, the volume decline is gentle, and their engagement is incredible. So, the apps were sold to people who had never bought a magazine. “What we’ve done is create a new audience which previously did not exist. So our growth has been genuine, rather than simply substituting one channel for another.”

• The Good Food app came first, launching around 2022. It now sits just short of 200,000 paid subscribers, from a standing start
• Nutracheck, a diet and nutrition tracking app, was acquired in 2023 and cross-sold to the Good Food audience. It is profitable, has roughly doubled since then, and currently has 580,000 subscribers
• Radio Times followed with its own paid products, including What to Watch, alongside HistoryExtra.

How Immediate decides which brands get a paid product

Importantly, the team hasn’t built a digital product for every brand. Key questions need to be asked before anything is built:  

• Is the audience large enough, and will it return regularly rather than just twice a year?
• Will people habituate to the brand, or is the relationship occasional?
• What can you realistically charge, measured against whoever else already meets that need?

Then the maths: how many subscribers at what acquisition cost, what happens at the first renewal, and what happens at every one after that?

Categories that clear the bar are the ones where Immediate can lead and defend. Food and Wellness through Good Food and Nutracheck, and entertainment through Radio Times. Because each audience answers those questions differently, no two products are priced or packaged the same way.

The same questions explain why paywalling the magazines was never the plan. “If you’re just paywalling content, it doesn’t really take you far enough, unless it’s real must-read content to get people to subscribe and stick around.” Evergreen lifestyle content lacks the urgency of news, so unlocking it alone is not enough. The value has to come from utility instead: cook mode features, prep and planning tools, celebrity takeovers and app-exclusive material.

The websites became the marketing machine

A product that clears the test still has to reach people cheaply enough for the maths to work. Immediate’s answer was already sitting in the business. It kept the free, ad-funded websites that Radio Times, Good Food and the rest already ran, and gave them a different job. They are now the top of a funnel that ends in an app subscription.

“We’ve got big websites for Radio Times, for all of our brands, and we use that to market the products that are appropriate for those audiences,” Burney says. “So it’s a marketing machine, really.” Recipe traffic is directed to the Good Food app, and TV listings to What to Watch. Social reach feeds the same funnel, and paid campaigns run off the back of it.

The machine also runs on creator and influencer talent. Immediate is home to a roster of chefs, presenters and social-first creators, with a dedicated ‘Faces and Voices’ team to cover talent management, including both staff and external names.

“It would be misleading to say that the talent is just going to drive subscribers. The talent is ultimately top of funnel,” Burney says.

Good Food works with talent, including Chetna Makan, Max La Manna, Sophie Wyburd and Angela Hartnett, fronting social campaigns for recipes such as chocolate cake, marry me meatballs and, randomly, rhubarb, at very low cost per order. “I think our best campaign got about 20,000 subs in January.” The same names then run app takeovers that are exclusive to subscribers, so the talent that pulls people in also gives them a reason to stay.

Not all of the talent is bought in. Alex Horne of the UK comedy show Taskmaster featured in an app takeover campaign, and Ricky Gervais did the same for the Radio Times app. So did Perry, a community manager on Burney’s own organic social team, who is massively into musicals. One of his posts about Wicked was retweeted by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and passed a million views. 

The talent stays the same down the funnel, but the message changes, from inspiration at the top (cook this dish, here is your Christmas plan, here is what is on TV) to utility at the bottom, the closer someone gets to paying.

One platform, and the commercial discipline underneath it

A funnel that runs from a free recipe page to a paid app subscription needs a technical stack that can manage the entire journey, and Immediate’s stack had grown incrementally. They spent 18 months replacing it. Paywall, billing, revenue platform, and first-party data now sit in a single system driven by a customer data platform (CDP), which was bought and extensively configured rather than built internally. “Building something in-house of this complexity would be out of the means of most publishers,” Burney says.

The result is an AI-driven paywall that the company expects will significantly boost numbers, as well as enable print and digital packaging options which were previously impossible. A separate commercial analysis team holds the budget on what gets funded: acquisition cost against lifetime value, three to one on a digital product over a couple of years. “People either overinvest and see a very poor return and then get disheartened and give up, or see a really good result but then don’t realise that it’s not replicable.”

What good looks like

Subscription only works if you know what a healthy product looks like. “Talk to some subs people, they can get lost in the detail that sits behind it,” Burney says. “But it’s a science and an art at the same time.” A free or low-priced introductory trial would be expected to achieve a 40-55% conversion to paid status. Below that, the return will not be there. The next renewal period should land between 65 and 80%. For monthly retention, anything under 90% is a problem, with 95% as the target.

“Typically, people don’t invest enough in retention. When you’re in growth mode, acquisition is the lifeblood, and that’s also the thing that everyone loves because it’s all high numbers coming in.”

Where the next 1.8 million comes from

The 3 million target rests on international expansion for Good Food and Nutracheck, particularly in the US, as well as organic growth, new products in markets Immediate already knows, and bundling. On bundling, she personally is more sceptical than many other publishers that this has to be one-size fits all. Nutracheck’s growth came from cross-selling into the Good Food audience and applying industrial subscriptions expertise to a small startup.  She notes, “While we are now experimenting with bundling, it’s actually cross-selling.”

“Your success in the current year hasn’t got a lot to do with what you’re doing in the previous year, because the subscribers you acquire are really building future value. What you’ve done in previous years is what’s making today work,” Burney says. “It massively increases the predictability of future earnings. Massively.”

What this means for you

Most of what worked here is separable from Immediate’s scale. The company refused to trade print for digital revenue, so nothing had to be cannibalised. It ran a product test before a content test: would people use the product repeatedly? And was the commercial model tight enough to identify a repeatable win from a one-off?

Publishers should take different things from their experience.

• Single-title magazines: the portfolio logic does not apply, but the product test does. Ask honestly whether your audience would habitually use an app, and whether the utility you could build is worth paying for. If not, an advertising model might be a legitimate answer.
• Regional and local news groups: the estimation discipline and the retention benchmarks travel directly. So does the argument for protecting a profitable print budget rather than forcing migration to a digital solution, and creating something new for audiences
• Large portfolios and media houses: the transferable strategy is refusing a single payment model across brands. Segment by whether the audience is sticky, whether the brand leads its category, and what the build costs, then invest only where all three hold.
• Nationals and news publishers: Burney’s exception is your advantage. News is one of the few categories where paywalled content alone converts, which makes utility a retention question for you as well as an acquisition one.

