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

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

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

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

So I ran an experiment whilst working on this article.

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

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

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

Forget “acquisition vs retention”, think micro-conversions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next micro-conversions: same logic, different offers

So where do all the other offers actually show up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this guide, we share the various ways that publishers can segment their audience to develop a dynamic paywall model, with examples for each type of segmentation: 
> By content type: free vs premium, user needs, date of publication...
> By user profile: level of engagement, user status, location...
> By acquisition channel: Google, social media, newsletters...

Some quick definitions: 
> Audience segmentation: grouping users based on their profile or context, i.e. data that could impact their behaviour, inform us on what could convince them to subscribe or make them more or less likely to convert in that moment
> Dynamic paywall: a paywall that adapts for different audience segments. This could be in terms of the paywall design, messaging or even the journey itself (e.g. seeing a paywall or not). Note that "dynamic" doesn't necessarily equate to AI-driven. It's often rule based - i.e. a user reading a "politics" article sees a different paywall to a user reading a "sports" article.

There are 3 main buckets of audience segmentation with the goal of increasing conversion rates:

• By content type
• By user profile
• By acquisition channel

In each of these cases, the form of segmentation dictates who sees or experiences what. For instance, if we segment based on location, someone in Germany might see and experience something different than someone in the UK.

What can change based on the segment, in terms of the conversion strategy?

• The fact that the article is blocked or not
• The conversion journey (e.g. how many articles for free before the paywall, the use of a registration wall)
• The wording on the paywall
• The design (colours, image, etc.)
• The pricing and subscription offers pushed

Let’s dive into these 3 buckets of segments, with examples for each:

1. Segmenting by content type

For many publishers, this is the simplest starting point. It allows for extensive testing to discover what content converts best without risking overall traffic. It also helps to put editorial teams in control (to an extent) as the paywall strategy is based around their work instead of a user’s profile. This can be valuable when first launching a dynamic paywall to get buy-in from these teams.

This form of segmentation can take various forms:

• Content divided into free (often general news or commodity pieces) and premium (generally longer-form, investigative articles which can’t be found elsewhere)
• Format-based: e.g. articles vs games vs videos
• Topic- or tag-based: sports, politics, news, lifestyle
• User needs based: update me, give me a perspective, etc.
• Date of publication: e.g. articles published more than 30 days ago

Free vs premium

Organising content based on its value:

• Free content: keep open to maximize reach (often focused on ad revenue)
• Premium content: close to convert readers into subscribers

Some publishers are developing this a step further by adding 2 additional segments:

• Grey content: sometimes open, sometimes closed (based on editorial decision)
• Super Premium Content: with a hard paywall

This segmentation is often driven by two business goals: advertising and subscriptions. However, the articles used for advertising revenue (which aim to gain page views) can also serve the role of engaging audiences to move them through the funnel toward subscription.

A good place to start is a matrix analysis, placing articles in different buckets based on their “strengths”. A goal can then be established for each bucket, making the most of each article.

For instance, Mather suggests the following matrix:

• Mass appeal / top of the funnel: advertising revenue focus, so left open
• Premium content / bottom of the funnel: subscription focus, so behind a paywall
• Mission journalism: often left open
• Under-performers (that require further analysis)

A slightly more complex approach is illustrated by FT Strategies below, who established 4 categories based on topic popularity vs willingness to pay:

The post Guide: how to segment audiences for a dynamic paywall appeared first on Audiencers.

In Fall 2025, Les Coops de l’information, a collective of six Canadian media outlets (Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, La Tribune, and La Voix de l’Est) launched an innovative subscription drive named internally as the “Pay what you can project”.

Designed to coincide with the 2025 Municipal Elections, the campaign aimed to lower the barrier to local news while reinforcing the value of independent, cooperative journalism.

Results were beyond their expectations:

• 4.2% increase in subscribers
• Despite the minimum amount being $1 per month for the first three months of subscription, the average amount paid was $3.12 per month. This increased to $3.50 after increasing the suggested price

Principal Director, Audiences and Platforms, Marc Gendron shared how this strategy boosted subscriber growth and increased ARPU for those on this offer.

“Pay what you can” strategy

The core of the initiative was a flexible pricing model for the first three months of a new user’s subscription.

“We wanted to make an audacious promotion that would be too good to ignore! It shouldn’t rely solely on a heavy discount, but also on our unique value proposition at a time when it’s more relevant than ever.

