> 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. 

> According to OpinionWay, the average French person consumes about 6 media families a day, 20% already use a generative AI to get informed, but a majority say they feel overwhelmed, even fatigued, by the news

> Faced with information fatigue, unlimited access is not the answer. Les Echos is instead making the opposite bet, that of selection

> "La Sélection" consists of between 9 and 15 articles a day, chosen from a daily output of 120 to 150 pieces, following a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) and a strict quota discipline

> Three platforms (a dedicated tab in the app, a section on the site, a daily newsletter), a weekly long read on Saturdays, and 5 shareable articles a month. Early bird price sits at €9.90 a month

Presented in the opening by Célia Pénavaire, the title’s values break down into three guiding axes for this selection: reason over ideology (an economic DNA that calls for a rational, almost mathematical reading of the world), optimism over fatalism (giving room to success stories and to solutions that work), and ambition over declinism (investigations and analysis to handle professional and personal challenges).

On the production side, it is a genuine editorial discipline, run by a dedicated team (two full-time journalists, according to our information). Each day, the newsroom produces between 120 and 150 articles; this team selects 9 to 15 of them, spread across a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) with fixed quotas per category, several times a day. Concretely, “develop” accounts for around 20% of topics, while “get inspired” and “unwind” are capped at 10% each. A culture piece or a roundup of the best summer crime novels thus has its place alongside the conflict in the Middle East.

Three platforms, a weekly long read, and sharing

“La Sélection” is designed to be identifiable on the three most consulted platforms: a dedicated tab in the app (in the form of immersive cards), a section of the same name on the Les Echos site, and a daily newsletter in your inbox (at 8:30am, signed by the newsroom). On the app, choosing your interests unlocks additional articles; on the site, subscribers can access the full history of past selections. All with some personalisation, but deliberately limited, to preserve a common core shared by all subscribers. On top of that, every Saturday morning, an exclusive long read looks back on the week’s key events, signed by the editors-in-chief Christophe Jakubyszyn and Clémence Lemaistre. And because information is meant to be shared, the offer includes 5 articles to share freely with those close to you each month.

Pricing: a deliberately accessible positioning

Conceived as a daily intellectual companion, the offer is meant to be accessible to as many people as possible, and gives access only to this daily selection (site, app and newsletter). The early bird price is €9.90 a month. Yasmine Maslouhi claimed a positioning “cheaper than Canal+, cheaper than Netflix, and even cheaper than Le Monde today”. A special VivaTech offer was available on the stand: two months free. Note that the AI assistant for professional use was presented right next door, on the same stand.

To subscribe to La Sélection, it’s here. See you in a few months for the first results…

> Le Monde has wanted to launch an English edition for 50+ years, but technological advances (AI translations) and digital subscriptions (delivering value internationally with ease) finally made the project possible in 2022. It's also an important move for the brand to continue to grow beyond the limited French market

> Content: Le Monde in English doesn't create original content; it exclusively translates a curated selection of the French edition (30% of all articles from Le Monde)

> Because an international reader is highly likely to already hold a primary subscription to a domestic title like The New York Times or The Guardian, Le Monde in English positions itself as a "second read," with a highly accessible pricing structure (starting at €2.50/month for the first year)

> Performance so far: around 16,000 active subscribers, 50% of whom are from the US. Approx. 5 million monthly visits, and subscriptions are the core business driver, representing 66.2% of revenue, followed by licensing (16.9%), B2B (12.3%) and advertising (4.6%)

> "It's not about translation": success comes down to content market fit, product distribution, and understanding the distinct profile of your international audience. And whilst AI has driven productivity gains on this front, it's also created journalism jobs - AI handles the mechanical translation, freeing human journalists to focus purely on editing, nuance, and curation

2. The tech triggers

Two key factors finally made the project feasible in 2022:

• Artificial Intelligence: AI finally matured enough to drastically lower the financial and temporal costs of translation.
• The digital subscription model: Unlike the 1970s print attempt, which incurred immense logistics costs to print and ship copies across the UK and US without any guarantee of sales, digital distribution completely eliminates the friction of international expansion.