> Le Monde does 4 million video views a day against 6 million site visits. Followers are only 25% of that traffic, so YouTube works as a discovery engine rather than a loyalty channel

> Views grew 25% in 2025, driven by long formats. The deliberate choice was to invest in the newsroom and in staff journalists on camera, not a standalone TV channel or external creators

> YouTube reports 15 billion news views a year, and its revenue share leaves publishers with more than half of what they monetise on the platform

> YouTube is building paywall integration with publishers' own subscription systems, with Le Monde as a pilot partner. Today there is no way to gate video on the platform at all

> YouTube's advice: be personality-driven and direct to camera, don't copy-paste a TV format, and hire someone with real channel-management experience to train the in-house team

Why Le Monde invests in YouTube

Lou Grasser reminded the room that Le Monde has been investing in platforms for more than 15 years, with one conviction: offer free content to younger audiences and bring them toward subscription. Le Monde now counts 700,000 subscribers, 90% of them digital. On YouTube specifically, the audience wants ambitious, long formats. In 2025, total views grew 25%, pulled up by long pieces (Charlie Hebdo, the 13 November attacks, the anniversary of Hiroshima). One telling number: followers represent only 25% of total views, so the platform remains a discovery machine rather than a loyalty channel.

“We’re often asked why Le Monde doesn’t invest in a TV channel. At Le Monde, we’d rather invest in the newsroom and in innovative video formats than in something with no direct return on investment.”

Lou Grasser, CDO, Le Monde

Le Monde does 4 million video views a day, against 6 million daily site visits. Much of the video work relies on OSINT (open source intelligence). The long-term goal: make Le Monde a reference for explainers and long formats, while gaining reach through short formats for discoverability.

Pedro Pina: YouTube’s case for news

Pedro Pina rejected the “Death Star” metaphor raised at the open: “YouTube wants this space to flourish, not destroy it.” He shared a few figures and points: 15 billion news views on YouTube last year, with news consumption growing steadily; Gen Z consume a lot of news, contrary to the cliché, and are not limited to short formats or mobile, since the connected TV is a major use. The revenue share leaves the publisher more than half of what it monetises. The moderation noted a recent partnership with France Télévisions for 20,000 hours of news a year on the platform.

On shifting habits, Pina described a move in demand: users already know “the what” through end-of-day notifications. What they want is “the why,” and how it concerns them. Hence, he argued, the explosion of podcasts. He cited the NYT podcast: “you know the news, now we explain why.”

“People expect journalists to have a face, a voice, to be on camera, to have a direct relationship with viewers. That’s not really new in TV. But it’s becoming more and more central.”

Pedro Pina, VP YouTube EMEA

His advice to publishers came in three points: be personality-driven, direct-to-camera and authentic (the hardest lever to move culturally, but the most decisive); don’t copy-paste TV onto YouTube, since it needs a different edit, a different rhythm, different voices; and “hire a YouTuber,” meaning one or two people who have run their own channel and can train the in-house team as it scales. Pina later clarified that he meant channel management, not putting creators in front of the camera in place of journalists.

What Le Monde’s audience actually asks for

Asked live what users want from Le Monde, Lou Grasser listed: long formats, long documentaries and journalists on screen; transparency around investigations, with “behind the scenes” coming up often; short breaking-news formats with systematic voice-over and subtitles; and recognisability of the Le Monde brand, on both long and short content.

On performance, the best-performing video cited was a storytelling piece on the Paris attacks: around 20 minutes of average watch time, more than 2 million views on the English edition and roughly 2.5 million on the French one. Long investigations and explainers perform on reach, engagement and watch time at once. Breaking-news formats, by contrast, are effective for discovery and habit-building, but not enough for long-term retention. Future priorities named by Grasser: strengthen hard-news video (with the live coverage of Ukraine and Iran as a reference), launch video podcasts in thematic series (climate, parenting), and improve video coverage of major events. On the recent municipal elections, Le Monde overperformed across the board and was an ultra leader on search, the weak spot being video and social platforms, hence the priority given to video.

Building one integrated newsroom

Le Monde shifted to a majority of digital subscribers back in 2017, but its workflows were still partly organised by medium. After study trips to American and British newsrooms, Grasser said the newsroom is now fully dedicated to digital, with a small print-specific team. The next step: getting the audio, video and other sections to genuinely work together, as an integrated newsroom rather than format-based silos. On creators, the position is clear: it is not a strategic priority for Le Monde, which would rather invest in its in-house journalists, who in Grasser’s view have the potential to carry stories on screen. For other titles in the group’s portfolio, the calculation could be different.

Monetisation: ads first, video paywall next

Pina reminded the audience that YouTube’s base model is advertising, as the historic model of publishers has always been, and that this is where you start. More than 10 monetisation modes exist on YouTube, and subscription products already exist. What is in the works is the integration between YouTube’s paywall and publishers’ own paywall, with partners like Le Monde pushing for it. The open questions: confidentiality, data handling and legal compliance.

“On a long investigation titled ‘Northern Europe is preparing for war with Russia,’ put behind the paywall on the site, we got 300 to 400 conversions in a few days. We can’t paywall on YouTube yet, so we had to publish the video on the platform a few weeks later. It’s a strong opportunity for us.”

Lou Grasser, CDO, Le Monde

12 months and 5 years out

Grasser’s 12-month horizon: deliver first-rate video coverage of the 2027 French presidential election, and make progress on dubbing and translation, notably to boost the growth of Le Monde in English. Her 5-year horizon: a newsroom no longer organised by sections (audio, video, text) but fully integrated, serving readers the content they want in the format they want. Pina’s 5-year view: that every major traditional journalism brand becomes video-first, not because it is good for YouTube, but because it is good for viewers and for society.

Methodology: written for Audiencers by Claude (Anthropic) from a Trint audio transcript of the session, translated and cleaned. Quotations in quote marks are faithful reformulations, not exact verbatims. WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, Marseille, 3 June 2026, Partner Showcase.

> SFGATE didn't add a paywall to its free site. It built a separate paid app instead, so the free web experience that built its audience stays untouched

> The name "Friends of SFGATE" beat "subscription" and "membership" in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund

> Nearly 90% of readers who took the 7-day free trial converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it's still early days

> The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time, not just once by anyone

> The launch required real org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming

The premium experience offered in the app

The app isn’t a stripped-down version of the site. It’s built around giving already-engaged readers more ways to spend time with SFGATE’s journalism and journalists.