Our gamble was: we know that there will be more interest towards our local politics content during the municipal campaign, so let’s surf on that wave and make sure our new promotional subscribers get the most out of their plans, that they feel that they are getting much more than what they are paying for. Instead of opening up access to our elections coverage, or setting up a fixed promotional price, we wanted to give more power and autonomy to users by letting them choose their price.”

Key components include:

• Democratic access: The campaign was rooted in the belief that a strong democracy requires exhaustive and impartial electoral coverage.
• Price autonomy: Prospective subscribers were invited to “fix the price” for their initial three-month period.
• Transparency and trust: Using the slogan “Un média qui vous ressemble, un média qui nous rassemble” (A media that looks like you, a media that brings you together) the group highlighted its status as an employee-owned cooperative.

“Our goal was to increase the total number of subscribers, between 3.5% and 4.3% of total subs. 

We mobilized everyone we could in order to achieve these targets. The new features we needed to implement, flexible pricing mechanics, everything was put on the development roadmap early in 2025. Our collaborators from Wizeline, who take care of all our platform development projects and Arc XP integration, worked tirelessly to have every feature ready for the fall campaign.

We also got the help of Drakkar Digital (renamed deRabane since), our long-lasting marketing partner, in order to create the visuals, copy and plan the delivery of all the marketing messages.

The editorial team was mobilised too, because the success of the campaign relied heavily on their capacity to deliver unique, useful and original content during that specific period.

Finally, our small digital growth team (including the IT and customer service team) operationalized the whole process.“

Feature gating: creating a product worth paying for

Of course, a promotional project is only as good as the product you’re selling! Les Coops has worked on developing strategic “feature gating” to build a subscription worth paying for, with clear value and strategic steps through registration towards subscription: 

Interactive engagement: Features like the “Question of the Day”  required users to be connected to vote and view live, constantly updated results.

Bookmarking across devices: Registered users gained access to a bookmarking feature, allowing them to save their favorite articles across web and app platforms.

Premium audio: Audio versions of articles were restricted to “All-inclusive” and “Ultimate” subscribers, serving as an upsell for basic plan holders.

Access limitations: To maintain account integrity, the platform limited simultaneous access to four devices, automatically disconnecting the oldest session when the limit was reached.

Premium content: Chroniques (articles written by columnists) and archives (articles published more than 30 days ago) have been hard paywalled as a key part of their subscription value proposition 

Marketing across site

As with any campaign, design and messaging needs to be consistent across the website and platforms, including the paywall. 

Dedicated paywalls: Les Coops d’Information built dedicated “Pay what you can” paywalls in Poool, including a live countdown to create urgency.

Subscription landing page: To ensure continuity of messaging through the user journey, dedicated subscription landing pages were also created in Poool, highlighting the value proposition, sharing subscriber testimonials and providing reasons why users should subscribe. 

Multi-channel promotion

The campaign was supported by an intensive five-week marketing blitz:

Email campaign: 72 unique emails (12 per media outlet) were delivered, each utilizing different angles and value propositions.

Targeted ads: The group targeted known non-subscribers through Google Ads, StackAdapt, and Bing Ads

In-app and newsletters: Non-subscribers were greeted with dedicated “Pay what you can” headers in free editorial newsletters and pop-up messages upon opening the mobile app.

Results 

“The final results were pretty impressive. By the end of the five weeks of promotion, our total subscriber base had increased by 4.2%, more than our targets and very close to our most optimistic forecast.

What was the most interesting though was the fact that, despite the minimum amount requested being 1$ per month for the first three months of subscription, the average amount paid was 3.12$ per month. This average increased to 3.39$ when we suggested 5$ in the price field and to 3.50$ when suggesting 6$. Each time we changed the suggested amount, we saw an increase in the number of users choosing to go with the suggested amount.

There are even some new subscribers that paid more than the regular price of a subscription!

Another really encouraging fact: 84% of these new subscribers had never subscribed before! This is probably one of the most encouraging findings of this adventure. It means that there is still room for us to grow.”

What’s next?

“This kind of campaign is a little more complicated than one with a fixed set of promotional prices. But the results we got were pretty impressive.

The fact that the user sets the initial price does add a layer of interactivity however, and it lowers the entry bar to a level where they feel comfortable. The core of the challenge remains though: to convince newly converted subscribers that our offer is worth the regular price.”

