When major news breaks, every publisher can report the facts. The challenge today is giving audiences a reason to stay.

For The Baltimore Banner, that meant rethinking what live coverage should look like. Rather than viewing a live blog as simply a faster way to update a story, the newsroom wanted to create an experience that felt immersive, collaborative and uniquely local, one that readers would actively return to throughout the day.

Anyone can report breaking news. The Baltimore Banner treats its live blogs as an audience product, not a faster way to publish updates

> Prepare before the event. More than 50 journalists were trained ahead of Maryland's primaries, and a dedicated editor preloads background, links and context so readers get value from their first visit

> Put one editor in charge. During the event, they prioritise updates, pin key developments, adjust headlines and decide which moments deserve their own standalone story

> Build an experience, not a feed. Several reporters, photos and video let readers follow the Turnstile concert from different perspectives. That blog drew 62% new visitors, and registration take rates were 2.2x higher than the rest of the site

> Connect the live blog to the wider journey. A voter guide, an election night live blog and a results page worked as one product, delivering record subscription conversions, and returning readers viewed the live blog 2.05 times each

Moving beyond the single-author live update

As The Banner’s live coverage ambitions grew, so too did the limitations of traditional workflows.

Major events increasingly required reporters, photographers and videographers to contribute simultaneously, while editors needed a simple way to coordinate coverage and publish updates quickly from the field. Just as importantly, the newsroom wanted to make live reporting easier to execute without adding operational complexity.

Rhe Banner uses Tickaroo, which lets several journalists contribute at once, publish from their phones and push updates into Arc XP.

The result was not just faster publishing, but broader, richer coverage.

“We’ve been able to activate more contributors and be able to cover more angles during events than we were previously,” explained Nicole Orders, SVP of Product at The Baltimore Banner. “That’s definitely helped us broaden our live event coverage.”

Preparation starts long before the event

Technology was only part of the equation, however. The Banner quickly learned that successful live blogs are built before the first update is ever published.

Ahead of major events, newsroom staff are trained on both the platform and the editorial workflow. During Maryland’s primary elections, more than 50 journalists received hands-on training, from logging into the tool to understanding how best to contribute text, images and video. 

Every live blog also has a dedicated editor responsible for orchestrating the coverage. That editor prepares the live blog before publication by adding background reporting, links to existing stories and contextual information so readers immediately receive value when they arrive. During the event itself, they become the central coordinator, prioritising updates, pinning key developments, adjusting headlines and deciding when important moments deserve their own standalone article.

As Breaking News Editor Eileen Holliday explains, “Once everyone has their positions, like in a game, then it’s really seamless.”

Creating experiences, not simply updates

For The Baltimore Banner, successful live coverage isn’t measured by how quickly information is published. It’s about making readers feel as though they’re experiencing the event alongside the newsroom.

In October, coverage of several major Maryland events from the Power to the People Festival to President Trump’s visit to Tradepoint Atlantic to the Turnstile concert near the Washington Monument demonstrated this approach. Rather than relying solely on written updates, the live blogs combined reporting from multiple journalists with photography, video and behind-the-scenes moments to create a genuinely immersive experience. For the Power to the People Festival, readers could watch as the concert unfolded and major acts took the stage, including Bruce Springsteen, Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews and many more. At the Turnstile concert, readers without a ticket could follow commentary from different perspectives and experience the concert  live as it unfolded.

“The more immersive we can make that experience,” Nicole explained, “and the more that we can meet audiences where they are, the more likely they are to keep coming back. Our live blogs reach more subscribers and more new readers than the average news story. Since August, live blogs have drawn 2x – 5x the site share of organic search traffic. Visitors to the Turnstile live blog were 62% new audience, and we saw registration take rates at 2.2x higher than the rest of our site, and 3.4x higher than the live blog average. We’re truly excited about the new audience we are reaching and the engagement momentum that we have built.” 