• Pop-up newsrooms (launching soon) in parks across San Francisco, where readers can meet a journalist in person. Editor-in-chief Grant Marek cited a statistic that only 23% of people have ever met a journalist face to face, and framed the initiative as a direct attempt to change that for SFGATE’s own readers
• Planned live journalism events across California, built around specific local reporters who are, in some cases, literally living the stories they cover. Julie Brown Davis, a reporter covering the Lake Tahoe housing market, was born and raised there, and was herself pushed out to Reno by rising housing costs. The plan is to put reporters like her in community spaces with readers who already trust them
• A California-themed mini crossword, distinct from a generic puzzle in that some clues specifically reward local knowledge. The app adds a streaks feature (consecutive days completed) and a leaderboard letting readers see how they stack up against SFGATE’s own staff
• Audio versions of articles, extensive bookmarking, and premium maps that plot SFGATE’s historic archive geographically
• Granular push notification controls, roughly 30 different alert categories, built specifically because California’s geography doesn’t map neatly onto any one set of interests

Why Friends?

Before landing on ‘Friends of SFGATE,’ the team tested more classic subscription names, including SFGATE+ and SFGATE All Access. But they found that ‘subscription’ read as too transactional for what they were trying to signal, and ‘membership’ carried strong associations with charities and causes that people support out of obligation rather than affinity. ‘Friends’ tested as warmer than the former and less formal than the latter, reflecting a relationship that already existed with SFGATE’s most engaged readers, rather than inventing a new transactional one.

Redefining what success looks like

Marek described a shift in how his newsroom is measuring its own performance since the move towards reader revenue. Total visits, historically the default newsroom metric, matters less to this project than repeat visits. How many times can someone who’s already shown up once be brought back a second and third time. 

That reframing also changes the editorial calculus. While competing on the exact same breaking story as ten other outlets used to be table stakes, Marek’s team is now weighing differentiated, SFGATE-specific coverage more heavily, on the logic that unique journalism is what actually builds the habit loop the app is designed around.

The early numbers

Four weeks post-launch, one figure stood out to Campbell specifically: of the readers who took the 7-day free trial, close to 90% converted into paying Friends. It’s an early signal rather than a settled result, but this number represents a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate than he’s seen in close to three decades of doing this work.

This is, in part, due to active retention early on, during these 7 days:

• An email series that includes a personal message from Marek himself, alongside reminders of specific app benefits
• Push notifications, tuned to each reader’s chosen interests from day one
• The crossword’s streak mechanic, which Marek described as quietly addictive once someone gets a few days in
• Daily social content (SFGATE has the largest Instagram following of any Hearst Newspapers title) introducing different app features on rotation, audio, bookmarking, events, to readers whether or not they’ve installed the app yet

What changed internally to make this possible

The launch required real organizational change, not just a new product wrapper:

• A newly created role, Community Engagement Program Manager, currently being hired for, is a first for SFGATE
• A second hire added to the video team, driven by strong reader response to journalists as recognizable, followable creators (Melissa Cho, known to readers as “SFGATE Girl,” for instance)
• An existing audience desk editor, with prior app programming experience at The Athletic and SmartNews, moved into leading app programming for SFGATE specifically, work Marek described as sitting dormant until this launch gave it a purpose
• On the marketing side, Hearst’s existing team and infrastructure stayed the same in headcount. The real work was calibration, such as learning to write copy and design interstitials that actually sound like SFGATE, a two-way collaboration between the marketing lead and SFGATE’s news team

Marek connected this to a broader shift he’s watched happen over his career. Journalists who started out purely writing have had to add video, then podcasting, and now, in his framing, business literacy generally. Understanding Campbell’s side of the operation, and vice versa, is what he considers necessary now for finding initiatives that contribute to reader revenue. 

What’s still being figured out

On acquisition, Campbell’s team is four tests into learning what actually drives trial sign-ups, testing different feature framings and on-site placements, with paid acquisition still to come.

On audience targeting, Campbell said the current approach has been intentionally broad – go wide and go loud, but the next phase, drawing on lessons from Hearst’s other subscription brands, is sharper segmentation, including identifying which readers are statistically most likely to convert to a Friend, and targeting acquisition efforts accordingly rather than treating the whole audience as one pool.

The bigger shift this represents

Campbell framed Friends of SFGATE as evidence that the old binary (a site that’s either a subscription business or a free one) doesn’t have to hold. 

It’s a structurally similar idea to the ‘willingness to pay versus willingness to commit’ gap The Washington Post has written about in its own flexible-access research. Rather than forcing every reader through the same single gate, SFGATE has effectively added a new, optional tier above the free web experience, built specifically for readers who were already deeply engaged but never had a way to formalize that relationship or directly support the journalism.

SFGATE has, for its entire history, had no answer for the reader who finishes a story during a big moment and asks how they can support their work. Now there’s a concrete answer. And one that has been designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. 

Thank you to Grant & Mark for their time!

> The Economist has launched a dedicated subscription tier for access to audio and video formats, priced lower than the core digital subscription to attract new audiences

> The "Halo Effect": From early signals, the team has observed an uptick in core Premium sign-ups. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product acts as an anchor, nudging undecided visitors to pay a little extra for the full suite.

> Net-New Audience: Conversions through Play have been driven almost entirely by brand-new readers rather than existing subscribers trading down.

> Play is part of The Economist's wider strategic development (alongside podcasts, short-form video and "Insider") towards building deeper, more "human" relationships with audiences

The reasoning behind building it as a tier rather than a separate product, in Arnot’s words, was straightforward: a growing audience across all age ranges, not only younger readers, is consuming news in audio and video form specifically in the in-between moments of a day, commuting, walking a dog, running errands. The Economist wanted a way to show up at this moment without asking people to pay full price for a format mix they didn’t want yet. It’s also, deliberately, a lower-priced entry point aimed at bringing younger demographics into The Economist’s orbit before they’re ready for the full written product.

Arnot was clear that this is not a sign of declining interest in text. Older subscribers still demand “the whole buffet” of text, audio, and video. However, AV formats are specifically what attract the next generation, audiences who are likely to skew toward 90% audio-video consumption and 10% print.

How Play is marketed and priced

On the acquisition side, paid media campaigns in test markets lead directly with the Play proposition. However, when prospects land on the offer page, they see all three tiers side-by-side: Play, Premium (Digital), and Premium Plus Print.

Play receives the same intro mechanics as the core subscriptions: 30% off an annual pass or a one-month free trial.