Aubron contrasted this with The New York Times, which launched a Spanish edition in 2016 but shuttered it a few years later. The New York Times relied heavily on manual translation without AI and built a business model dependent on advertising rather than subscriptions, a strategy that ultimately proved unsustainable.

The launch and operational workflow

Following Aubron’s appointment in September 2021, the project launched in April 2022 to coincide with the French presidential elections.

At launch, the assumption was that AI could handle the heavy lifting, followed by a quick proofread. In reality, it required much more human intervention.

1. DeepL translation: The software was used to generate the initial baseline translation. While highly rated, the technology in 2022 still required heavy editing to meet Le Monde’s journalistic standards.
2. Professional freelance translators: To ensure maximum quality for a premium subscription product, two translator agencies were brought in to meticulously review and correct the AI-generated text.
3. In-house editorial team: A dedicated team of 8 journalists was embedded directly within the French newsroom. This physical proximity allowed them to collaborate, anticipate news, and edit translations seamlessly alongside the original authors.

Article selection: quality over quantity

Le Monde in English does not create original content; it exclusively translates a curated selection of the French edition.

• 30% of French articles translated: The team skips live coverage, podcasts, and strictly local French wire stories (e.g., specific domestic politics, local school or banking issues) that hold little relevance to an international audience.
• +10 daily dispatches: They supplement translated deep-dives with roughly ten English news dispatches per day to provide hot news.

Pricing: A “second read” strategy

Because an international reader is highly likely to already hold a primary subscription to a domestic title like The New York Times or The Guardian, Le Monde in English positions itself as a “second read.”

To account for this, the pricing structure had to be highly accessible:

• Introductory price: €2.50 per month for the first year.
• Standard price: Loops up to €10.00 per month progressively.
• Average price point: As of March 2026, the average revenue per user sits at €4.66.

Aubron noted that an attempt to raise prices in 2025 stalled subscriber growth because the price increase came at a time when audience acquisition hadn’t scaled sufficiently to absorb the change. Lesson learned: a secondary read strategy demands highly sensitive, highly competitive pricing.

Four years later: audience & subscription performance

The strategy has paid off, yielding steady traffic and subscription growth since the launch 4 years ago.

• Current Subscriber Base: Hovering near 16,000 active subscribers.
• The American engine: A staggering 50% of all subscribers come from the United States. Aubron attributed this to a stark cultural difference in the propensity to pay for news: while only roughly 10% of French consumers pay for digital news, closer to 20% of Americans do. The subscriber base consists heavily of students, retirees, and individuals with an existing personal, educational, or marital link to France.
• Global traffic footprint: The platform pulls in approximately 5 million monthly visits.
  • United States: 38.5%
  • United Kingdom: 12.2%
  • Canada: 9.5%
  • France: 7.3% (although access to the English edition from France is limited to subscribers on higher-tier plans)
  • India: the fastest-growing traffic segment
  • Germany: the first non-anglophone country.

What do they read?

True to Le Monde’s core strengths, the most read sections are international news, French politics, and economy. Surprisingly, culture and lifestyle pieces perform exceptionally well; articles about new Parisian restaurant openings or art exhibitions see massive engagement from readers living as far away as Texas and Florida.

Subscriber acquisition strategies

To recruit international subscribers, Le Monde deploys a three-pronged approach:

1. Leveraging LeMonde.fr’s SEO hierarchy: Internal debates weighed whether to launch on a standalone domain (LeMonde.com) or a subdirectory (LeMonde.fr/en). Choosing LeMonde.fr proved to be a major SEO blessing, allowing the English edition to instantly draft off the massive domain authority of the main French site.
2. Paid acquisition adjustments: Google advertising is a core driver. Aubron also highlighted a massive breakthrough in their Meta acquisition costs: after peaking at an expensive €86.90 cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in late 2025, optimization strategies successfully drove that CPA down to just €9.30 by March 2026.
3. Strategic publisher partnerships: By setting up reciprocal marketing exchanges with premium Anglo-Saxon publishers (The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic), Le Monde cross-promotes free trial offers directly to highly qualified audiences who are already accustomed to paying for premium journalism.