Building audience value beyond the live moment

The Banner has also discovered that the most successful live blogs rarely stand alone.

For Maryland’s primary elections in June, the newsroom combined its election night live blog with a voter guide published in advance and a dedicated election results experience on polling day. Rather than treating each as separate products, they became complementary parts of one editorial journey.

That approach delivered record subscription conversions from election coverage with over 380,000 pageviews while also producing record page views for the live blog itself. Users spent almost 6 minutes on the voter guide, and the election night live blog drove more return visits than any other in 2026–returning readers viewed it 2.05 times each.

Throughout every event, the editorial team continually links readers to deeper reporting, creating standalone stories from significant updates and driving audiences into the wider journalism surrounding the story. This recirculation strategy extends the value of live coverage well beyond the event itself.

The Banner’s live blog has been effective at driving traffic from Google search and currently sits behind a dynamic paywall. When used in combination with other content, it can also be a driver of subscriber conversions. Based on audience engagement growth this year–October has set another record in terms of live blog pageviews at The Banner. They are actively exploring additional ways to experiment with it as a source of advertising revenue.

> Benchmarking: how to turn an election into subscribers

Lessons for publishers

The Baltimore Banner’s experience illustrates that successful live blogs depend on far more than publishing technology. They require thoughtful planning, clear editorial ownership, collaboration across departments and a commitment to creating distinctive journalism that audiences cannot easily find elsewhere.

Most importantly, they demonstrate a shift in thinking. At a time when breaking news reaches audiences almost instantly through countless channels, publishers no longer compete simply on speed. Anyone can report the latest developments. What distinguishes trusted journalism is the experience and expertise to explain what those developments mean, add context, connect the dots and help audiences make sense of events as they happen. That’s what keeps readers coming back.

By combining collaborative newsroom workflows with immersive storytelling and strong local journalism, The Baltimore Banner has transformed live blogs from a publishing format into a strategic audience product – one that strengthens engagement, supports subscriptions and keeps readers coming back long after the biggest moments have passed.

The post The Baltimore Banner: Turning live coverage into a product audiences want to return to appeared first on Audiencers.

Steven Wilson-Beales is a UK-based SEO, AI visibility and content strategy consultant for publishers and brands. The morning after the US midterms, on 4th November 2026, he checked 16 US and UK news sites to see how they asked readers to subscribe. He shares his findings, and recommendations below.

The morning after the US midterms, Steven Wilson-Beales checked 16 US and UK news sites. Most showed their standard subscribe messaging, with very little tied to the election itself

> Tie the pitch to the moment. Open the article with a call to action linked to the news event, and give readers a one-line reason to subscribe that relates to the story in front of them

> Put free facts above the paywall and paid analysis below it. A "Related" strip near the top of the page links the news to the analysis that subscribers get

> Keep the offer simple. One discounted offer, plus a free account to read a single article, gives readers who aren't ready to pay a way in

> Change the page for each reader. First-time visitors see the moment message and free sign-up, registered readers see newsletter and follow prompts, and subscribers see no pitch at all, only gift articles and what to read next

The post The anatomy of a news article built to boost subscriptions appeared first on Audiencers.

During an election, audiences surge and reading intent is at its peak. People who rarely visit come looking for results, explanations and somewhere to follow the night as it unfolds. For a subscription business, that’s a rare opportunity. 

We looked at 21 initiatives from 12 publishers in France, the UK, the US, Spain and Germany, across elections and other big moments like Euro 2024 and the Paris Olympics, which raise the same questions. The publishers getting the most out of these moments work towards four goals, in order:

• Attract: make your site the place to follow the election, with hubs, live coverage, data and service tools
• Engage: get readers taking part, with votes, predictions and contributions
• Recruit: capture an email address or another owned channel in exchange for a service
• Convert: time-limited offers and a value message that follow the electoral calendar

Here’s what each one looks like in practice, and how to adapt it for your next election.