Early signals, three weeks in

So far, subscription growth is looking very promising and, critically, existing Premium subscriptions in those markets have stayed healthy. Arnot even noted an uptick in Premium sign-ups that they attribute partly to Play’s presence on the offer page. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product seems to be nudging some undecided visitors toward paying a little more for everything, rather than pulling people down to the cheaper tier. So far, everyone acquired through Play has been genuinely new to The Economist, rather than existing subscribers trading down.

Importantly, Arnot’s team is watching closely to check that the new lower tier isn’t cannibalising their classic subscription. The logic they’re applying: it’s fine to accept some cannibalization risk as long as incremental new subscriptions outweigh it, and so far, that hasn’t materialized as a problem.

Product portfolio realignment: Play vs Espresso

The Economist already operated a lower-cost daily news offering, Espresso, alongside Economist Podcast Plus. However, Espresso offers only a handful of written pieces per month—a materially thinner proposition than Play’s full audio-video catalog.

To prevent audience confusion and eliminate product overlap:

1. The Economist delisted Espresso from app stores entirely within the Play pilot markets.
2. The team funneled all lower-friction entry points toward one unified brand experience inside the primary app ecosystem.

The wider relationship-building strategy

For Arnot, Play is one piece of a long-term evolution toward human-centered publishing:

1. Podcasts (top of funnel): Un-paywalled podcasts introduced audiences to journalists as real people—a shift for a publication that historically ran without bylines.
2. Short-form video (mid funnel): Put journalists directly in front of the camera, deepening visual familiarity.
3. Insider (retention & loyalty): A premium feature launched in late 2025 that brings subscribers into the newsroom through editor-led shows, biweekly newsletters, and newsmaking interviews with global leaders. The value of these “human” formats was echoed by Diana Babei, Principal Product Manager, at Audiencers’ Festival London, who shared that insider is already proving to build loyalty and trust in ways that article text doesn’t, including high engagement with this product (75% of subscribers) and lower churn among Insider viewers. 

4. Play (acquisition & conversion): Uses the same human-first AV formats that drive Insider’s loyalty, but packages them at a lower price point to build habits and acquire audiences who haven’t yet subscribed

Arnot connected this directly to the pressure AI search and AI-generated summaries are putting on publishers broadly: as it becomes easier for a reader to get information without ever visiting a publisher’s site, the case for a human-centered, personality-driven product only gets stronger, not as a defensive move, but as one of the few remaining things a subscription can offer that a summary can’t.

Insider and Play, in that sense, aren’t two separate initiatives so much as two different answers to the same underlying bet: that in an AI-saturated information environment, the publishers who win will be the ones readers feel some kind of human connection to, whether that connection starts with a $15 audio tier or a premium interview.

Key takeaways for publishers

• Lower barriers, high intent: Play acts as both an affordable entry tier for news consumers and a funnel toward the full-fat product
• Single-app ecosystem: Consolidating tiers inside one core app keeps brand equity intact and simplifies the upgrade journey
• Format-led segmentation: Rather than gating by topic, gating by format (AV vs. text) aligns naturally with mobile habits and daily routines
• Human-first defensibility: Prioritising formats that showcase real journalists builds trust and retention that AI summaries cannot replicate. 

With a hard paywall leaving practically zero articles for free, Foreign Policy prioritizes low-effort, high-impact tactics, three of which were shared at Audiencers' Festival Montréal:
> Build one segmented "win-back" email, targeting lapsed-but-recent visitors
> Test an exit-intent registration wall instead of loosening your paywall
> Turn your best columnist into a short email course for readers who aren't ready to subscribe yet

The paywall is genuinely strict, and getting stricter

FP offers essentially no free content. Osnos was upfront that this is unusual – freemium is perhaps the most popular model in Europe, whilst in Canada a lot of content is freely accessible and many media are government supported. And their model has only gotten more restrictive over time. In 2018, the meter allowed around five free articles a month. Today it’s practically zero. Because there’s no ad revenue to fall back on, every article needs to justify its existence through subscription value.

Four problems sitting underneath that strategy

Osnos framed FP’s current position around four challenges, several of which will be familiar to most publishers reading:

• Top-of-funnel erosion. Organic discovery through Google search, historically a major channel, has dropped off significantly, even though FP isn’t chasing traffic.

• A demographic gap. FP’s core paying audience skews over 50. But it also has a large 18-to-23 segment, driven almost entirely by university group subscriptions. Those students are a meaningful exposure channel (Osnos says it’s one of the most common things she hears from subscribers she meets: “I used to read FP at university”), but they arrive through IP-authenticated access, meaning FP has no contact information for them, and loses nearly all of them the moment they graduate.

• High pricing on a strict meter. Because there’s no ad revenue, FP has to price for value and hold the line on access, which creates real friction for readers who aren’t ready to pay upfront.

• Rising competition in a moment that should otherwise favor FP. Geopolitics is dominating headlines, which sounds like a tailwind, but it also means FP is now competing directly with much larger outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times for the same coverage. Osnos noted that FP used to see clear, isolated traffic and subscription spikes tied to major geopolitical moments (the clearest being the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war). More recent moments, including developments around Venezuela, have still moved the needle, but far less distinctly, because so many outlets are now covering the same stories simultaneously.

Given a small team (3 on the individual subscription side, 2 focused on group subs), Osnos’s operating principle is to prioritize low-effort, high-impact tactics, three of which she shared with us in Montréal: 

Win 1: The weekly trending digest

This is a weekly email combining a curated feed of articles, with marketing messaging at the top and bottom. Its effectiveness comes almost entirely from precise targeting and testing, not from the format itself.

Targeting: the email goes to users who visited the site in the last 30 days but haven’t visited in the last 7, a segment the team calls “Active 30, Dark 7.” These readers haven’t seen the last week’s stories, so the email surfaces what’s new rather than repeating content they may have already seen, and it re-engages them before they drift into a fully at-risk state. Readers still inside that 7-day window get more direct subscription-offer messaging instead, since they don’t need a content refresher.

Article selection: the team tested a blend of signals (last-touch conversion attribution, subscriber engagement time, and Apple News performance as a proxy for general news interest) against Sailthru’s personalization engine. Curated selection matched or outperformed the automated personalization engine consistently. Osnos’s read: curation still beats algorithmic personalization here, even though full automation would have been the lower-effort path.