Achieving break-even

The most significant milestone of the session was the announcement that Le Monde in English has officially achieved financial break-even in 2026, a full year ahead of the initial business plan.

Revenue breakdown:

• Subscriptions: 66.2% (The core driver of the business).
• Licensing: 16.9%.
• B2B: 12.3%.
• Advertising: 4.6%.

Product evolutions: what’s new today?

Since its 2022 launch, the operational model has undergone substantial changes, heavily driven by advancements in generative AI:

AI-driven productivity gains

• The transition to ChatGPT: Le Monde migrated its primary translation workflow away from DeepL to customized ChatGPT protocols. This allowed the team to deeply bake Le Monde’s distinct editorial tone and style guides directly into the translation layer.
• Eliminating the translation layer: The quality of generative AI advancements and the know-how developed by the team of journalists completely eliminated the need for external freelance translators.
• Creating journalism jobs via AI: Instead of using tech to downsize, Le Monde redirected those cost savings into expanding its internal editorial team from 8 to 10 full-time in-house journalists. AI handles the mechanical translation, freeing human journalists to focus purely on editing, nuance, and curation.

Platform and multimedia expansion

• A bilingual app: They integrated a native toggle inside the core Le Monde app, allowing users to switch effortlessly between the French and English editions. While app users represent just 4% of total English traffic, they account for a massive 49% of all English subscribers.
• A dedicated YouTube channel: Rather than merging video content, they launched a standalone English YouTube channel. High-end video investigations have achieved breakout success: their video on Dubai money laundering garnered 760,000 views (vs. 1 million for the French original), and their documentary on the November 13 Paris attacks pulled in 2 million views (nearly matching the 2.2 million views of the French version).
• Apple News+ integration: Le Monde in English is now available directly within the Apple News+ ecosystem to capture a broader layer of casual readers.
• M International magazine: In March 2025, they went “back to paper” by launching a premium, biannual print magazine called M International (themed “The French Touch”). They distribute 25,000 copies across 350 elite newsstands in 20 countries and 37 global cities.

Key takeaways

Aubron concluded his presentation with three definitive lessons learned over the four-year journey:

• It’s not about translation: Translation is now a commoditized utility. Success comes down to content market fit, product distribution, and understanding the distinct profile of your international audience.
• Hard to imagine working in another language: Due to global curiosity around French art de vivre, culture, and global politics, in the US, the English edition works beautifully. However, Aubron noted he would not attempt to launch a Spanish or German edition of Le Monde yet, as those markets lack the critical size and same unique cross-border structural demand.
• AI can create jobs: The project stands as living proof that when publishers embrace automated productivity tools like generative AI, they can reinvest the dividends directly into hiring more human journalists to elevate the final product.

> The Sun launched Sun Club in 2025 as a £1.99 freemium membership, layering subscription revenue and first-party reader data on top of an already large free audience

> A year in, 65% of members are women, and TikTok has opened a genuinely new audience: those subscribers are 85% female and 15 years younger than the average member

> First-week app activity is the strongest predictor of long-term retention. The most loyal members read over 100 articles a week, almost entirely in the app

Lessons:
> Value-driven perks are the core of the proposition, and for this audience they're the retention tool that matters

> Freemium can serve advertising and subscription goals at once, because a known, logged-in audience strengthens both

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

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

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

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

What your team can do:

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

2. The audience trust gap: rethinking participation and storytelling

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

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

What your team can do:

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

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

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

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

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

What your team can do:

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

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

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

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

What your team can do:

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

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

> Le Nouvel Obs cut its article output by nearly 30% and everything went up: pageviews rose 30% year on year, median pageviews per article rose 50%, and digital subscriptions rose 35%

> The cuts were structural rather than across the board. Raw newswire reposts went, print-shaped cultural reviews became digital-first compilations, and premium content doubled as a share of the feed

> The mechanism is simple: fewer pieces competing for the same homepage and distribution means each surviving article reaches more people, which lifts propensity to subscribe

> A daily morning briefing puts editorial and data in the same room, and deliberately spotlights what worked rather than what flopped. They chose positive reinforcement over chasing underperformers

Hi, I'm Lennart Schneider, Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

When I talk to newsletter creators, it usually doesn't take long before one of two questions comes up:

1) What actually constitutes a good open rate?