What should another publisher make sure of before testing this same project? 

“They should immediately get the buy-in from all important stakeholders as the impact on ARPU can be unpredictable. In our case, we feel that we were quite lucky to get an average ARPU of more than 3$ despite the fact that the minimum amount required was 1$. But that is still below the average ARPU we got with fixed price promotions and way below our regular numbers. Make sure that you manage everyone’s expectations. Even your own! 

That being said, as we have been galvanized by the nomination we got for this project at the INMA Global Media Awards, we will reactivate the Pay what you can promotion for two weeks in order to see if we can get similar, or even better, results this time around.”

The post Les Coops de l’information “Pay What You Can” Campaign appeared first on Audiencers.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft, a leading German science journalism publisher, embarked on a multi-phase journey to optimize its digital subscription model, Spektrum+. Facing the challenge of engaging a broad audience with “deep, heavy, nerdy science content,” and understanding the limitations of resources, the publisher turned to a rigorous, data-driven testing strategy to build a product based on actual user behavior rather than internal assumptions (what a crazy thought, I know!).

At Audiencers’ Festival in Hamburg, Ann-Kristin Ebert, ecommerce Manager at Spektrum, shared their two phases of getting started with segmentation. 

TLDR: lessons from Spektrum’s journey

- Start by testing everything to understand audiences and prove the importance of segmentation

- Then test what matters based on learnings. Prioritize based on valuable, large and underutilised segments 

- Let go of perfectionism! Accept that some things that can’t be done now, and maybe not next month, maybe not even this year. “We can’t bake big pretzels with tiny ovens!”

Phase 1: “Testing Everything” (test like Darwin was watching!)

In the initial phase, Spektrum adopted an exhaustive testing philosophy, described as “testing as if Darwin was watching”. The goal wasn’t necessarily to find a single winning variation immediately, but to build a comprehensive understanding of how different tests performed across diverse user segments.

Strategy and implementation

Spektrum focused on rapid, lightweight tests at the beginning of the purchase funnel to gain quick-win insights while minimizing cross-team dependencies. They initially targeted user groups they already knew well or could reach directly.

Key learnings from phase 1:

• Free trials: A banner promoting a free trial across all user groups had a significantly smaller impact on conversions compared to blocking walls in any usergroup. This led Spektrum to shift its focus toward testing its “hard paywall”.

• Contextual messaging (Facebook): Testing informal vs. formal language for Facebook referrals revealed that informal messaging (“Du” instead of “Sie”) nearly doubled click-through rates (CTR) for these audiences.

• Paywall design: Spektrum tested walls with one, two, and three offers across the 4 engagement groups defined in Poool’s dynamic paywall dashboard. While a single offer proved least effective across all segments, a three-offer wall with a central “Best Offer” highlight emerged as the strongest performer for the general audience.

• Text density: On the subscription offer page, most segments preferred shorter, concise text. However, a notable exception was print magazine subscribers, who converted better when presented with more detailed information.

Ann-Kristin shared that this first batch of testing proved very helpful for understanding the behavior of different segments, convincing the team that dynamicity is essential, and that they should start adapting to actual user needs, not just team assumptions.

“Evolution is a perfect way for the perfect adaptation for everyone – if you have some million years of time (spoiler: we didn’t).”

Phase 2: “Testing What Matters” (Test as if Marie Kondo could knock on your door at any time)

Recognizing that they lacked the “million years” required for total evolutionary adaptation, Spektrum moved into a more focused phase: “testing what matters”. This phase prioritized high-impact user groups rather than every possible variation for every segment.

Priority segments

Spektrum identified four key segments for prioritized testing:

• Biggest Group: currently “Volatiles” on mobile devices.
• Most Overall Conversions: currently “Volatiles” on desktop devices.
• Best Converting Group: currently newsletter subscribers.
• “Hidden Gems”: High-potential audiences, a segment that’s hard to identify. Ann-Kristin described this as like playing poker! At the moment, they think these audiences are those receiving mailings already

Device-based segmentation

A critical finding in Phase 2 was the difference in behavior between desktop and mobile users. While an “Unlock article now” prompt outperformed “Continue reading with Spektrum+” on desktop (raising both CTR and purchase rates), the same prompt on mobile increased CTR but dropped the purchase rate. It wasn’t so much the variations that were important here, but simply the proof that mobile and desktop users need to be treated differently. 

