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 assumption is this: engagement is one thing, and more of it is better. But engagement isn’t one thing. It’s the outcome of different reader behaviors, driven by different motivations.

Same reader, different moments

Think about how you consume news. Some mornings you want a quick overview. Some evenings you want to go deep. Sometimes you’re browsing. Sometimes you want distraction.

These aren’t different readers. They’re the same reader in different situations, with different needs.

A short session can mean the reader got exactly what they needed. A long one can mean depth — or friction. High article counts can mean curiosity, or confusion. The same metric means something different depending on what the reader was trying to do. Without that context, you’re pattern-matching on behavior you don’t fully understand.

Who you’re actually looking at

Here’s a pattern that shows up consistently across publisher data: a small group of heavy users (20+ visits per month) drives a disproportionate share of pageviews. A large flyby majority (one visit per month or fewer) makes up most of the audience but a tiny fraction of consumption. Frontpage clicks illustrate this well: they overrepresent heavy users. Optimizing for clicks risks building a homepage for the audience you already have, not the one you’re trying to grow.

In between sit the loyal readers, visiting 2 to 20 times a month. They have a relationship with you but haven’t yet built a habit. They’re the most likely to convert and retain — and the easiest to overlook, because heavy users dominate the averages. The real movement happens here: turning flybys into returning readers, and loyals into heavys.

What a summary feature taught us

Product decisions show what happens when you measure at the wrong level.

When we introduced article summaries across our portfolio at Tamedia — short digests at the top to help readers decide whether to go deeper — the concern was obvious: readers would skim and leave. That’s partly what happened. Scroll depth dropped for some users.

But at session level, something else emerged. Those readers went on to read more articles per visit, and overall session time increased. The summary helped them get oriented quickly and navigate to what mattered for them more in this moment.

Other readers used it differently. After reading the summary, they were more likely to finish the full article. It gave them confidence it was worth their time.

Two opposite behaviors at article level. Both positive at session level. Both pointing to the same outcome: a need met, and a higher likelihood to return.

Segment awareness can also shape product design from the start. We kept our fast news format intentionally compact. Heavy users quickly find what they need, while the freed-up space showcases the differentiated content that loyals and flybys need to keep coming back.

What this means for how you measure

The answer isn’t a more sophisticated metric. You need to be more deliberate about what you measure and why.

Look at your segments separately in your analytics tool. The same metric tells a different story across them — and the average hides most of it. Track them over time: a single snapshot tells you little; the direction of travel tells you a lot.

Article-level metrics will often mislead you. A reader can leave early and still have had a successful session. That’s why session-level metrics matter — but only when read together with segment data. A daily digest designed for quick orientation will show low time-on-page. That’s not underperformance — it’s the format working as intended. The right metric is whether those users come back the next day.

Try this in your next team meeting

Start in your next team meeting. Pick one feature or format you’ve recently launched or are evaluating. Review its impact at article level, then at session level. Then ask: for which segment was this actually useful — and in which moment? A multi-format feature is a good example: a reader who skipped the article but listened to the audio version on their commute — possibly in a podcast app, invisible to your analytics — may well return the next morning. Low article engagement, high likelihood to come back.

You’ll often find that what looks like low engagement in one view is exactly what success looks like in another.

The reader who got what they came for is more likely to return. Design your metrics to capture that.

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

Written by Catherine Léger, Director of Performance Marketing, & Mathieu Therrien, Director of Products, at Radio-Canada. They'll also be speaking on the topic at Audiencers' Festival Montreal on June 25th 2026.

Let’s talk about the fear that keeps product managers tossing and turning at night: the soul-crushing fear of alienating your audience. There’s nothing quite like the stress of watching users churn because you dared to put a barrier in their way.

Yet, a little over a year ago, Radio-Canada decided to stop holding its breath and start taking risks. We did the unthinkable for a public broadcaster: we implemented a hard registration wall across our entire app suite. It was a global first for a public news entity—a move driven by equal parts boldness and strategic necessity. We realized that if we wanted to remain relevant and maintain a long-term relationship with our audience, the “status quo” was no longer an option; it was now or never.