Format specifics, tested directly: seven articles per edition, chosen after testing five, seven, and ten; seven won. The email always ends with an “end unit,” a final clickable item (a magazine issue, a new feature, a limited offer) so the reader has somewhere to go after the content rather than the email simply stopping. The top of the email is segmented into four different versions depending on who’s reading it, students and academics with .edu addresses see different pricing and messaging, former subscribers see a different version again, and existing subscribers never see price or offer messaging at all (they instead see messaging to reinforce sub benefits e.g. gift links, new issues, FP Live).

Effort and what’s next: the whole build takes under 30 minutes a week and consistently lands in FP’s top 10 monthly conversion sources (by campaign). The team is now testing an internally built AI tool that analyzes FP articles for conversion and subscriber-traffic performance and generates optimized headlines and decks, since the email leans almost entirely on headline and deck to pull readers back to the site.

Win 2: The exit-intent registration wall

FP has tested hard paywalls against softer meter strategies repeatedly, across every audience segment (known, unknown, newsletter subscribers, everyone), and hard paywalling consistently converts 5x better. That’s why 80% of FP’s traffic sees a hard paywall 100% of the time.

The remaining 20% is where the exit-intent wall comes in. When the system detects a reader about to leave the page (or swipe away on mobile) without paying, it offers a registration prompt instead: create a free account, get that one article. This avoids cannibalizing the primary hard-paywall conversion moment while still capturing readers who weren’t going to pay this time but are worth keeping in the funnel.

What happens after account creation matters as much as the wall itself. New registrants go through on-site onboarding and a structured nurture sequence: an explanation of why FP exists, a set of “greatest hits” articles with the paywall temporarily removed, a note from a subscriber-favorite columnist, and promotion of newsletters, which the team has found to be one of the strongest drivers of paid conversion among registered-but-not-subscribed readers, along with FP Live, FP’s video series. The average time from account creation to paid subscription across this flow is 14 days.

Win 3: Newsletter courses

FP’s first newsletter course, an introduction to core international relations theory, was launched in 2026 and authored by Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor and one of FP’s top-converting columnists (also featured in the onboarding nurture sequence above). The format is a five-part email series covering foundational IR concepts.

The logic behind it: geopolitics is increasingly relevant to people well outside FP’s usual readership, but without some grounding in the basics, a general reader has a hard time getting real value from FP’s actual coverage. The course is designed to meet a younger, less specialized audience where they are and bring them into FP’s orbit gradually.

In its first six weeks, the course drew roughly 9,500 signups. 40% of signups were net new to FP, meaning they’d never previously been in FP’s email system. Paid acquisition for the course is running at a $1 cost per lead, against FP’s normal average of roughly $3. These users are driven to the FP website rather than using an ad platform email capture, a strategy that may lead to higher CPLs but means higher quality leads.

The course also functions as a self-contained subscription funnel. Throughout its five parts, it embeds subscription messaging: “homework” assignments using gift links to relevant FP coverage, and promotion of specific benefits, like FP’s podcasts, that the team believes will resonate with a similar audience. Rather than offering a broad free trial that risks prompting cancellations among existing subscribers, FP built a narrower incentive: completing the course earns a 30-day free trial, available only to that specific, already-engaged cohort. So far, 18% of readers exposed to the trial offer go on to claim the trial.

Because the course is built once and requires no ongoing maintenance to keep running, it fits the same low-effort, high-impact principle as the other two tactics: a small team’s structural bet, built on the front end and left to keep converting on its own.

For any publisher weighing a stricter paywall against the traffic it might cost, Osnos's session is a useful reminder that the constraint didn't stop growth, it forced the team to continuously innovate and develop tactics precise enough to convert when article access can’t.

> Product decisions at most news organisations get made by whoever's loudest in the room, or by instinct built from experience. To overcome this, Germany's FUNKE Mediengruppe built a framework to replace that with something structured and evidence-led instead: a KPI tree

> Start with one metric at the top, not a dashboard. Funke picked Engaged Time, then broke it down layer by layer: what drives sessions, what drives active users, what drives new vs. returning. Each layer down gets more specific, until you hit something Stefan calls a movable metric, one a single product decision can actually shift

> Once you have even a partial tree, run a basic sensitivity check. Move two input variables by 5% each and see which one moves the KPI above it more. That tells you where to run your next sprint, not guesswork

> Only after the tree exists, build the org around it. Funke's four pillars (Reach, Engagement, Monetisation, Infrastructure) came directly from the tree's branches

> Don't start with the whole tree. Stefan's advice is to instrument one branch, show your team what it reveals, and let that build the internal case before you expand

How are product decisions actually made?

It is worth asking this question honestly, about your own organisation.

Is it the most senior person in the room? Is it instinct built from years of experience? Or is it different departments each pushing their own priorities, without a shared picture of what the product actually needs? Some news organisations have already built strong product cultures, where decisions stem from shared data and clear goals. For many others, the reality is messier.

The problem is not that any single input is wrong. The problem is the absence of a shared view, one where decisions are understood in relation to each other rather than evaluated in isolation. In practice, what often happens is that each team or department sees a part of the picture and acts on it. Everyone is doing something, but it does not click together, and a lot of value gets lost in the gaps.

When data is also missing from the equation, the risks compound. In product discussions about what to build next, maybe the loudest voice, the most confident person, or the most senior stakeholder gets their way. And maybe their suggestion is the right one. But without a shared framework to evaluate it against, there is a real chance that a lot of value gets lost. Hello, agency theory.

There is also a structural challenge specific to product development: new features are expected to have long-term impact, but evaluating that long-term impact after release is genuinely hard. Who hasn’t heard the famous “We simply have to implement Feature X, then in 6 months PV will have increased by xy%”. Too many things change between shipping a feature and having enough time to assess results. This makes it easy to keep moving by instinct, because instinct, in this environment, is rarely held to account.

So ultimately, the goal is to ground product decisions in evidence, not to take judgment out of the process.

Build the tree first

To solve this, the first thing we did was build a KPI tree.

For us as a news organisation, the metric at the top of that tree is Engaged Time, the total time users spend meaningfully interacting with content in our apps. Users choose to spend their time with us rather than somewhere else. The more intentionally they do that, the more value we deliver to them, and the more value we can generate commercially. When Engaged Time grows, the downstream indicators follow: ad impressions increase, subscription conversion improves, churn decreases.

Starting from Engaged Time, you break it down: what drives it? Session length and session frequency. What drives sessions? Active users. What drives active users? New users coming in, and existing users returning. How do new users arrive? Through different channels, direct, social, newsletter, search, each with its own conversion rate and return behaviour. How do existing users come back? Through habit, through push notifications, through content that gives them a reason to return tomorrow.