2) My newsletter has an open rate of 40%. That's great, isn't it?

The honest answer is: There is no such thing as a "good" open rate, and the open rate really says nothing about the quality of your newsletter. 

In this article, I want to clear up this misconception and explain when you should still pay attention to it.

P.S. I've written a book! The playbook for successful subscription models: With growth strategies and best practices from 50 leading companies. You can pre-order here (or on Amazon).

I completely understand the need for benchmarking and comparability. With newsletters, you have relatively few metrics, so you try to draw as many conclusions as possible from what you do have. Often, however, you draw more conclusions than are actually useful.

Let’s start with the basics: open rate is a fraction. You calculate it by dividing the number of unique opens by the total number of recipients. So far, so simple.

However, this leads to a small detail that is often overlooked. You can increase the open rate in two ways: more openers, or fewer recipients.

The latter point is often overlooked, but it’s crucial. People who don’t open your newsletter are often the same ones. And especially with older mailing lists, you often have a large proportion of inactive subscribers who have lost all interest.

So, if you have a 50% open rate with 10,000 recipients, then there are probably several thousand among them who haven’t opened a single email in six months. Let’s say there are 3,000 of them. If you remove them from the mailing list, your open rate immediately jumps from 50% to 71.4% (5,000 opens/7,000 active recipients).

Has this improved the quality of your newsletter? Are your readers more satisfied? No!

Has the quality of your distribution system improved as a result? Absolutely!

Why would you delete valuable leads?

Admittedly, I’ve recommended this to many newsletter creators, but the enthusiasm is usually lukewarm. They’ve put a lot of money and effort into acquiring these subscribers, so why would they just delete the addresses? Perhaps the reach is even important for advertising sales (even if nobody sees the ads).

But here are a few reasons why it’s worth it:

1. If someone hasn’t opened your emails for a long time, the likelihood of them returning is relatively low
2. You increase the risk of being perceived as spam
3. Depending on the newsletter tool and contract, costs increase as you send more emails
4. Your brand suffers when customers perceive you as pushy
5. Your advertisers are surprised when clicks fail to materialize on a supposedly large distribution list, and become suspicious
6. …

Many of the world’s leading newsletters therefore place great importance on the quality of their mailing lists and remove users after a long period of inactivity. The New York Times even discloses this quite transparently:

How can I find out who is inactive?

Good question! And not so easy to answer. Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, it’s often difficult to track who actually opens an email – Apple automatically opens emails before they reach the recipient, and therefore your email program thinks these users are active. Other users block tracking and are registered as inactive, even though they enthusiastically read every issue. So if you’re unsure: just ask the users.

Clicks can be tracked more reliably than opens, and if readers don’t click after (repeated) requests, you can remove them from the mailing list with a clear conscience.

Do I really need to delete them?

No. You can also pause them for now, or reduce the frequency. A good example is the sports newsletter “The Gist”. They temporarily pause inactive subscribers, and then when a major event is coming up (for example, the Olympics), they try to reactivate them.

However, you shouldn’t overdo it. If you haven’t contacted them for 1.5 years, you should continue to refrain from doing so. After that time, their consent to contact them also expires.