In this article, we share the results of this “high-stakes gamble” one year on. From transforming our internal digital maturity to seeing a massive +83% surge in monthly active accounts, we’ve proven that you don’t lose trust by asking for an account—you lose it by pretending you can build a future with anonymous visitors.

What we feared

Like everyone else in the industry, we had the same fear: if we block access, we block the audience. We worried that users would become discouraged, that the most impatient would leave, and that the trust we had built up over decades would be undermined. Internal skeptics argued that people would never create an account just to listen to the radio or read a quick news story, noting, “we’re not Netflix.” In short: the wall was supposed to cause people to flee.

The tipping point

And yet, we had to go for it. A wall was deployed on July 3, 2024. We launched on iOS, Android, and connected TVs, followed by a partial web rollout ahead of the Paris Olympics. On that day, we took the risk of frustrating our users in the name of long-term relationships.

What really happened

Spoiler alert: Not only did people not leave, but they came back in greater numbers and with accounts.

• +83% monthly active accounts in one year.
• +14% engaged visits to our platforms (excluding the Olympics).
• Peaks of over 800,000 active registered visitors per month.
• Stable engagement: No collapse in reading time or listening, and no abandoned applications.

Regarding user reaction, comments related to mandatory authentication accounted for less than 2% of user tickets, and the majority of those were simply requests for assistance.

Key lessons

We learned that registration is not perceived as an obstacle when it is justified, clearly explained, and respectful of the user experience.

Internal surveys show the impact on our organization:

• Nearly 90% of internal teams believe the initiative advanced the company’s digital maturity.
• 75% have a better understanding of the potential of authenticated data.
• 9 out of 10 already see concrete uses for this data in the coming year.

Why we must persevere

The wall is not an end; it’s a foundation. You can’t build lasting relationships with strangers, and you can’t personalize blindly. Mandatory authentication is an act of digital sovereignty that allows Radio-Canada to better understand, serve, and activate our audiences.

TLTR: Trust is not lost by asking for an account, but it can be lost by pretending that we can build the future with anonymous visitors. For a public media outlet like Radio-Canada, the status quo was and is impossible.

Written by Catherine Léger, Director of Performance Marketing, & Mathieu Therrien, Director of Products.

The post Obligatory registration at Radio-Canada: a successful gamble appeared first on Audiencers.

In a country with 4 official languages, and in the complex landscape of international public service media, SWI swissinfo.ch is a pretty unique case (to say the least!).

With a mandate to reach the Swiss diaspora and a globally curious audience, the publisher needs to navigate linguistic diversity and localized contexts, all digital- and community-first. 

Although you may not relate to their context, Swiss Info’s strategies to achieve all of the above certainly provide important lessons for the wider industry. 

We spoke with Veronica DeVore, Head of Audience, to discuss the operational and editorial challenges of adaptation over translation, the role of community engagement across borders, and product-building for different audiences.

Company card:

SWI swissinfo.ch is the international online service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC).

For many national broadcasters, the "international service" is often a secondary consideration. At SWI swissinfo.ch, it’s their core mission. Operating in 10 languages, ranging from the four Swiss national languages to English, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, the platform serves as a bridge between Swiss perspectives and global conversations, with about 75% of audiences located abroad.

“Our content puts Switzerland in touch with the world and reaches people in all 195 countries recognised by the United Nations.

Thanks to our journalistic quality, our articles are referenced up to 80 times a week in 46 languages and serve as a reliable source not only for diplomatic services and journalists abroad.” - Swissinfo.ch

Tapping into global touchpoints 

It’s part of the uniqueness of Swiss info and also part of the challenge: doing right by all of these language markets whilst bringing perspectives from Switzerland. That means reporting always has some touchpoint to Switzerland, but the team looks for points where it’s an internationally relevant conversation. 

“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

The post Beyond borders and between the lines: How swissinfo.ch engages a global audience in 10 languages appeared first on Audiencers.

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

This article is the second in a 6-part series where Max shares what he learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. If you haven't read the first one yet, start here. 