The post Benchmarking: how to turn an election into subscribers appeared first on Audiencers.

The stories newsrooms publish most are, article for article, the least effective, and Dmitry Shishkin thinks the fix starts with how publishers commission. 

Ten years after a piece of BBC audience research turned into the user needs model, its architect used his FIPP Congress slot in Madrid to argue that most publishers still get this the wrong way round. Shishkin, now an independent consultant after senior roles at the BBC, Culture Trip and Ringier, told the audience that topic and format are only two of publishing’s three pillars. The third, the reader’s motivation, drives subscription and loyalty metrics, and most newsrooms still leave it to instinct.

> Article for article, "update me" pieces underperform every other user need, yet newsrooms produce more of them than anything else

> Tag every piece with three things: the subtopic (personal finance, not just finance), the format (Q&A, feature, listicle, data-led) and the single user need it serves. Then commission on all three

> One dominant need per piece. An article that tries to serve every need gets a headline that can only sell one, so most readers never discover the rest

> Don't let the newsroom write its own user needs model: take the needs from audience research. At Ringier, across five countries, conversions, subscriptions and loyalty metrics all increased once teams moved to the model

Measure the angle as well as the story

The post Why your newsroom shouldn’t write its own user needs model, and what to do instead appeared first on Audiencers.

James Webb is a product leader with 15 years of experience helping news subscription businesses boost subscriber retention. Most recently, he served as Apps Group Product Manager at The Economist, and previously as Product Director at the FT. In this article, James looks at the 2026 Pugpig Media App Report and argues that the value is hiding where standard metrics don’t look.

> Nearly half of app users are anonymous, and most publishers barely optimise to convert them. James Webb, formerly Apps Group Product Manager at The Economist and Product Director at the FT, reads Pugpig's 2026 Media App Report and argues the value is hiding where standard metrics don't look

> Offline is not an edge case. At both The Economist and the FT, offline was around 10% of screenviews and cellular around 30%. If half those cellular sessions hit patchy signal, roughly one in four opens happens with the app on the back foot, and session analytics are flaky in exactly those conditions, so it is undercounted

> Digital still prices like it is scarce: one person, one paywall, one login, so a household either buys four subscriptions nobody can justify or three people free-load invisibly. The Times gives subscribers free bonus accounts and found those users 76% more likely to say they would stay, with churn under 0.01%. The New York Times charges for the same idea, three extra logins at $30 a month against four separate $25 subscriptions

> Only 26% of publishers say their app's main job is acquisition, yet apps are full of non-subscribers who hit a paywall after a single article. Habits take months, not one read. The Times' £1 for three months gives someone a chance to form one; a seven-day trial does not

The post Why your most valuable app readers are probably invisible appeared first on Audiencers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Le Monde invests in YouTube

The post Le Monde on YouTube: 4 million views a day, and why it won’t build a TV channel appeared first on Audiencers.

Dina Shatner is the co-founder and CEO of Caledo, an AI-powered News Experience company, and co-author of The Age of News Experience, a book drawing on conversations with media leaders, research, and practical work.

> The Age of News Experience argues that for social platforms and games, experience is not a feature added to the product. It is the product, and that is what holds attention

> Strong products do not add up to a strong outlet. Readers still meet a fragmented set of things unless you design how they move between them, an approach the authors call Experience Islands

> The AXR framework runs audience to experience to revenue. Skipping the middle turns "reach younger audiences" into "make vertical video". Formats produce outputs, experiences produce behaviors. And repeatable behaviors connect audience value to commercial value

> In video there is a passive-active pattern. Viewers happily let the next item start, but if it shifts too sharply they have to actively decide again, and that decision point is where they leave

> So the unit of planning changes. Before launching anything ask what experience begins here, what the natural next one is, and what must stay consistent so it feels like continuation

The post The next engagement shift: from strong products to experience systems appeared first on Audiencers.

