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

Pugpig’s 2026 Media App Report is, on the surface, a story about apps being taken seriously again. Engagement is up, A/V, games, push and personalisation are the priorities of the year. 

However, a few aspects caught my attention: first, how the report handles offline usage; second, what publishers (and this report) seem to be missing regarding household engagement opportunities; and third, how restrictive most publishers are when it comes to sampling.

Take the standard funnel, or rather, loop ;). We’re all familiar with the sequence: acquire, activate, engage, retain etc. It’s surprising that nearly half of app users are anonymous, but that most publishers barely optimise anything to convert them. The habit-forming features sit at the bottom of the adoption table, with games at 16% and video at 22%. Subscriber retention, the KPI that tends to be most important, is one of the least well measured, with only a small fraction reporting advanced capability. I have some thoughts on where publishers could do much better for themselves.

> Audiencers’ summary of the Pugpig Media App Report 2026 is here

1. Offline is not an edge case

The Pugpig report treats cellular and offline usage as a small, almost incidental slice of total screenviews. I find this hard to believe.

For readers who commute, fly and move through cellular blackspots constantly (at least in the UK), that slice is nowhere near as small as the report suggests. At the Economist offline and cellular usage represented around 10% and 30% respectively, and at the FT it was broadly the same. If half of those cellular sessions hit a patchy signal, then roughly one in four opens happens with the app on the back foot. Before we rebuilt The Economist app natively, that experience was painfully brittle. And our best subscribers were paying the price (and letting us know about it in volumes).

Think about who reads on a tube platform, in a station concourse or at thirty thousand feet. They are people who deliberately brought your content with them, likely your most loyal base, and it is exactly where too many apps still don’t handle things gracefully: articles that half-load, images that spin, editions that won’t sync, glitchy ad reloads, saves that fail without telling anyone. 

There is a measurement problem too. Session analytics under these conditions are notoriously flakey, so are probably undercounted. The report’s engagement numbers are likely a floor, not a ceiling, for audiences who read on the move. Treat offline and low connectivity as a retention issue, and test your edition, save and caching with the network switched off, as well as just slow.

Of course, Product Designers always design for state (eg connectivity), but in these constrained times, this is often the polish that gets deprioritised, and then forgotten about, by teams under pressure to deliver to tight deadlines. Publishers who’ve raised the bar won’t necessarily be the ones with the flashiest new formats – though they’ll likely have deeper pockets. Pugpig’s own data half-confirms this: mobile-plus-editions apps, the least fashionable format in the report, still outperform mobile-only apps on almost every engagement measure. My hunch is the same pattern holds for reliability under poor connectivity. It’s unglamorous, it won’t make your slideware pop when selling it to stakeholders, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that decides whether a reader who trusted you on a delayed train chooses to open your app tomorrow, and the next day. 

2. Digital still prices like it’s scarce

Pre-internet, it was fair game for anyone else in the house to read the primary reader’s copy of the newspaper. In the subscriptions era, digital has done the opposite from day one: one person, one paywall, one login, and a family of four either buys four subscriptions nobody can justify, or one person subscribes and everyone else free-loads, unconverted and invisible.

Very few publishers seem to have figured out that this is simply a design choice, and a poor one for tracking true engagement behaviours.

There are only three that spring to mind. The Times led with “bonus accounts” some time last year, letting subscribers share access with family or friends at no extra cost, essentially recreating the breakfast-table version of the newspaper digitally. This was inspired by Le Figaro’s play to reduce password sharing. The New York Times has introduced a paid family tier, up to three extra logins for $30 a month total rather than four separate $25 subscriptions, each with its own personalised account and its own Wordle streak. 

The Times treats sharing as a retention feature you don’t charge extra for. Everyone in a shared account has their own login. A family plan with individual, personalised accounts isn’t just cheaper access, it’s four separate chances to turn an anonymous user into a known user, to learn what they read, deepen the relationship with features suited to them, rather than one subscriber and one or two freeloaders who never show up in a single engagement analysis. 

From there a loop forms. An invited member gets their own login, activates on their own terms, and their usage compounds. Household engagement makes cancelling harder, and a member with a year of habits behind them is a far better candidate to subscribe in their own right than a cold prospect.

It may take time, but it works. The Times found people using shared bonus accounts were 76% more likely to say they’d stay subscribed, and churn on those accounts ran under 0.01%. Shared use turns a single subscription into a sticky household relationship.

NYT’s reasoning for the family tier was explicit: people with a lighter relationship to the paper become far more likely to convert once a friend or family member brings them in. When they convert or renew the household plan, they can invite someone else, expanding reach household by household.

Put this next to the anonymous-user problem from earlier and the opportunity becomes obvious. Nearly half of app users are anonymous, and most publishers barely optimise to convert them. A family member added to a household plan is the friendliest version of that anonymous user: someone already inside the tent, already reading, and one step away from being known.

The ones building this loop have figured it out. They’re turning the thing publishers tend to treat as leakage into the fastest lever they have for both retention and growth.

3. Be more generous with sampling/trials

According to the Pugpig report, only 26% of publishers say the main role of their app is subscriber acquisition, yet many apps attract plenty of non-subscribers who are far less engaged than payers. I’ve read countless angry reviews from people who followed a prompt to download the app and hit a paywall after a single article. Habits take weeks or more likely months to bed-in, not one read. The Times’ £1 for three months is a far better way to let new entrants get a feel for the product than a seven day trial ever will.