Why we’re focusing on media for this one

In most subscription businesses, the rules for accessing the paid offer are simple. You subscribe to a box, you get the box. You hit a usage limit on Claude, you’re asked to upgrade. You want to get access to Calm for guided meditation? You get 1 week, then have to pay. Each model has its logic, but it’s tied directly to the product.

In media, it’s different.

Media online was historically free (almost always). Then publishers moved to paid models, and products got more complex: apps, newsletters, podcasts, games, bundling, community. Because of this, an enormous variety of access models emerged.

So we decided to go deep into media alone in today’s episode. Because the question “what’s free and what’s paid” is one of the most consequential product decisions in our industry.

And there’s no right or wrong answer. The right model depends on your organization, your editorial DNA, your content, your business model… It’s specific to each media, each newsroom, each audience.

The goal here isn’t to tell you what to do. It’s to show you the range of what exists, so you can figure out where the opportunities are for your unique context.

The engagement-frustration trade-off

The data on this has been clear for a while now.

In 2021, we published the Digital Media Review (DMR – a research initiative with Google and Le Geste – a french association for publishers) at Poool. One data point stood out: the relationship between the share of traffic exposed to paid content and conversion. The correlation is clear: the more you expose, the more you convert. But only up to a threshold. Past that, conversion plateaus or falls. Frustration alone is not a sufficient reason to subscribe.

And the other side of the coin is just as important: the DMR also showed a strong correlation between traffic on paid articles and the share of users who simply leave the site when hitting a paywall. The more you frustrate, the more people bounce. That’s not just a missed conversion. That’s a direct hit on engagement, on page views, ad revenue, and your ability to build any relationship with that user.

In the same year, Mather Economics published a study (part of a GNI LatAm Subscriptions Lab report) looking at paywall hits per user. Subscription probability follows a bell curve: up with each hit, peaks, then back down. Same conclusion, different data.

Then in 2022, the New York Times shared what brought all of this together (Audiencers analyzed it here). When they launched their paywall in 2011, the meter limit was the same for everyone: a fixed number of free articles, a regwall, some more articles, and finally a paywall.

Over the years, they developed the Dynamic Meter, a machine learning model that sets personalized meter limits per user.

The core insight: the model optimizes for two metrics simultaneously, engagement and conversion. And these two metrics have an inherent trade-off. More paywalls → more subscriptions, but less readership. They proved this with randomized control trials: as the meter limit goes up, engagement increases but conversion drops.

With a fixed approach, you’re forced to choose. Maximize engagement, or maximize conversion. Not both. There’s always a window of lost revenue that a single rule can’t capture. The Dynamic Meter expands that window by personalizing: more frustration for high-propensity users, more openness for low-propensity users.

None of this is new. DMR: 2021. Mather Economics: 2021. NYT: 2022. We’ve known this for years. And yet, the vast majority of publishers still use a uniform paywall for all users.

If you don’t personalize, you’re forced to make a choice between engagement and frustration. And that choice won’t be the right one for all users. That’s why more and more sophistication has developed. And the jump from “manual” to “1-2-1” isn’t binary. There’s a whole spectrum in between.

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The 6 levels of paywall sophistication

Being at level 1 doesn’t mean you’re behind. But it means there are probably missed opportunities. The question is whether these missed opportunities are big enough to justify the resources needed to reach the next step.

• Level 1: Fully manual

Free and paid decided by hand, article by article. An Atlas & Audiencers’ study confirmed this is still the norm: the decision is based on the article’s perceived value. Breaking news free, analysis behind the wall (to simplify it to its core).

• Level 2: Manual + automated rules. Paid content still decided manually, but rules modify access based on additional criteria.

Foreign Policy shared their approach on The Audiencers. They segment by publish date (under 7 days: hard-walled; older: standard meter), but also by cohort. Users with high search intent and churned subscribers are hard-walled (high subscription propensity). Social referrals see a registration wall with a free page view (low subscription propensity, but conversion on registration is 100x higher than on subscription). That registration data became their strongest conversion driver. No AI needed. Just smart segmentation.

• Level 3: Manual with override.

The base decision is manual, but the system can override contextually: closing a free article for a high-propensity user, opening a premium one for a segment you want to engage. A first step toward personalization without losing editorial control.