As search, social and AI continue to reshape discovery, publishers are looking for more reliable ways to connect with readers directly. Apps are playing an increasingly important role in strengthening owned channels and supporting subscriber relationships.

The Pugpig 2026 Media App Report offers a clear picture of what’s working, what isn’t and what the top-performing apps have in common. Combining analytics from more than 440 apps with survey responses from 140 publishers, it’s our most data-rich edition yet. 

The post The super user effect: what the Pugpig Media App Report tells us about reader engagement in 2026 appeared first on Audiencers.

Mark Zohar, President and CEO of Viafoura, shares why he believes that Frequency (the F in RFV) is the most important metric to be tracking in an era where content is increasingly a commodity that AI can summarize, paraphrase, and serve without ever sending a click your way.

The publishing industry has spent the better part of two decades chasing the wrong metrics.

Publishers chased reach when scale was the story. They chased pageviews when programmatic told us impressions were currency. And now, in an AI era where Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a growing constellation of answer engines are intercepting traffic before it ever reaches a publisher’s domain, the old playbook isn’t just tired. It’s broken.

So here’s the question every publisher CEO, CRO, and audience leader should be asking right now:

What the F are you doing?

The “F” in RFV is the metric that survives the AI era

RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) has been a customer-analytics staple for decades. Recency tells you when someone last showed up. Volume tells you how much content they consumed while they were there. But of those three letters, Frequency is the one that quietly does the heavy lifting. Frequency tells you whether you have a business.

Frequency is the metric that tracks habit formation. It’s the metric that signals brand loyalty. It’s the leading indicator of customer lifetime value, registration propensity, and subscription conversion. And in an environment where AI is steadily eroding the casual, search-driven, one-and-done visit, Frequency is the only metric that compounds in your favor.

If a reader visits you once a month because Google sent them, you don’t have a reader. You have a rounding error.

If that same reader visits you twelve times a month because they want to be there, to weigh in, to read what others are saying, to participate in a live conversation with your journalists, to follow a topic they care about, then you have a customer. You have ad inventory that actually performs. You have a registration waiting to happen. You have a subscriber in the making.

The post What the F Are You Doing? Why frequency is the metric that matters in the AI era appeared first on Audiencers.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Ross Wilmot, Director of Reader Revenue at Broadsheet, shared how implementing a registration wall served as the cornerstone for a highly resilient digital subscription model. By transforming anonymous audiences into known, authenticated users, Broadsheet unlocked a powerful engagement framework that directly accelerated conversion rates.

After months of testing, Broadsheet found registration works best as a step before the paywall, building a direct relationship while readers are still deciding

> Registration selects for quality: Superfans register at 127 times the rate of casual Fly-bys, with 38% willingly authenticating

> Newsletters are the conversion engine: registered, newsletter-engaged readers hit the paywall 3.5 times per visitor against 0.1 for anonymous ones, a 35x difference

> The compounding effect: that cohort is 0.7% of the audience but drives 43% of all digital subscription conversions, an over-index of 61x. Direct offer emails to readers already warmed by daily editorial account for a further 18%

The strategy behind registration

To pave the way for their subscription model, Broadsheet deployed a registration wall in December 2025, strategically positioning it as an essential precursor to the full paywall, which followed on 21 April 2026, both built and launched using Poool. This sequential approach was designed to achieve several key outcomes:

• Accelerating conversion: By unlocking specific engagement features, the team could efficiently increase user exposure frequency to the upcoming paywall.
• Unlocking direct channels: Secure marketing permissions during the registration process to establish direct lines of communication, which heavily influences ultimate conversion.
• Setting the tone: Introducing a clear value exchange on the site, conditioning readers to understand that completing an action is required to access premium content, ensuring a smoother transition to a paid model.
• Boosting confidence: Confirming the audience’s willingness to complete an action built immense internal confidence within the company regarding the viability of the model.
• Guiding product strategy: Capturing known user identities allowed Broadsheet to develop personalised services tailored to specific reader needs.