Apps are getting better at keeping the people they already have. Meaningful opportunities are hiding where standard metrics don’t bother to look: the reader with no signal, the family member re-using a login, and the anonymous user we ask to pay before they’ve had a chance to connect with your journalism. How can we expect younger people to adopt news apps that weren’t even designed for how they want to consume media, if we don’t even give them a decent chance to try it out?

James Webb has led mobile and web product groups at The Economist and the Financial Times. For a deeper look at why 82% of publishers misdiagnose their delivery bottlenecks, read The capacity myth: why your product bottleneck is actually a focus problem, on Substack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Le Monde invests in YouTube

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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.

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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

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In a world of falling traffic, trust and the increasing use of AI, building relationships with readers is more important than ever. It’s the difference between a fly-by and a loyal, returning user who interacts meaningfully, feels a sense of belonging with your brand, who advocates for you and brings in new audiences.

It’s a strategy that many publishers are already benefiting from.

This article shares a few of these case studies, diving into what’s working, sharing lessons to take away and articles to dive in deeper.

1. The New York Times: reporters in the comments

The New York Times recently turned comments into an editorial product to develop relationships with readers and enhance the perceived expertise and trust in journalists.

The post Steal this strategy: examples of publishers building relationships with readers (and how to replicate them) appeared first on Audiencers.

Le Nouvel Obs is one of France’s most iconic media brands, with a unique editorial legacy. But for years, its digital strategy was largely driven by audience volume. When Sandro Martin arrived as CEO in September 2024, traffic had already been declining for nearly two years. Rather than chasing more content and more clicks, the team chose a different path: fewer articles, stronger editorial choices, and a renewed focus on reader value.

In this interview, Sandro Martin explains how Le Nouvel Obs reshaped its editorial production, data culture, newsroom organization, newsletters, and reader relationship strategy to build a more differentiated and sustainable digital model.

> 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

Le Nouvel Obs is a prestigious publication with a unique place in French history, but for a long time digital strategy was based solely on audience numbers. When you arrived, those numbers had been declining for nearly two years. How did you respond?

In 2024, our digital strategy was based primarily on two metrics: overall audience and subscriber growth, with no real prioritization. However, our audience had indeed been in steady decline for nearly 24 months, and our ability to recruit new subscribers had plateaued at levels lower than those of our direct competitors.

In recent years, Le Nouvel Obs had undertaken a major overhaul of its platforms, which is already a positive step, but without completely rethinking how they align with the editorial and marketing strategy.

So, when I arrived, Editor-in-Chief Cécile Prieur and I sought to realign these three dimensions—editorial, marketing, and user experience—around shared priorities. My arrival as the new CEO allowed us to revisit issues with the editorial team and make it a central pillar of our transformation. This initiative was launched in late 2024, following a study trip to the United States, which served as the catalyst.

To get started, you brought in an outside consultant. What was the idea behind that. To get an outside perspective, or to speed things up?

We did indeed decide to work with Max Leroy, an Audience and Product Strategist. Having spent the early part of his career in the US—notably at CNN and The New York Times—and later at POLITICO Europe, Max brought a wealth of international experience. Our goal wasn’t to outsource the strategic thinking, but rather to save time, structure our approach, and objectively validate our intuitions through macro-level data analysis and international benchmarks.

This collaboration allowed us to quickly identify our true priorities and rule out several false leads. Four central objectives emerged:

• Showcase our editorial value-add more effectively in the digital space, where the flood of breaking news often diluted our core offering
• Support the evolution of editorial production to better meet our readers’ changing needs
• Strengthen reader relationships by moving beyond the mere logic of traffic and pageviews
• Evolve our organization to focus more energy, expertise, and decision-making power on digital platforms

We opted for a highly pragmatic approach that combined data analysis, team feedback, and strategic planning workshops. The goal was to arrive at actionable outcomes and shared decisions in order to begin implementation.

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Regula Marti helps media organizations navigate transformation at the intersection of editorial, product, technology, and business strategy.

In this article, Regula discusses how engagement isn’t a single metric to maximize — it reflects different reader needs and moments, where the same behavior can signal success or friction depending on context. She recommends moving beyond averages and article-level metrics to analyze engagement by audience segments and sessions, focusing on whether readers get what they came for and return.

Most publishers have more engagement data than ever — and still struggle to agree on what engagement actually means. The tools aren’t the problem. The problem is the assumption behind them.

The post The reader who left your article early might be your most engaged user appeared first on Audiencers.

Catherine Léger, Director of Performance Marketing, & Mathieu Therrien, Director of Products, at Radio-Canada share why and how they required readers to login to access their app, a gamble that has paid off.

> Radio-Canada put a hard registration wall across its entire app suite in July 2024, a global first for a public broadcaster. Internal sceptics pushed back: "we're not Netflix"

> A year on, monthly active accounts are up 83% and engaged visits up 14% excluding the Olympics, with peaks above 800,000 registered visitors a month. Reading and listening time held steady

> The feared backlash never came. Complaints about mandatory sign-in made up under 2% of support tickets, and most of those were people asking for help rather than objecting

> The bigger shift was internal: nearly 90% of teams say it advanced the company's digital maturity, and 9 in 10 already have concrete uses planned for authenticated data

The why

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