• Level 4: Manual + a third automated category.

Free and premium decided manually, but a “grey zone” is managed automatically based on user profile, device, or source. Ideal for publishers in transition between fully manual and more automation, while still giving the editorial team a great deal of control (yes, the business side gets some autonomy, but only on categories validated with editorial).

• Level 5: Fully automated for conversion and engagement.

The system decides everything: whether to show a wall, which type, what meter limit, per user. The engagement/frustration trade-off managed dynamically.

Business Insider does this with AI: reading habits, traffic source, content genre propensity. The algorithm decides: paywall, registration wall, or nothing.

The NYT does it with the Dynamic Meter (as we talked about earlier). It learns from first-party engagement data (no demographic or psychographic features), adjusts per user, and continuously runs randomized trials to improve. This is the model that expanded the opportunity window we described above (source).

• Level 6: Fully automated for conversion, engagement, AND advertising.

The decision also integrates ad revenue. Fortune’s CCO at the time, Selma Stern, explained that if a user’s subscription probability is too low (first-time visit, smartphone, social media), the paywall opens and the page view is monetized through ads. The goal is to maximize total user value, wherever it comes from (which I personally think is an amazing model for short term profitability – because yes, sometimes long-term profitability might require less revenue in the short-term).

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

Figure out which level you’re at. If all your users see the same paywall regardless of behavior, source, or profile: what are you missing?

Try one rule-based variation before thinking about AI. Foreign Policy’s 100x stat didn’t require machine learning. It required a hypothesis and a way to test it.

Start by looking at your bounce rate on paywalled content. If a significant share of users leave the site when they hit your paywall, that’s revenue you’re losing twice: no subscription AND no engagement. The DMR, Mather Economics, and NYT data all showed the same thing: a uniform paywall always forces a trade-off. Even a simple first step (like showing a registration wall instead of a paywall to low-propensity users) can start closing that gap. That’s what Poool makes it easy to test.

See you next week for Article 3, where we leave media and look at how the best subscription businesses across all industries think about conversion.

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PS: This article was about the decision logic (who sees a paywall, and when). We didn’t cover the blocking method: how the paywall is technically implemented, front-end or server-side, and what that means for content protection, AI scraping, and SEO. That’s a separate topic, and we covered it here: “Paywalls & SEO“. All 6 levels above work with all blocking methods.

The post What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-off: episode 2 appeared first on Audiencers.

The Next Gen News Report 2 (NGN2), a collaboration between FT Strategies, Medill Knight Lab, and the Google News Initiative, provides a roadmap for news organizations to reach younger audiences. The core of the report is the 7 Modes of Engagement, which distinguishes how "next gen" consumers (ages 18-25+) discover, consume, and share news.

To reach the next generation of news consumers, publishers must stop thinking about “the audience” as a monolith and start designing for specific “modes” of behavior. The second Next Gen News report reveals that younger consumers are not passive; they are active “information curators” who cycle through seven distinct mindsets.

Let’s breakdown the 7 Modes of Engagement and uncover how you can win in them.

1. The “Sift” Modes: how news is discovered

In sift modes, users filter through their chosen information environments to separate news from noise. 

Across all markets studied, the report finds that young consumers actively curate their information ecosystems, seeking to reduce the daily mental load from sifting through endless content. Consumers intentionally mold their environment to refine and filter the news sources they encounter.

Observing this shaping process in the field showcases how sifting is richer than originally thought, now defined through three distinct modes of news discovery: 

Mode 1: Scroll

 The vibe: passively encountering news whilst browsing social feeds
 The energy: engagement is often spontaneous and fleeting, shaped by the emerging news producers they follow and platform algorithms.
 The strategy: intentionally create content that feels native to the platform and find patterns that break through to capture fleeting attention in the few seconds before viewers scroll to the next post

How to win at Scroll mode:

• Post consistently and predictably 
• Balance the tone to make news entertaining without trivializing serious events
• Develop repeatable storytelling templates.

Case Study: Local News International. Using “Dave,” a recurring character who plays the role of the viewer, they use skits and satire to cover complex news in 40 seconds. By using a consistent personality and humor, they stop the scroll and build a recognizable brand identity without formal news constraints.