Operational framework and final lessons

To maintain this rigorous testing loop with a relatively small team, Spektrum implemented several organizational priorities:

1. Alignment through OKRs and RACI: They used three-to-four-month Objective and Key Results (OKR) cycles to define focus and RACI matrices to establish clear accountability for who is responsible, consulted, or informed for every task.
2. Data visualization: Spektrum emphasizes that seeing user segments visualized (e.g., in donut charts) makes it impossible to ignore the importance of the largest and highest-value groups.

3. Pragmatism over perfectionism: The team adopted “Zen mode,” accepting that “we can’t bake big pretzels with tiny ovens”. They focused on what could be accomplished immediately rather than future ideals.

Spektrum concludes that there is no “final version” of their product, only the next iteration, as user behavior and opportunities constantly evolve.

The post Spektrum’s evolution of audience segmentation and testing appeared first on Audiencers.

The Guardian is pretty unique in the US media landscape. Unlike most major players, it’s not owned by a billionaire or conglomerate, it’s owned by The Scott Trust, a mission-driven structure that ensures editorial independence and, crucially, allows the site to remain paywall-free.

Instead of a traditional subscription model, The Guardian relies on voluntary support. This makes their US “End of Year” (EOY) campaign, running from early November, through Giving Tuesday and on to midnight on December 31st, the most critical window in their financial calendar.

Why is EOY so huge in the US?

• The cultural “season of giving”: It leverages a peak period of philanthropic behavior in American culture, as nonprofits and mission-driven organizations all fundraise towards an annual New Year’s Eve deadline.
• The revenue bedrock:  For mission-driven organizations like The Guardian, these final weeks often generate a large portion of their annual voluntary support revenue, providing the financial bedrock for the year of reporting ahead.

In their most recent EOY campaign (2025), the final numbers were staggering: 

• Total raised: $3.1 million in liquid cash by Dec 31st (exceeding their $3M goal).
• Lifetime Value (LTV): The estimated total value of the campaign (including recurring commitments) is $8.6 million
• Year-on-year growth: This represents an 83% increase in campaign value compared to the 2023 “standard” year (because a presidential election year – as 2024 was – is usually an outlier).

Inside The Guardian’s Record-Breaking US End-of-Year Campaign

I sat down with Georgia Warren, US Executive Editor and VP, Reader and Supporter Strategy at The Guardian, to deconstruct their most recent campaign. In particular, Georgia shared some of the key pillars to this success, lessons that can be applied to any newsroom’s marketing campaigns, whether for the EOY or general subscription acquisition. 

Whilst EOY is important, the rest of the year is there to help you prepare

Georgia reveals that while the EOY campaign is the shining moment, the heavy lifting happens during the other ten months of the year. The Guardian uses their “business as usual” periods for constant testing  to de-risk their high-stakes holiday season.

• Year-round messaging and UX testing to de-risk during crucial support moments: new ideas are tested out over the lower-risk months so that any messaging can prove it can beat benchmarks before featuring in the EOY campaign
• Deploying incremental gains: the EOY campaign is a culmination of dozens of small optimizations found throughout the year. Everything from the order of bullet points in a module to the specific color of a “Support” button
• Building engagement and understanding the audience:  Readers support the Guardian because they believe – as Guardian journalists do – that a free press is vital for democracy. Throughout the year the Guardian team makes sure supporters feel included in this shared mission – sending emails from individual journalists about their work, surveys asking for supporter feedback, letting supporters know about the real-world impact of the stories and investigations they have funded in order to foster the kind of loyalty and engagement that mean people will want to support the year-end campaign

For instance, during non-peak times, they test non-blocking walls that ask anonymous search-engine visitors to sign up for a newsletter instead of a donation. This increased their mailing list by over 66% in three months, creating a massive pool of warm leads for the December push.

Campaigns aren’t single hits – consider phased pushes

The campaign is not a single burst of energy but a carefully choreographed sequence that leverages cultural and political moments.

Support comes from across channels, with roughly 25% from site banners, 30% from the below-article appeal and 25% from email campaigns, proving that a multi-channel “surround sound” approach is essential for hitting ambitious targets.

During the campaign, test and optimize in real-time

While traditional A/B testing is the industry standard, it’s often too slow for the “winner-takes-all” windows of Giving Tuesday or New Year’s Eve. To combat this, the Guardian team uses multi-armed bandit testing to optimize messaging in real-time.