Five key findings from Broadsheet’s registration data

Despite being in the early stages of the paywall rollout, Broadsheet data has already yielded critical insights regarding user behavior and the reader revenue funnel.

1. Registration captures high-quality readers

Broadsheet segments its audience into four distinct engagement cohorts based on monthly session frequency: 

• Fly-bys (1 session)
• Regular Readers (2–4 sessions)
• Engaged Regulars (5–9 sessions)
• Superfans (10+ sessions)

The data reveals that registration penetration rises sharply alongside engagement. Specifically, Superfans exhibit a registration rate 127 times higher than casual Fly-bys, with 38% of them willingly authenticating. This confirms that a registration wall successfully establishes a direct relationship with the most loyal segments of the audience, those with the highest propensity to buy a subscription in the future.

2. Newsletters initiate the conversion journey

Authentication acts as the primary gateway to newsletter adoption, which serves as a massive catalyst for paywall hits.

While registered users who actively engage with newsletters account for less than 1% of the total audience, they drive a staggering 7% of all paywall exposures. This means that this specific segment over-indexes for paywall hits by an impressive 10x, successfully drawing high-intent readers straight back into premium, monetisable touchpoints.

3. The newsletter is the core conversion engine

The daily newsletter serves as a continuous, automated nudge that repeatedly invites authenticated users back to the site, where they naturally encounter paywalled boundaries.

Registered users who are signed up for newsletters hit the paywall an average of 3.5 times per unique visitor, representing a 35x higher exposure rate compared to the average anonymous reader, who sits at a mere 0.1 exposures.

4. The compounding effect drives the majority of subscriptions

When high-intent audiences are paired with a high frequency of paywall exposures, the compounding effect generates the vast majority of subscriber growth.

The numbers paint a clear picture: the cohort of registered, newsletter-engaged users, which accounts for a tiny 0.7% fraction of the total audience, drives a disproportionate 43% of all digital subscription conversions. This equates to an extraordinary over-indexing factor of 61x. Registration hooks the high-intent reader, and the newsletter sequentially delivers the repeat paywall exposure required to close the sale.

5. Registration unlocks direct offer emails

The marketing permissions captured during the initial registration step open up a highly profitable parallel conversion path: direct offer emails.

By targeting prospects who are already kept warm by daily editorial newsletters, these high-impact, immediate sales emails successfully account for 18% of all subscription conversions.

The registration flywheel

The compounding dynamics of Broadsheet’s strategy form a self-sustaining lifecycle designed to maximise reader value:

1. Register: Capture invisible, anonymous readers via the registration wall to unlock the newsletter engine.
2. Engage: Deploy targeted newsletters to consistently return these authenticated readers back to paywalled content.
3. Expose: Systematically increase the frequency of paywall exposures over time.
4. Convert: Activate premium digital subscriptions through a combination of repeated paywall prompts and direct offer emails.

Next steps for Broadsheet

To refine the registration flywheel and further optimize conversion rates, Broadsheet is focusing on five core strategic enhancements:

• Refining analytics tracking: Adjusting internal analytics tracking frameworks to compile a completely transparent picture of user engagement metrics both immediately before and after registration
• Revamping user onboarding: Overhauling the initial post-registration onboarding flow to actively encourage the early adoption of editorial newsletters across the new database
• Introducing dynamic onsite experiences: Moving away from a static, one-size-fits-all approach to deliver tailored onsite journeys based on an individual’s specific engagement cohort
• Segmenting email campaigns: Categorising and filtering direct offer email campaigns to match the specific engagement levels of different user cohorts
• Continuous A/B testing: Initiating rigorous A/B testing variations directly on the registration wall interface to continuously optimize structural conversion efficiency

The post Broadsheet’s path from reader to subscriber: The registration flywheel in action appeared first on Audiencers.