Even more reasons why open rate is misunderstood

Your open rate depends on numerous factors, and the quality of your content is just one of them. Here’s a (likely incomplete) list of factors that affect open rates:

Mailbox display:

• Subject lines (Do they encourage clicks?)
• Pre-header (Do you tease the content well?)
• Sender’s name (Do they trust you and look forward to your emails?)
• Sender images (Will they stand out in the inbox? Only works with certain clients)

The quality of your distribution:

• Cleanup of inactive users (Are non-openers regularly removed?)
• Segmentation (Do you always send emails to the entire mailing list or do you select recipients based on interests?)
• Preference Center (Can users configure which emails they receive and how frequently?)
• Age of the addresses (How long ago did someone sign up?)
• Lead campaigns/address origin (On which channels and with which promises were the users acquired? Did they want the newsletter, or did they just share their email to participate in a competition, for example?)

Deliverability

• Advertising tab in Gmail (Are emails from Gmail classified as advertising and not delivered to the main mailbox?)
• Spam (Do the emails often end up in the spam folder?)
• Bounces (Can the emails not be delivered? What are the different types of bounces, hard and soft?)
• Image sizes (are the images too large?)
• Email size (Will the email be truncated, for example, by Gmail, which happens from 102 kb upwards?)
• Shipping time (Is the shipping time chosen?)

Contents

• Good quality & relevance
• Diversity (do you cover different needs so that every issue contains an “aha” moment?)
• Continuity & predictability (Do readers know what to expect and why each issue is worthwhile?)

Technology

• Email tool or measurement technology (each mailing tool measures opens slightly differently, which affects the KPIs)
• Tracking Opt Out (Have users disabled tracking of clicks and opens?)
• Auto Opens on iOS (Are open rates inflated because emails are automatically opened due to privacy settings?)

So I can ignore the open rate?

Not quite. Since we don’t have many metrics, it’s still a valuable signal, as long as you’re aware of what it tells you, and what it doesn’t.

What you shouldn’t do is compare your absolute open rate with competitors who use completely different tools and whose lead generation works differently. This apples-to-oranges comparison is completely pointless.

What you can do instead:

• Observe long-term trends: Is my own open rate constant? Have there been any sudden changes I should understand? (But keep in mind that these changes could be due to technical reasons, e.g., more users with tracking protection.)
• Optimize your open rate with A/B testing: e.g., send each email with 3 different subject lines to a sample group beforehand and send the best version to the rest of the distribution list.
• Examine outliers: Were there any particular issues that were opened more or less frequently than average? What can I learn from them?
• Re-contacting those who didn’t open the email: Some companies send a newsletter a second time if it wasn’t opened the first time. I find it a bit spammy, but it seems to work.
• Use net reach (recipients x open rate) as the basis for advertising deals: This is fair to your advertising clients and you can also justify why the CPM (cost per thousand contacts) is higher if you are contacting a cleaned distribution list.
• Comparing segments: When running different lead generation campaigns, you shouldn’t just focus on the short-term cost per lead (CPL), but also consider whether the campaigns generate active recipients in the long run. A sweepstakes often generates a large number of addresses cheaply, but the open rate drops significantly after just a few campaigns.
  For better comparability, you can calculate a cost per lead after, for example, 10 campaigns. If you generate 1,000 leads per campaign for €1,000 in each of two campaigns, the short-term CPL is €1. If, after 10 campaigns, 70% of the leads in campaign A are still active, while only 30% remain active in campaign B, you get a clear picture: In campaign A, an active lead cost €1.43, while in campaign B it cost €3.33.
• …

PS: My newsletter has an open rate of 51-58%. That’s great, isn’t it?…

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This article was originally published in German on the Subscribe Now website, translated and republished with permission.

> You become what you measure. At Amedia, older subscribers were the majority, so they dominated the dashboards and quietly defined what counted as high-performing content

> The fix was blunt: filter analytics to readers under 40 only, making 90% of subscribers invisible to the newsroom. What the team optimised for changed as soon as what it could see changed

> This wasn't a matter of adding a few pieces "for young people". At Romerikes Blad the editorial team overhauled its working methods and which topics it treated as priorities

> It didn't cost them older readers. The sharper focus made the journalism more relevant overall: at Romerikes Blad, under-40 subscribers grew 30% in nine months and total readership and subscriptions rose too

> SWI swissinfo.ch, the international service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, publishes in 10 languages with roughly three journalists per service and 75% of its audience outside Switzerland