Mode 2: Seek

 The vibe: actively looking for information on a specific event or topic
 The energy: a highly intentional mode of engagement, where consumers look for efficient, information-rich content that delivers depth and relevance without distraction
 The strategy: anticipate information needs and make depth accessible without friction, ensuring that credibility, clarity and efficiency guide every interaction.

How to win at Seek mode

• Guide discovery
• Deliver curated briefings
• Offer live formats that capitalize on immediate interest.
• Create seamless, intelligent discovery experiences (such as Ask FT or Ask The Post)
• Design intuitive interfaces within owned and operated platforms
• Provide high utility & control, such as personalization and tailored formats based on preferences, such as listening or watching

Case study: Particle News. Using AI, Particle gives readers the option of discplaying a news story in 6 different ways, including the 5 Ws, opposite takes on the same story or “Explain like I’m 5”

Mode 3: Subscribe

 The vibe: receiving news from trusted, curated sources (newsletters, podcasts, SMS) they have deliberately chosen
 The energy: people expect timely, important or novel updates from sources whose judgement they rely on and do not want to miss
 The strategy: timely, important or novel updates from reliable sources

How to win at Subscribe

• Sync with daily habits: design delivery around audience routines and preferences, not output cycle, and consider offering personalized delivery
• Make subscribe content dense and easy to complete
• Standardize the skeleton for instant scanning
• Keep it short, but provide options to go deeper

Case Study: The Edinburgh Minute. Short paragraphs, plain language, softer tone in the introduction. A long list of key stories, each with two sentences max, along with an emoji to introduce the topic, and a follow-up link.

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2. The “Consumption” Modes: how news is processed

In consumption modes, users have chosen to explore a subject, topic or piece of content more deeply.

Audiences are more likely to engage further when a story feels personally relevant, emotionally resonant or sparks their curiosity. How they first encounter that story does not dictate what happens next. Differing motivations shape how individuals choose to go deeper, whether by verifying facts, exploring context, or interpreting different perspectives.

The 2025 findings reinforce the three modes we previously identified that capture how audiences engage more deeply with the news once they move beyond sifting. These modes are:

Mode 4: Substantiate

 The vibe: verifying if a story is true or finding the "raw" facts.
 The energy: an individual has found a piece of information and wants to quickly and credibly confirm it
 The strategy: create content that is promptly delivered after a breaking news event, focusing on main claims and facts, with simple, clear and digestible evidence at its core

How to win at Substantiate mode:

• Meet your users where they are
• Prioritize accuracy and relevance over speed or volume
• Push information directly to audiences
• Lead with facts
• Create quick, easily digestible formats 
• Show your working: stitch primary source materials into the content and show the process

Case Study: UnderTheDeskNews. They often presents sources behind the presenter, such as maps of military facilities, to promote substantiation. These successful news producers clearly annotate from where information has come using overlays on videos or references in text, and they include links in captions and bios

Mode 5: Study

 The vibe: going deep to master a topic of personal or professional interest
 The energy: a desire to learn, upskill and be inspired. For some, Study mode is a pleasant distraction
 The strategy: producers can create long-form, information-dense content that has high-production value to keep engagement high, while showcasing their lived experience as a means to draw users into the story.

How to win at Study mode:

• Bring the story to life through immersion.
• Show interest
• Open with the motive, not just the topic
• Use mini-brands or shows as a creative sandbox
• Start with a learning goal to orient the audience and prime attention
• Favor evergreen or under-explored themes
• Build concepts progressively and go deep
• Bring it to life: gather original evidence, showcase it in original ways and develop a signature form

Case study: HowTown. 15-plus-minute long-form videos that have clear chapter markers and distill key information while allowing users to easily go back or skip specific sections.

