Music fans, news listeners, and “cultural FOMO”: How KCRW built memberships around three audiences
How KCRW grew to 55,000 paying members: three audience segments, human curation, free registration and events that bring listeners together
Case Studies
Case studies from digital publishing brands around the world to help you better engage, convert and retain your audiences in a reader revenue model.
180 posts
How SvD grew digital subscriptions by 60% in two years by putting editorial first
How Svenska Dagbladet grew from 98,000 to more than 158,000 digital subscribers in two years: one North Star, paid by default and aha content
Inside Grupo Joly’s subscription strategy: How Spain’s regional giant leverages registration and dynamic paywalls
How Andalusia’s Grupo Joly built subscriptions without losing ad revenue: a registration wall first, 34% paywall visibility, 92% on annual plans
DC Thomson’s Sports Pack: a smaller subscription for readers who wanted sport and nothing else
Scottish publisher DC Thomson offered a Sports Pack subscription using already existing content, leading to higher conversion & retention rates.
How we segmented our paywall audience to optimize ARPUÂ
Why Handelsblatt's ARPU growth started with showing readers less, not charging them more, and why the winning paywall variant wasn't the one with the best conversion rate.
Reader revenue at Immediate Media: 1.2 million paid subscribers, and a custom model for almost every brand
Growing digital separately, utility over content & a different model for each brand. Immediate share how they're working to reach 3M subscribers
Le Monde on YouTube: 4 million views a day, and why it won’t build a TV channel
Le Monde's Chief Digital Officer shares how the newspaper is going video-first without becoming a TV channel.
Why SFGATE launched an app instead of a paywall, and called it “Friends”
Rather than add a paywall on their site, SFGATE built something separate: a paid app called Friends of SFGATE, designed with lasting reader relationships in mind
The Economist’s push to get closer to readers with audio- and video-only subscription
How The Economist has spent the last few years developing products and offers that foster deeper, more human relationships with readers
3 acquisition tactics from Foreign Policy, a publication offering near-to-zero free articles
Foreign Policy's Corinne Osnos shares three low-effort, high-impact tactics her team uses to bring in readers despite running one of the strictest paywalls in media.