At each level of the tree, what you are really working with are ratios. How many visits convert to downloads? How many downloads become active users? How many active users encounter the paywall, and what share of those convert? Each ratio is a product decision waiting to be made. And there is something important about working with ratios rather than absolutes: it is easier to move five ratios by a small amount than to move one ratio by a large amount. The more levers you identify in the tree, the more opportunities you have to create meaningful impact.

The further down you go, the more granular the metrics become, and the closer you get to what we call movable metrics. These are metrics specific enough that a concrete product decision can actually shift them. You cannot ship a feature which directly increases Engaged Time. But you can ship a feature that improves how the homepage surfaces content, which changes the click-through rate to articles, which increases time in session, which moves Engaged Time. If you understand the chain, you know exactly what you are building toward.

Building the tree also means filling it with data. Some of it already exists. Some requires new tracking. The more granular you go, the more likely you will find instrumentation gaps. But as the picture fills in, something useful happens: you stop describing what the product produces and start understanding how it produces it.

The tree can also be filtered by user segment. The ratios look different for subscribers, registered users, and anonymous visitors. Understanding where those differences appear tells you where the most valuable product work is concentrated.

What the tree reveals

One of the most useful things a completed tree enables is simple calculation.

Once you have your first tree filled with data, even if only some branches, you can start to model the relationships between metrics. Take any KPI in the tree that is influenced by two variables below it. Increase each of those variables by five percent in isolation and see what happens to the KPI above. Which one has the bigger effect? A basic sensitivity analysis like this tells you quickly where the highest-leverage opportunities are in your product, and where effort is likely to be wasted.

Once you have identified a movable metric worth pursuing, the next question is how to actually move it. This is where mapping opportunities and solutions becomes important. For any given metric, there are usually multiple opportunities to influence it, and for each opportunity, multiple possible solutions. A structured approach, which opportunity has the highest potential, which solution is the most feasible, is what connects the diagnostic work of the KPI tree to actual product decisions. That process deserves its own deep dive, but it is the natural next step after the tree has done its job.

With that kind of visibility, prioritisation conversations change. Where should product investment go? What should marketing focus on? The tree does not make those decisions for you, but it makes the trade-offs visible. And visible trade-offs are easier to act on than invisible ones. That is the practical value: better prioritisation, and therefore better return on the investments you are already making.

A concrete example: once the tree was in place, we started observing new users as a specific segment. Sessions and page views among this group were dropping off within the first 30 days, pointing to a retention problem the aggregate numbers had been masking. Looking at what differentiated users who stayed from those who did not, the data pointed clearly to push notification subscription as a key factor. Push subscription rate during onboarding became our movable metric for this branch of the tree. We ran a series of A/B tests across the onboarding funnel, which increased push subscribers as a leading indicator, and significantly grew engaged time for this user segment, resulting in a higher 30-day retention rate as the lagging indicator.

From tree to organisation

Once the KPI tree was in place, the structure of the team followed naturally from it.

The tree has distinct branches, and those branches became four operational pillars:

Reach covers everything connected to bringing new users into the app and converting existing web readers into app users. App store presence, referral channel performance, cross-platform conversion. Reach asks: how do we grow the active user base?

Engagement takes over once a user is inside the app. Its mandate is habit formation: building the product and editorial conditions under which users return regularly and spend meaningful time. Onboarding, notification strategy, content personalisation, homepage design. Engagement asks: how do we make the app worth coming back to?

Monetisation is the commercial result of Reach and Engagement doing their jobs well. Ad revenue, subscription conversion, ARPU. Monetisation asks: how do we convert engaged attention into sustainable revenue?

Infrastructure is the supporting pillar: technical stability, data pipelines, analytics instrumentation. Without it, the other three pillars cannot move with speed or confidence. Infrastructure asks: are the foundations strong enough to build on?

And beneath all four pillars sits journalism, not as a pillar but as the foundation. Great editorial content influences all four. It drives Reach through word of mouth and search. It drives Engagement through loyalty. It drives Monetisation through willingness to pay. It makes Infrastructure worth investing in. The product framework serves the journalism, not the other way around.

The four pillars themselves are not a new idea. What matters is what sits beneath them: clear ownership, defined KPI sets, and the mandate for each team to break those KPIs further down within their branch of the tree. Downloads is a Reach KPI. But how are downloads generated? Through app store visits and the download conversion rate. Which of those can be moved? That is where the actual product work begins.

The pillars are independent in ownership but interdependent in practice. Reach without Engagement produces churn. Engagement without Monetisation produces a great product that does not sustain itself. A decision in one pillar usually affects the others.

Working together across pillars

Having clear ownership per pillar solves one problem. It creates another: how do you keep four teams, each focused on their own metrics, moving in the same direction?

This is where the organisational question becomes as important as the product question. Each pillar needs to understand what the others are working on, how prioritisation decisions are being made, and how a new feature or product change in one area will affect the others. Without that shared understanding, you end up with well-run silos rather than a well-run product.

What we built is a cross-pillar structure where all relevant stakeholders, from editorial and data to advertising, subscriptions, and tech, sit down together with the same data in front of them. Each pillar shares its learnings, its priorities, and its dependencies. Where one pillar needs something from another to move forward, that gets named and resolved together.

The goal is not process for its own sake. The goal is to get genuinely data-oriented as a group, not just in individual teams, but across the whole organisation. When everyone is looking at the same KPI tree and asking the same questions about what is moving and why, the conversation shifts. It becomes less about opinions and more about what the numbers are actually showing.

That shift is harder to achieve than it sounds. But it is where the real value of the framework sits.

A new way to think about what comes next

The KPI tree has changed how we make product decisions. The next opportunity is to apply the same thinking to strategic planning.

A user-centric planning approach starts with an understanding of how users move through the product: where they drop off, where they convert, and what drives them to return. Leading indicators first, active users, retention rates, engagement depth, push notification reach. The lagging indicators, including revenue, follow from those.

A subscriber target becomes meaningful when it is anchored to retention rate assumptions, conversion rate assumptions, and active user trends. A combination of leading and lagging indicators, connected through the KPI tree, gives every team a clear view of which part of the tree they are responsible for moving and how their work connects to the overall goal.

But the KPI tree also points toward something bigger. Every data point collected across all KPIs is a training signal. The logical next step is a statistical or AI-driven model that operates on top of the tree and surfaces the highest-leverage actions automatically. Imagine a system that tells you: sending four percent more push notifications related to sport, at 4:30pm, has a 78 percent probability of increasing MAU by two percent, which flows through to a 1.5 percent revenue effect. (Numbers are illustrative to get the point across.) The tree helps you understand your product and it can become the foundation for a system that actively tells you where to act next.

