Building a sustainable digital reader revenue strategy requires a careful balance between user experience, advertising revenue, and subscriber acquisition. For Grupo Joly, Andalusia’s leading regional media group spanning 11 publications, including Diario de Sevilla and Diario de Cádiz, navigating this transition meant laying strategic groundwork years before launching paid subscriptions.

We spoke to Ana María Ferrand, Head of Data Analytics & Project Manager, Pedro Moreno, Product Manager, and Laura Grimaldi, Head of Engagement & Retention, about this strategy. 

> Grupo Joly, Andalusia's leading regional group with 11 titles including Diario de Sevilla and Diario de Cadiz, spent years on groundwork before charging for anything. A free registration wall launched in 2021 turned anonymous readers into known ones, and registered users spent longer on site and read more pages per session than anonymous ones

> Simpler won twice. A/B testing found clean, text-focused paywalls converted better than elaborate visual designs. And a single high-value annual offer beat showing monthly and annual side by side, lifting click-through across every reader segment. Over 92% of subscribers now take the annual plan

> Paywall visibility sits at around 34%, rising slowly. Fast-breaking general news stays open under a high metered threshold to protect traffic and programmatic revenue, while opinion columns, local analysis and regional sport go behind the wall

> Calls to action are embedded natively between paragraphs and in inline cards as readers scroll, rather than as pop-ups, to avoid ad-blocker and intrusive-interstitial penalties. The whole programme is run by a four-person core team, rolled out brand by brand rather than across all 11 at once

1. The pre-subscription phase: building an engaged database

Before introducing paid access, Grupo Joly focused on cultivating reader loyalty and collecting valuable audience data.

• The registration wall as a stepping stone: In 2021, the group launched a free registration strategy. By requiring users to create an account to access key benefits, such as tailored newsletters or exclusive reader contests, they transformed anonymous visitors into known, registered users.
• Habit-building value proposition: Free registration was presented as a premium service, helping readers build strong habits prior to any payment requirement.
• Increased engagement: Registered users demonstrated significantly higher engagement metrics, spending more time on site and consuming more page views per session compared to anonymous visitors. This registered pool established the ideal target audience for eventual paid conversions.

2. Launching subscriptions

When Grupo Joly launched paid subscriptions, they integrated Poool to manage paywalls, content access, and user journey optimization.

• Phased brand rollout: Rather than implementing paid models across all 11 brands simultaneously, the small 4-person core team opted for a progressive rollout. They began with flagship publications like Diario de Sevilla before expanding to title brands like Diario de Cádiz.
• Testing and simplifying design: The group initially tested elaborate visual paywall designs, but discovered through A/B testing that clean, text-focused, straightforward designs led to higher conversion rates.
• Single vs. dual offer messaging: While paywalls showing both monthly and annual plans were tested, presenting a single, high-value annual offer drove significantly higher click-through rates (CTR) across all reader segments. Over 92% of subscribers ultimately opted for the annual subscription.

3. Revenue balancing & paywall visibility

A primary challenge for regional publishers is safeguarding existing programmatic and advertising revenues while scaling subscription income.

• Targeted paywall visibility: Grupo Joly maintains an overall paywall visibility rate of approximately 34%, a figure they’re going to slowly increase over time.
• Hybrid access model: Fast-breaking general news is kept accessible under a high metered threshold to preserve traffic and programmatic ad revenue. High-value, unique content, such as opinion columns, local analysis, and regional sports coverage, is placed behind paywalls.
• Non-disruptive messaging: To prevent intrusive ad blockers or pop-up penalties, calls-to-action are embedded natively between article paragraphs or featured in inline content cards as users scroll.

4. Key metrics and future focus

Grupo Joly continues to refine its reader revenue strategy based on direct audience metrics.

Thank you to Ana, Pedro and Laura for their help with this article!

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DC Thomson is a family-owned publisher headquartered in Dundee, founded in 1905 and best known outside Scotland for the Beano. Its two regional dailies are the titles in this story: The Courier in Dundee and the Press and Journal in Aberdeen. 

Graham McDougall is Head of Trading and Retention, responsible for pricing, packaging and offers across both titles and the wider portfolio. The company’s digital subscription launched in lockdown, grew by roughly 10,000 a year and last reported around 50,000 subscribers. One product inside that number is a digital-only Sports Pack, now £4.99 a month, built for readers who only wanted sport.

> 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"

Sport had the audience but none of the subscriptions

Sport was one of the biggest content areas on The Courier and the Press and Journal, and readers spent a lot of time on it. Almost none of them subscribed to read it. McDougall boils this down to the fact that match reports and team news are commodity content: the clubs publish them, fan sites repeat them, and any reader can find them free within minutes.

“It was really good for engagement of subscribers, but wasn’t something that would convert users,” McDougall says.

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.

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This article was written by Ann-Kathrin Wind & Marvin Suder at Handelsblatt Media, Germany.

> 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

At Handelsblatt, the problem was clear: our paywall conversion rate was too low, and we were not generating enough subscription volume. 

However, product diversification was not the issue. We already offered a strong portfolio  tailored to different use cases: 

• H+ Standard, including digital access to all articles on the website and in the app
• H+ Premium, adds the e-paper and a paid newsletter 
• H+ Premium Student, the Premium experience at a student price 
• H+ Premium Business, users who also want business-focused content, events  and professional learning opportunities 

Each product was relevant and well-positioned. The mistake was showing all of them at once, at the moment of highest reader impatience.