> The teams adapt rather than translate. Explaining the Swiss Federal Council, which has no single president, to a Chinese audience means inventing lexicons and style guides, not swapping words

> A debate format replaced comment sections five years ago, with journalists posing specific themed questions. Auto-translation inside threads lets a reader in Brazil and one in Russia argue in their own languages

> Products follow distribution constraints rather than the org chart. With the website partially blocked in Russia, the Russian edition leans on hour-long YouTube interviews instead

> AI does the translation lifting, but a strict human-in-the-loop policy and published disclaimers protect the thing they actually trade on, which is trust

“We aim to be at the intersection of where Switzerland has an impact on global conversations,” says DeVore. “Whether it’s the pharma companies operating out of Basel, the diplomatic hub of Geneva, or the unique system of Swiss direct democracy, we look for touchpoints that resonate internationally.”

Adaptation over simple translation

One of the most striking aspects of the swissinfo.ch workflow is the move beyond literal translation. Instead, the team practices adaptation.

With small teams of roughly three people per language service, journalists must act as cultural mediators. “It’s not just translating from English to Chinese – you have to adapt for the context and the market. For example, how do you explain the Swiss Federal Council, a body that has no single president, to an audience in China? Our teams often have to invent lexicons and style guides to transmit these unique political concepts effectively.”

Deep engagement through debating

Moving away from a traditional broadcast model, swissinfo.ch has pivoted toward community building to bring these diverse audiences together. Five years ago, they launched a debate format to replace standard comment sections. 

Instead of readers commenting in their own language, often sharing information that didn’t really serve anyone’s needs (not to mention the necessity to moderate heavily), journalists now pose specific, theme-based questions seated in a theme currently being explored. 

To solve the problem of linguistic silos, they implemented auto-translation within threads, usually using Deepl but not only. The best tool/LLM is chosen per language depending on the feedback of the editors. This allows a reader in Brazil to engage in a conversation with a reader in Russia, both viewing the thread in their native language.

This focus on dialogue has led to long-running, nuanced discussions on high-stakes topics like Swiss neutrality, which DeVore notes has seen consistent engagement for over a year following the invasion of Ukraine.

“On some topics, we get really interesting, nuanced, and sometimes surprising threads going, for instance on things like Swiss neutrality. Of course, it’s a hallmark of Switzerland; people think of that quite quickly alongside cheese and chocolate and army knives when they think of the country, but what does it really mean in practice? Especially after the Ukraine war started. And this thread has had hundreds and hundreds, an evergreen comment section that’s been going for a year or more.”

Products for niche needs

SWI swissinfo.ch also develops bespoke products for specific audience segments. Of course, part of their niche is the Swiss connection, but at the same time they’re trying to fill gaps in people’s media needs in markets where accessibility isn’t exactly a given, or where content might be behind paywalls.

• The SWI Plus App: Tailored for the Swiss diaspora (over 800,000 citizens living abroad), allowing them to personalize their news feed across multiple languages

• The Russian Edition: Recognizing that their website is partially blocked in Russia, the team has leaned into video-based platforms like YouTube, producing long-form, one-on-one interviews (up to an hour) to provide in-depth context to Russian speakers
• ‘Truth or Tale’: A short-form video series focused on myth-busting common misconceptions about Switzerland, designed for social media discovery

Trust in the age of AI

As a publicly funded media outlet, trust is the currency swissinfo.ch relies on. DeVore highlights their involvement with a recent research cohort piloted by the US-based nonprofit  Trusting News, which helped them understand audience needs around AI transparency and develop “disclaimers” regarding the use of AI.

“We are a niche media with an international footprint, which makes it even more important to show people at a glance that we are trustworthy.” While the organization uses AI for translation assistance and other tasks to manage resource limitations, they maintain a strict “human-in-the-loop” policy to ensure cultural accuracy and editorial integrity.

> If you’re working on a similar strategy, you’ll also be interested in hearing about the business logic behind Le Monde in English