• The execution: Rather than splitting traffic 50/50 and waiting weeks for statistical significance, the “Bandit” algorithm evaluates 8–10 simultaneous variations of copy and visual design.
• The benefit: As soon as the algorithm identifies a high-performer, it automatically shifts the majority of traffic to that version. This ensures that during high-intensity periods, the publisher isn’t “wasting” impressions on underperforming messages.
• The lesson: Use adaptive algorithms to let your audience tell you what resonates

Cross-functional work is crucial

A common pitfall for publishers is siloing messaging and “asks” within the marketing department. At The Guardian, the campaign is deeply rooted in the newsroom. Georgia, as an editor, serves as a bridge between journalists and commercial teams.

• Editorial as the value prop: Every public-facing module is reviewed by an editorial eye to ensure the tone is a seamless extension of the journalism, not a jarring commercial break
• Human connection: The campaign leans heavily on transparency. By featuring personal appeals from high-profile columnists and US editor Betsy Reed, they transform “revenue asks” into a conversation about the actual cost of independent reporting.

“Our readers support us because they recognize the free press is under threat. Our job is to reflect that mission back to them, human to human.” — Georgia Warren

Pivot to recurring revenue for sustainability

The Guardian has been carefully shifting to push for recurring support over one-time gifts.

• The team successfully shifted the revenue mix from 51% coming from recurring products in 2023 to 65% in 2025 
• Recurring revenue provides a “predictable floor” for the newsroom. Even if a user gives less per transaction ($5/month vs. a one-time $100), the stability and LTV are far higher.
• As a reward for this loyalty, recurring supporters enjoy a cleaner reading experience with site fundraising modules suppressed, reinforcing the value of their ongoing commitment.

The post Behind The Guardian’s record-breaking US End of Year campaign appeared first on Audiencers.

According to the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, digital subscriptions have hit a plateau. Across 20 countries, only 18% of people pay for online news, a figure that has barely budged since last year. So if you feel like you’re hitting a ceiling with your core audience, you aren’t alone.

However, in their latest report on the power of registration, the 2025 FT Strategies and Google News Initiative (GNI) Subscriptions Academy found that the most successful publishers are stoping the “anonymous-to-subscriber” leap and focusing on the “middle ground”: Registration. By converting anonymous visitors into known users through a lightweight value exchange, you aren’t just collecting emails, you’re building the resilience needed for a privacy-first, platform-fragmented market.

The post Building resilience with registration appeared first on Audiencers.

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

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

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

The post Subscription offer page benchmarks appeared first on Audiencers.

Launched in 2018, Republik digital magazine belongs to no one, but to each of their 30,000 members a little bit. The team’s mission? To strengthen democracy with journalism, publishing just 2 to 3 stories per day, prioritizing the highest possible quality, and today funded entirely by subscriptions. 

I spoke to David Bauer, Head of Product Development, to hear about how they leverage editorial products for growth.

A bit of context: From April 26 to May 31, 2017, Project R, a non-profit cooperative, ran a crowdfunding campaign to launch a digital magazine in Switzerland. It was an overwhelming success: over 13,000 supporters, together with the Project R development team, aimed to make a significant difference in the media landscape. The magazine, named, "Republik" launched on January 14, 2018 – uncompromising in quality, reader-funded, ad-free, and without any unnecessary frills. (source: Project R)

The post Leveraging editorial products for growth at Republik appeared first on Audiencers.

Lindsay Ederheimer is Director, Consumer Revenue at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

I was humbled on a recent Sunday afternoon by a phone notification informing me of my weekly screentime report. I’m not brave enough to share what my total time was (that will stay between me and Apple), but it was yet another reminder of how often I’m glued to my phone. On the bright side, I can at least defend the minutes I spent in the New Yorker app playing our newest daily word game, Shuffalo. 

That moment got me thinking about what actually feels worth the time I spend on my phone, and why games have become such an important part of what we do at The New Yorker.

Digital games are becoming ubiquitous for publishers and users alike. Everyone from The New York Times to LinkedIn have invested in games as a way to grow, engage, and retain audiences. 

And while games are having a moment across the industry, this isn’t about following a trend. Here at The New Yorker, puzzles are an extension of the magazine’s ethos, offering readers a thoughtful, lightly challenging pastime that rewards curiosity. On the heels of Shuffalo’s launch in early November, our consumer team recently revamped our entire paywall strategy for our puzzles and games offerings. Here’s how we did it.