Mode 6: sensemake

 The vibe: looking for context to understand why a story matters and what to think about it
 The energy: exploring different viewpoints to form opinions. This mode is driven by curiosity and a desire for co-learning spaces
 The strategy: create spaces that invite perspective and transparency, helping audiences process disagreement and find orientation amid uncertainty

How to win at Sensemake mode:

• Create open conversations 
• Create open spaces for honest conversation where producers and audiences can think aloud
• Clearly disclose your intention, bias or viewpoint
• Orient and include the audience: vary show formats to deepen engagement and reach audiences across information needs
• Use livestreams to transform news into a shared, real-time act
• Use satire wisely (it should stimulate critical thinking): build recurring inside jokes to make complex topics feel approachable and foster a sense of belonging

Case Study: Morning Brew. Always linking to the original business story to anchor it to one company and how it’s being covered. Satire is created through the use of props, funny captions and over-the-top personas or characters.

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3. The “Social” Mode: how news is shared

Mode 7: Socialize

 The vibe: sharing news to connect with others, express identity, or start a conversation. Sharing news is less a discrete consumption habit and more of a long-term relational action to be considered in its own context.
 The energy: there is no more valued, trusted source than friends and family, and often these connections help cut through content overwhelm.
 The strategy: build for sharing!

How to win the Social mode:

• Make sharing a “product feature” that makes the action effortless for readers
• Create content that people want to send to their peers
• Leading news producers tell human stories
• Consider using memes to condense meaning and inject humor

The takeaway for publishers

The “Next Gen” consumer is suffering from information overwhelm. To win, publishers must transition from being “content factories” to “mode-specific service providers.” Whether it’s winning the first two seconds of a Scroll or providing the deep-dive tools for Study, success in 2026 and beyond depends on meeting the audience exactly where they are.

The post Beyond the feed: mastering the 7 modes of next gen news engagement appeared first on Audiencers.

Newsletters are a powerful engaging, habit-forming and loyalty-building tool for publishers employing a reader revenue model. And there are a huge variety of ways that you can convince a reader to convert.

To inspire your efforts, we’ve created this collection of benchmarks, categorized by format-type.

Landing page

Banner

Side module

Within the article

At the bottom of the article

Pop-up

Newsletter wall

Newsletter quiz

Special section for The Washington Post who built a newsletter quiz for readers to discover the newsletter best suited to their interests.

The post Benchmark ideas to increase newsletter subscribers appeared first on Audiencers.

Anil Chitrapu is a Senior Product Manager at Wirecutter (The New York Times), focused on audience growth, AI, and personalization.

In this article, Anil takes a closer look into the operational choices, guardrails, and tech powering Wirecutter For You, the new email that tailors article recommendations to each reader - without compromising editorial judgment or inbox trust.

Wirecutter, The New York Times’ product recommendation service, shares the same commitment to rigorous journalism that defines our broader newsroom. The mission has always been to help readers make confident, informed decisions about the products in their lives – from the best gifts to the most reliable home appliances – through reporting that is diligent, transparent, and practical.

But reaching readers today requires more than great reporting; it demands a thoughtful approach to how we surface that journalism. As information overload grows and attention spans shorten, the challenge expands beyond what we publish to how we make sure each reader finds what’s most relevant to them. Within Wirecutter, we’ve long debated how to use technology to serve that mission responsibly. Our goal has never been to replace the editorial voice that makes our product recommendations distinct, but to use personalization as a way to extend it: to help every reader find the next right thing at the right time, in a way that still feels unmistakably like us. Every design decision flowed from that principle: personalization should extend editorial judgment, not replace it.

This idea led to the creation of Wirecutter For You, a weekly email that pairs our journalism with a robust personalization model to deliver tailored article recommendations. The system we created is designed for flexibility and oversight, allowing us to refine its rules and outputs in tandem. In the sections that follow, we’ll share why we built it, how it works, and what this taught us about bridging editorial craft and algorithmic systems.

Why we built it

As we entered Q4 (our yearly peak shopping period), Wirecutter wanted to build a resilient and automated channel to help our readers find their way to more of our journalism. Even with our deep library, many readers only ever see a fraction of Wirecutter’s journalism. Personalization gave us a way to surface the right story at the right moment. Our goal was to develop a product that would be able to learn from a reader’s browsing history while maintaining Wirecutter’s standards.