Even if we are not fully there yet, the tree gives us the language and the structure to get there.

Where to start

If you are thinking about building something similar, start with the first draft of the tree.

Start with one branch, not the whole tree. Instrument what you can, show your team what it reveals, and let the results build internal confidence in the approach. The framework earns trust the same way any good product does: by demonstrating value before asking for full commitment. Then expand.

It does not have to be complete. It will not be. Gaps in tracking will appear. Assumptions will turn out to be wrong. Metrics you thought were independent will prove to be connected. Correlation is not causation.

That is the process, not a problem with it.

The value of the tree is not in its perfection. It is in the discipline of building it, because building it forces you to ask, at every level, the question that product decisions too often skip: what needs to happen for this metric to change?

Ask that consistently. Break each number down until you find something specific enough to act on.

And when you find it, build toward that.

> The Observer launched its first-ever digital subscription in November 2025 at £16 a month or £144 a year, with a single umbrella tier covering print, digital, audio and Culture Club benefits from spring this year.
> Culture Club, a set of arts and culture perks worth more than £800, is given to every subscriber instead of being held back for a premium tier.
> Early data shows subscribers who engage with multiple parts of the product, from Nigel Slater's recipes to the puzzles to podcasts, are significantly less likely to cancel.
> The Salt Path investigation and its podcast and documentary afterlife have been the single biggest growth catalyst since launch.

Lessons:
> A single, transparent subscription can beat early tiering when you are reintroducing a brand to its audience.
> Retention comes from breadth of engagement across a product, not from any one flagship story.
> Old brand equity can bridge readers into new daily habits, but only if the product is built to earn that habit.

Why there are no tiers

Where many publishers reach for tiers early, The Observer launched with a single umbrella subscription covering print, digital, audio and now, Culture Club (see below). “We wanted the subscription to be simple to understand, great value for money and comprehensive,” Riley says. Reintroducing a heritage brand to an audience that may not be familiar with it, or has never encountered it digitally at all, is not the moment to ask people to choose between packages.

A separate audio-only subscription, a legacy of the Tortoise audio model, exists through Apple Podcasts and Spotify for readers who want nothing else, and there is real cross-pollination between formats. But the umbrella model is deliberate: with only six months of data, Riley says tiering decisions now would rest on very little evidence. Simplicity was the safer bet, leaving room to see where the value lands before carving up the product.

Culture Club, for every subscriber

The Observer’s most visible product launch since the initial rollout is Culture Club, a set of arts and culture benefits bundled into every subscription: two-for-one tickets to the National Gallery, exclusive cinema screenings with directors, author events and book clubs held in the newsroom, and discounted theatre tickets. “It’s your cultural life, curated,” is how Riley describes it.

Rather than a separate product built for a distinct audience, Culture Club is included in the standard subscription and goes to every reader who pays for it, with no separate tier. Riley frames it as adding significant partner benefits to those that The Observer was already quietly offering, like giving a 70% discount on home cinema memberships through their partner MUBI and turning them into a coherent proposition tied to the brand’s editorial identity. Arts and culture were the deliberate focus rather than, say, food or travel: Riley sees it as a standout interest for Observer audiences that other subscription products in the market have overlooked. The commercial logic is retention as much as acquisition: subscribers who attend an event or use a benefit build a tangible relationship with the brand that a login alone cannot create.

Riley traces the conviction to the i newspaper, where he launched reader events and saw that most people find news organisations distant and faintly mysterious right up until they are sitting in a room talking to a journalist. Subscribers who have had that kind of experience with a brand, in his experience, are simply more likely to stay, which is the logic Culture Club now builds into the subscription itself.

Pricing without the tricks

The Observer priced its subscription at £16 a month or £144 a year, deliberately avoiding 99p-style pricing. “That was part of just trying to be really clear about what we think the value is of the work that we’re doing,” Riley says. An under-35 price point at 50% off acknowledges that younger readers are often priced out of premium subscriptions, with 35 chosen as a deliberate life-stage threshold.

The Observer has no obvious competitor to benchmark against. The Guardian’s UK voluntary model and the Times’ hard paywall represent decades of pricing evolution aimed largely at winning back or re-engaging audiences a mature business has already exhausted. The Observer has no such legacy to correct for, which Riley treats as an advantage: the headline price can reflect where the business is now, without unwinding years of promotional pricing.

What’s driving retention

Six months in, Riley says the clearest signal in the data is breadth of engagement. Subscribers who touch multiple parts of the product, reading Nigel Slater’s recipes, doing the crossword and listening to a podcast, are significantly less likely to cancel than those who arrived for one thing and never explored further. Because the product is still young, many subscribers do not yet know everything they have access to.

That is why subscriber messaging pushes Culture Club so hard: highlighting more than £800 in available benefits is a fast way to demonstrate value to someone who subscribed for a single podcast series before they reach a cancellation decision. The Observer has also seen a healthier-than-expected skew towards annual plans, which Riley reads as an early show of faith, buying time to build a relationship before the first renewal.

The Salt Path’s second life

The Chloe Hadjimatheou investigation into the bestselling memoir The Salt Path was a hit before the subscription even existed, driving millions of readers to the open-access site last summer and helping build the registration base the launch depended on. In January, a narrative podcast series built on the investigation became, in Riley’s words, the biggest catalyst for subscriber growth in the first few months after launch, driving uptake in both the standalone audio subscription and the full subscription that includes it. A Sky documentary over Christmas had extended the story’s reach further. A new Hadjimatheou series, We Call Her Emma, has just been released, an investigation focusing on the extraordinary rise of Asma al-Assad from West London girl to the heart of Syria’s brutal dictatorship: the next test of whether a story that brings subscribers in at scale can hand them on to the rest of the product.

Building fast without the legacy costs

The Observer’s product team has moved almost entirely to an agentic coding approach, using AI tools to handle the bulk of feature development. A small team of engineers from an outside agency works alongside an in-house tech lead and product manager. Claude writes most of the code for new features, while the engineers concentrate on harder technical problems and on testing and quality assurance, checking that the output does what it was meant to. The approach lets a young, lean organisation compete with newsrooms that have far larger legacy technology teams, freeing more of the business’s resources for journalism itself.