The big picture & sizing the opportunity 

The New Yorker first introduced crossword puzzles online in 2018. By the time the mini crossword launched in 2024, we were publishing 5 puzzles a week of varying difficulties on the website and in the app. We made small paywall rule adjustments over the years, but until this most recent strategy overhaul, all puzzles were free to play.

Beyond crosswords, two other games existed in our suite. Laugh Lines is a weekly cartoon history game, prompting users to guess when iconic cartoons from our hundred-year-old archive were originally published. Name Drop is a timed trivia game where players guess notable figures. Most recently, both of these games were free to play on the website, and hard-paywalled in the app.

A few key metrics let us know that our puzzles & games suite were key engagement drivers and ripe with opportunity for growth:

• The games section consistently ranks in the top three categories for engaged minutes across the site.
  
• The average time spent per user on crossword puzzle pages sits at twenty-five minutes.
  
• The games section drives hundreds of thousands of players each month, with well over half of the audience coming to us directly, rather than through Search or Referral traffic. This also signals that puzzles are uniquely insulated from news cycle shifts and off-platform algorithm changes.

The data was clear: Even getting 1% of our free puzzle-playing audience to convert to a subscriber had great revenue potential. However, it’s also clear there’s a loyal audience of puzzle players who may be turned off by an abrupt hard paywall. Balancing subscription growth and user engagement was a key consideration in our strategy. 

Users behave differently while playing a game versus reading an article. Our journalism is at the heart of what we do at The New Yorker–and while our goal is to offer a premium games experience for readers, they require a different sampling approach. As such, separating our paywall rules for our games versus the rest of the site content was a vital part of our strategy. Having a games-specific paywall campaign also grants us the liberty to test different paywall copy without interrupting our regular meter treatment on the rest of the site.

Aligning on a strategy and path forward

The key project owners across Editorial, Aud Dev, and Consumer Marketing established a core strategy to bring to other cross-functional stakeholders. Beyond separating our regular site paywall from our games paywall, the concept of a windowed hardgate felt like a natural first step. A windowed hardgate meant that users could play the most recent 7 days of puzzles for free, with older puzzles fully behind a paywall.

This approach works well for a few reasons:

• It’s a way to “soft launch” a paywall without frustrating loyal users. It also enables us to get an initial read on engagement metrics as we consider other conversion levers. For example, the “7-day” gating rule could be opened or tightened to say, 3 days or 14 days, if we want to test more options down the road.
  
• Based on our publishing schedule, users can still play up to 5 crosswords (3 full, 2 minis) in a week’s time, ensuring users can still sample our puzzles. Plus, loyal users who are playing “archive” puzzles (any puzzle published more than 7 days ago) are at a higher propensity to subscribe anyway.
  
• By leaving many of our games free to play in the app, we can incentivize app downloads for users who may not be ready to subscribe just yet. Getting a user to take the action of downloading our app and creating an account is a tall order in the first place. The more users who at least download the app and build a daily habit of playing are more likely to subscribe down the road.
  
• Keeping our full archive of puzzles as a subscriber-only benefit makes our digital value proposition even stronger, and adds to all the great benefits of being a subscriber. At The New Yorker, we want to give our subscribers a premium experience, which includes giving them access to all games in our archive. 

Measuring success and planning for the future

There are plenty of ways to measure success here. In an ideal world, engagement stays steady (or better yet, improves, at least among active subscribers) and we see a sizable lift in subscriptions from our puzzles. Here are the core KPIs we’re tracking beyond pure subscription growth: 

Conversion rate on games-specific pages (compared to our standard site conversion rate), individual puzzles (i.e. crosswords vs Name Drop), and on our hardgated games (any archive puzzles), where we expect to see the most lift.

Paywall hit rate, especially on our hardgated archive games. Considering we didn’t consistently have a paywall on crosswords, we know the percentage of users who hit the paywall will rise significantly. Tracking paywall hit rate over time will signal user interest in playing older puzzles.

Engagement through time spent and average minutes played. Our goal is to mitigate dips in engagement as much as possible.

Repeat visitation on site and in-app, broken out by subscribers and non-subscribers. 

Ultimately, our priority every day is to offer our readers a premium experience worth paying for. As our paywall approach evolves and our suite of games expands, we hope that every minute our readers spend with The New Yorker earns its place in that weekly screen-time report.