At a high level, we wanted to answer a simple question: how could we introduce personalization to Wirecutter in a way that still felt entirely editorial and intentional? For us, that meant starting in a space where we could test carefully, learn quickly, and retain full control over tone and trust – and email was the perfect place to do that. It gave us a contained environment to experiment with personalization primitives, measure impact, and ensure deliverability, all without changing the on-site experience until we got signal.

We designed the program’s format with three primary goals.

• First, we wanted to build a weekly reading habit that complemented our existing editorial newsletters – adding value without displacing what readers already trusted.
• Second, we used the email as a controlled space to learn: testing personalization logic, tracking engagement and trust metrics, and validating that the signals we captured could scale across unique email sends.
• Finally, we treated this as an early framework for how personalization should operate across Wirecutter: establishing the rules, measurement standards, and editorial guardrails that future products could build on.

Because this was new territory, we defined success less by traffic spikes and more by durable reader signals: quality over clicks, inbox trust and deliverability, and long-term engagement that deepened – not diluted – our relationship with subscribers.

What we launched

After a small hardcoded pilot earlier in the year gave us confidence in the format, we began developing a dynamic weekly email that could scale – one capable of dynamically tailoring article recommendations for readers while staying true to our editorial standards. The goal was simple but ambitious: to create a product that felt more personal than automated, guided by the same standards our newsroom applies to any published work.

We launched Wirecutter For You as a weekly Sunday send, designed to deliver personalized story recommendations alongside a concise, editor-written lede. Each version draws from a reader’s recent engagement and a curated, editor-approved content pool. We started with a small, highly engaged audience to monitor performance and maintain deliverability as we introduced a new sender identity.

The post How NYT Wirecutter shipped a personalized newsletter in 4 weeks appeared first on Audiencers.

Jason Langsner is Group Product Manager, Data + AI, at The Washington Post. In this article he shares how they built The Post's in-house generative AI chatbot tool that uses RAG to answer user questions.

The Washington Post may be best known for our world-class and award-winning reporting, but we also pride ourselves on being industry leaders in technology and innovation. In addition to producing journalism, we also develop products and solutions in house to improve our users’ experience, including through our expanding AI Pod Research & Development (R&D) lab and newly launched WP Incubator.

The post The Washington Post: how and why we built “Ask The Post AI” appeared first on Audiencers.

This article summarizes the session given by Max Leroy, Audience & Product Strategist, formerly of The New York Times, CNN, and POLITICO, at The Audiencers’ Festival in Paris on September 16th, 2025.

This session in 5 bullet points:

• The real danger to the media? Not AI or Google, but our disconnect from readers’ needs.
• Plummeting trust, dwindling audiences, refusal to pay: in any other industry, we would be talking about the collapse of product-market fit.
• Urgent action is needed: we must stop pointless obsessions and return to users’ needs.
• This series of articles presents five toxic obsessions and offers five useful obsessions for the sustainability of the media: short circuits, communities, respect for audience needs, experimentation, and advertising/UX balance.
• This second chapter covers obsession number two: refusing to interact with audiences

What if the greatest threat to the media were neither AI, nor the “big bad wolf” Google, nor the decline in social traffic, not even the crisis in publishers’ business model? What if the real problem were us? Us and our persistent inability to take an interest in those we are supposed to serve: our readers.

The post The media industry’s 5 toxic obsessions: no.2 refusing to interact with audiences appeared first on Audiencers.

Heiko Scherer is the founder and CEO of tchop. In this article, Heiko discusses how the homepage has changed - it's no longer about one screen. It’s about shared intent that runs through the entire product experience.

Homepage traffic has been drifting downward for more than a decade. In most newsrooms, this is no longer up for debate. The signs are clear: visits have declined, session durations are shrinking and the ways people arrive are more fragmented than ever. What used to be the front door is now, for many users, a side entrance they rarely walk through.

Still, what’s more interesting than the data is how publishers have responded.

Some tried refreshing the homepage with new layouts, hoping a better design might bring users back. Others added personalisation layers, believing algorithms might rebuild the kind of editorial judgement that once guided readers. A few removed the homepage altogether, shifting toward infinite scrolls or card-based structures that resemble social platforms.

The post The homepage isn’t dead, it just stopped being a page appeared first on Audiencers.