Riley applies the same instinct himself. After seeing a story-support widget demonstrated by a US publishers’ collective at the recent Audiencers Festival in London, he built a rough version of it within an afternoon, not to launch it but to show his own team the idea. Prototyping, he says, has become quick enough that showing is often faster than telling.

On the harder question of AI companies and publisher content, Riley is careful not to stake out a fixed position. The Observer has partnered with Particle News, an AI-powered aggregation app, as its first UK publisher, and Riley points to Reuters Institute research showing a growing share of global news journeys now beginning inside a chatbot as a signal publishers cannot ignore, whatever position they eventually take on direct deals versus industry coalitions.

The hardest part isn’t the technology

Asked what has been harder than expected, Riley doesn’t hesitate: discipline. A brand this old, with this much editorial breadth, invites endless extensions: more tiers, more products, more features, especially now that the barrier to building any of them has collapsed.

“When Claude can build you a recipe site in an afternoon, you have to ask yourself: is that really what we want to build?”

Riley has previously cited The Atlantic’s decade-long path to a million subscribers as a realistic model for the kind of timeline this takes. His ambition for The Observer is to build a sustainably profitable media business on reader revenue and other income streams, and he argues that doing so without the legacy cost base of an older company changes the calculation. He won’t share subscriber numbers this early. Six months in, he says, The Observer is on track. There is, by his own admission, still a long way to go.

Jack Riley is Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, where he leads customer revenue strategy across subscription growth, marketing, data and product. He joined in 2025 from The London Standard, where he was Chief Digital Officer, and previously led Huffington Post’s turnaround to profitability as Managing Director. The Observer is owned by Tortoise Media.

The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, anyone can read it, whether they pay or not. So the 1.4 million people who choose to give money anyway aren't paying for access, they're paying for something else entirely

> Ownership is the product: The organisation's value proposition comes down to three words - global, independent, free. Owned by the Scott Trust, their sole purpose is to ensure The Guardian can keep publishing. It's this that's sold to readers

> One email, built entirely around that pitch, generated $2 million. When The Washington Post and LA Times pulled their 2024 election endorsements, The Guardian sent readers a simple message - we published ours, and always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to

> But it's the method that's worth noting rather than the moment: The Guardian surveys readers right after they give, with the goal of understanding the why. The top answers include protecting the free press, editorial independence, or the journalism itself

> These surfaced motivations don't just become a slide that's presented once to the team, they're used to build every single message that asks for support. They keep telling the story, deliberately and repeatedly

The starting point: ownership as the product

The Guardian was founded just over 200 years ago as The Manchester Guardian, a local UK paper. It’s now the fifth most visited news site in the world, pulling in roughly a billion page views a month. Its US team is small, about six people, working alongside a much larger marketing and reader revenue team of around 90 people at the London HQ.

The organization’s value proposition, as Harkin frames it, comes down to three words: global, independent, free. The independence part is structural, not just marketing language. The Guardian has no billionaire owner. It’s owned by the Scott Trust, established 90 years ago with a single purpose: ensure The Guardian can keep publishing in perpetuity. The Trust isn’t built to generate returns for shareholders. It exists to keep funding journalism.

That structure becomes the actual product sold to readers, not just backstory.

Ownership isn’t just a backstory

In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, both The Washington Post and the LA Times pulled their presidential endorsements, reportedly at the direction of their billionaire owners. Inside The Guardian, an editor suggested sending readers a simple message: we published our endorsement, and we always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to.

That email went out to The Guardian’s list. It generated two million dollars.

Harkin described it as one of those moments where you assume your analytics dashboard is broken, because the spike looks impossible for a normal day. What it confirmed for her team was that US readers are far more media-literate about ownership structures than publishers often give them credit for. People understood exactly what billionaire ownership can do to editorial decisions, because they’d just watched it happen at two major outlets, and they responded to a publication that structurally couldn’t be pressured the same way.

What people say when you ask them why they paid

The Guardian surveys readers immediately after they support the organization, while the motivation is still fresh. The consistent, top-ranked answers: protect the free press, protect editorial independence, protect the journalism itself. Further down the list, at roughly position six, is a motivation specific to The Guardian’s model: keeping the journalism free and open for everyone, not paywalled.

Further down still, in positions eleven through fourteen, is a newer and growing motivation: dissatisfaction with other media sources. Harkin ties this directly to visible cases of ownership interference, citing Jeff Bezos later restricting which topics The Washington Post’s opinion pages were authorized to cover. Readers notice, and it shows up in what they tell you when they give.

How this research becomes the actual email copy

The endorsement email wasn’t written as an abstract mission statement. It was built, deliberately, around the specific motivations the research had already surfaced, worded so it read as natural rather than like a fundraising checklist:

• Dissatisfied with other media: named exactly what The Washington Post and LA Times did, and what The Guardian did instead
• Wants editorial independence protected: explained the Scott Trust ownership model in plain terms
• Wants work that holds power to account: made clear that only the editor-in-chief, never a business owner, decides what gets published
• Wants to protect the free press: the direct ask

Harkin’s point in walking through this line by line: the research isn’t a slide you present once internally and then forget. It’s the literal structure of the copy you send.

The revenue mechanics underneath it

Readers who want to support The Guardian financially see three recurring options: a five-dollar monthly contribution, a fifteen-dollar tier called Supporter Plus that comes with added benefits, and a higher Digital Plus tier with more on top. There’s also a one-time support option and a recently launched student discount.

Alongside the main organization sits theguardian.org, a registered nonprofit. Harkin pointed to US philanthropic culture, Americans give roughly half a trillion dollars a year to causes, ranging from small one-off donations to major gifts, as a real reason this structure matters specifically in the US market, even though The Guardian itself isn’t a nonprofit. The motivations that drive nonprofit giving (mission alignment, wanting to sustain something you believe should exist) map closely onto why people choose to pay The Guardian.

The Guardian currently has 1.4 million digital subscribers. The UK has the largest paid supporter base, but North America, US and Canada combined, is the fastest-growing region, now at 14% of the base.

The takeaway

Her closing point applies well beyond publications without a paywall: figure out the full range of motivations and emotional connections your audience has with your organization, not just the functional value proposition of “you get access to the app.” Then keep telling that story, deliberately and repeatedly, across your marketing rather than assuming people already know it.

For The Guardian, that story is ownership. For another publication, it might be something else entirely, a specific beat, a founding mission, a community it serves. The method Harkin described, survey people right after they convert while the reason is still fresh, then build your actual marketing copy around what they tell you, works regardless of what that story turns out to be.