The post The power of puzzles: How The New Yorker approached a games paywall appeared first on Audiencers.

For a long time, donations were presented as a nice little extra source of income, reserved for radically committed media outlets, cannibalizing subscriptions, and condemned by the sociology of age. However, in France, as in several European countries, donations are experiencing unprecedented growth. They’re increasing turnover for both established and emerging publications, as well as attracting younger audiences.

So why is the media industry struggling to take donations seriously? Well, because of stubborn preconceptions and a lack of concrete examples…

From The Guardian to Vert, La Croix, StreetPress, and Kometa, here’s what the facts show when we lift the veil – a model that appeals to publishers, mobilizes new readers, and finances open, accountable journalism in the public interest.

At The Audiencers Festival in Paris, we explored the donation model with Médianes, a studio that helps media outlets strengthen their editorial, economic, and technical independence with a 360° approach. The round table brought The Guardian, La Croix, and Kometa together to discuss acquisition and conversion, followed by a workshop where Médianes shared best practices for campaigns, with use cases from Vert and StreetPress.

To share our insights beyond the Festival, here are eight common misconceptions about donations, debunked.

Misconception #1: “There’s no framework, nor advantage to a donation model.”

This is, of course, false. While donations have long been seen as a source of revenue that only works in countries with a strong philanthropic culture, this is no longer true today, and the French legal framework has contributed greatly to this change.

Since 2015, the “Charb amendment,” a provision adopted after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, has allowed political and general news media companies to receive tax-exempt donations through associations dedicated to press pluralism. In concrete terms, individuals can deduct 66% of their donation (up to a limit of 20% of taxable income); the organizations Presse & Pluralisme and J’aime l’info are responsible for collecting and tracking donations. This is a strong argument that puts France in an advantageous position compared to its European counterparts.

Misconception #2: “In France, donations are limited.”

This is no longer the case. As documented by La Revue des médias de l’INA, the J’aime l’info platform raised more than €7 million in 2024, compared to €5.1 million in 2023 and €1.8 million in 2020, with a trajectory that could exceed €10 million in 2025 or 2026.

In practice, donations can finance an entire model: for example, Reporterre, a pioneering media outlet in France, claims to be 98% donation-funded in 2024, up 30%. As detailed in their impact report, this represents €3.5 million, the result of donations from 45,821 donors, with 2 million unique visitors to its website and more than 180,000 subscribers to its newsletters. Another example is Vert, a new environmental media outlet launched in 2020, which announced that 90% of its revenue in 2024 would be funded by donations, with more than 12,000 financial supporters, more than 120,000 newsletter subscribers, and 340,000 followers on Instagram.

And they aren’t alone: on the investigative side, StreetPress, a media outlet specializing in the far right, reports 36% of its revenue coming from donations in 2023 and 77% growth in 2024. Disclose is approaching 60%, while Brittany-based Splann! has reached 75%.

Misconception #3: “Only activists are interested in donation models.”

The Guardian has been building its counterexample for the past decade. Without restricting access to its content, the publication is based on a clear vision: “Open to all, funded by many, beholden to no one.” The audience that supports it is not a self-perpetuating circle of activists, but a broad group of readers who defend the common good because they see its value. The nuance is essential: support does not come from a sense of belonging to a particular camp, but from a promise of public interest and a contract of trust.

The motivations put forward are consistent: protecting press freedom, preserving editorial independence, supporting investigation, recognizing the reliability and quality of the work, and holding the powerful to account.

The results speak for themselves: in ten years, revenue from digital readers has grown from around £5 million to £107 million. Now, 72% of the publication’s total revenue comes from digital sources (readers, advertisers, and other sources)—proof that a civic contract can become an economic pillar.

The base of regular supporters has reached approximately 1.3 million people, including more than 182,000 in Europe, with growth of around 20% over one year.

> Read about The Guardian’s reader revenue growth and proposition development

Misconception #4: “Donations cannibalize subscriptions.”

La Croix proves the opposite. The daily newspaper has opened a tax-exempt donation channel via Presse & Pluralisme, alongside its subscription offer.

• Subscriptions sell a service—convenience, apps, frictionless reading.
• Donations fund a mission—pluralism, solidarity formats, tool improvements, investigations.