We set two objectives: Reduce the number of decisions a reader has to make and make better use of our Likelihood-to-Subscribe scores. 

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Jess Burney is the Managing Director of Customer Marketing and Subscriptions at Immediate, the publisher behind Good Food, Radio Times and Nutracheck. She runs a team of 50 and has spent five years pivoting from a print subscription business to a digital one. Immediate now has more than 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital-only, and a mission to reach 3 million by 2030. The majority of the remaining 1.8 million are expected to come from the US, from products not yet launched and from bundling.

> 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

Print was working. That was the constraint.

Immediate publishes Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra and around 50 other brands, and by the early 2020s its print business was thriving. Magazines still sold well, and lockdown had been good to them, with a steep uptick in demand for copies by post. Instead of needing to rescue subscribers from a collapsing format, as many other publishers did, Immediate’s existing subscriber base was profitable, loyal, and not going anywhere fast. As Burney put it, print is still a robust format, and one the brand needed to continue to commit to. But growth is in digital, a development necessary to achieve their 3 million subscriber target. 

What’s more, the bet was that the expertise from years of building subscription expertise in print – pricing, renewals, retention, and direct marketing to a known customer file – would carry into digital even though the format would not.

New products for audiences that print never reached

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At the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille (3 June 2026), Le Monde’s Chief Digital Officer Lou Grasser sat down with YouTube’s VP for EMEA, Pedro Pina, for a fireside chat moderated by Marion Ranchet (Streaming Made Easy). The session, “Transforming Journalism on YouTube,” looked at how a reference newspaper is going video-first without becoming a TV channel. Le Monde now does 4 million video views a day. Here is what they shared.

> 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

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SFGATE has been a free site for its entire existence. Rather than bolt a paywall onto that, the team built something separate: a paid app called Friends of SFGATE, designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. We spoke with Grant Marek, Editor-in-Chief of SFGATE, and Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer across Hearst Newspapers, about the thinking behind it, four weeks after launch.

> 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

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. The web stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been. What’s new sits next to it, a separate, paid app.

Why not just add a paywall

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The Economist has spent the last few years developing products and offers that foster deeper, more human relationships with readers. Its latest launch, Play, provides a lower-priced audio and video subscription tier aimed at a growing audience across all age ranges who consume news in these formats but aren’t yet ready for a full-price subscription. Crucially, it serves as an accessible entry point to bring younger demographics into The Economist’s orbit before they transition to the full access tier, which also includes all written journalism.

We spoke with Nada Arnot, Co-Managing Director of The Economist, about Play’s launch and how it fits into the publication’s wider relationship-building strategy.

> 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

Play, a new audio and video subscription tier

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At the Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, Corinne Osnos, VP of Subscriptions and Marketing at Foreign Policy, shared three low-effort, high-impact tactics her team uses to bring in readers despite running one of the strictest paywalls in media.

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

Foreign Policy was founded in 1970 at Harvard by two professors, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, originally as a forum for views on US foreign policy that weren’t getting airtime elsewhere. Today it covers geopolitics globally rather than just American foreign policy, and its subscribers reflect that: about 60% US, 40% international, with Canada as its second-largest market.

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Stefan Schneiderbauer is Senior Product Manager at Funke Mediengruppe, where he is responsible for product and development across 13 regional news app brands. Speaking at Audiencers’ Festival London in June 2026, Stefan shared a new framework that he developed to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgement, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.

> 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

Paradigms are shifting in real-time: News brands used to compete on access to information. That advantage is largely gone, due to the abundance of daily generated content from all different kinds of sources, AI generated content included. What remains is trust, and trust is earned through the quality of journalism, not the sophistication of the product. How the journalistic core gets expressed and amplified in a digital environment is the job of the product organisation. When the two work in isolation, even the best journalism struggles to build the sustained reader relationships that trust requires. To gain and earn the trust of readers, product and journalism need to work more closely together than ever.

This article is focused on the product side of that equation. Specifically, on how we built a framework at Funke News Apps to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgment, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.

I am responsible for app development across 13 news brands at Funke Mediengruppe. Over the past 12 months we repositioned our apps as a strategic growth pillar, which involved a redesign at scale, bringing development in-house, introducing user-segmented advertising, among many other great developments. I want to share the framework that sits beneath all of it.

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Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, explains why the 233-year-old title launched with a single umbrella subscription rather than tiers, how Culture Club became a central retention bet, and why the hardest part of the build has been saying no.

> 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.

When Jack Riley joined The Observer in 2025, he inherited separate journalistic businesses rather than one. Tortoise Media built digital infrastructure for audio, events and membership, but not the volume or breadth of content a newspaper needs.

The Observer brought a newsroom with genuine authority and a 233-year history, but none of the digital scaffolding that sits around it. “We really had to design a lot of stuff almost from scratch in order to bring it to life,” Riley says.

The consolidation happened in two waves. The first was making sure the Sunday paper kept getting out of a newly combined newsroom. The second was an open-access sampling site throughout the summer, used to build registration and newsletter lists ahead of a proper launch. What followed was an intense six months of building and prototyping: new iOS and Android apps for phone and tablet, a full website redesign, brand refresh and the subscription infrastructure underneath it, including analytics, paywall logic, access controls and integrations with both the Guardian’s print systems and Tortoise’s existing membership base.

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