At La Croix, 90% of donors are also subscribers: donations do not cancel out subscriptions, they add to them. Presented in this way, coexistence becomes natural and editorial balance clearer.

Since 2022, the Catholic daily newspaper has internalized fundraising and reworked its campaigns (targeting, media, messages). The model is gaining momentum and becoming established with a philanthropic approach, leading to the creation of a Philanthropy Manager position in 2024.

As a result, donations now account for 2% of revenue, with around 3,400 donors, most of whom give less than €500.

Misconception #5: “Donations only concern older audiences.”

This is changing thanks to the internet. While the median age of donors in France is 62, a growing number of young people aged 15 to 35 are now contributing financially to the media. Supporting content is part of their habits: online tips, support subscriptions, live fundraising. In other words, the gesture of “I support because it has social value” already exists; the media are getting better and better at activating it.

StreetPress, a free-access investigative media outlet celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, now derives more than a third of its revenue from donations. In its best months, its content reaches around six million people on social media and through newsletters, and nearly three-quarters of this audience is under 35. This requires campaigns to be designed differently: embodying faces and stories, linking donations to a specific format or project, and showing the impact in concrete terms.

The result? After an initial campaign in 2021 that raised €75,000 to launch a newsletter dedicated to the far right, followed by €185,000 in 2023 to develop a collaborative platform on the same subject, StreetPress had gathered more than 6,000 regular donors within a club by 2025.

Misconception #6: “It’s just another source of funding.”

That would be a lot, but if donations work, it’s not just about money. It requires a clear editorial model, a coherent marketing strategy, and rigorous governance.

Vert is proof of this. The media outlet has turned donations into a clear editorial contract, funding open-access environmental journalism, and has translated this into a controlled conversion and loyalty process. The inserts are easy to understand, recurring donations are offered by default, and tax exemptions are explained without jargon. Conversion and follow-up messages are tailored to profiles and synchronized with current events. The relationship is maintained over time through concrete expressions of gratitude, behind-the-scenes insights, and impact reports.

This rigor pays off. In 2024, Vert finances 90% of its budget through donations, with more than 12,000 supporters. On the governance side, transparency is not just for show: reports are public and objectives are clearly stated. In other words, at Vert, donations do not simply add to the revenue stream: they guide the way we produce, explain, and report.

Misconception #7: “Donations are only small amounts.”

Editorial philanthropy exists, and it mainly finances time, which is the lifeblood of production.

Kometa, a media outlet dedicated to literary journalism, photo essays, and debates, is a prime example of this: beyond the fundraising that enabled the media outlet to launch in 2023, raising €760,000 from six investors, grants of €12,000 finance a year of work by authors in difficult fields, with a net cost to the patron of around €4,000 after tax relief. The mechanism is straightforward: a clear offer, symbolic rewards, follow-up, and often a round-table approach where one donor leads to others. It is therefore not just a matter of scattered micro-contributions, but also of major donations that can structure ambitious projects.

Result: in less than two years, the company collected €300,000 in donations, including individual donations, support from foundations, and a crowdfunding campaign.

Transparency note: Médianes, the studio, supported Kometa in its fundraising campaign in 2023.

Misconception #8: “Donations are a one-time thing.”

Recurring donations are becoming commonplace on both sides of the Channel, and even across the Atlantic. At Vert, the club requires a monthly donation for membership; most of its budget now comes from these recurring donations, which give the editorial team visibility.

At The Guardian, transforming one-off donators into regular supporters has become a discipline – “We thank donors, we explain, we give them a behind-the-scenes look, we follow up with substantive reasons, and we build a relationship.” This shift changes everything: cash flow is smoothed out, editorial planning becomes possible, and independence is better protected than it would be with sporadic donations.

Now what?

These cases prove it: donations work when you honestly say what they fund, when you show what they change, and when you agree to be accountable for them. They don’t replace subscriptions, they don’t conflict with advertising: they balance the whole by making it more readable. Guardian, La Croix, Vert, StreetPress, Kometa: they all tell the same story—a contract of trust forged with an audience that chooses to support a common good.

One requirement remains: consistency over time. A clear mission, genuine transparency, regular recurrence, and regular proof of public utility. This is the price that must be paid for donations to definitively move from prejudice to model.

Would you like to learn more about Médianes’ expertise in fundraising campaigns? Visit our website.

The post Funding public interest: 8 common misconceptions about donations, debunked appeared first on Audiencers.