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 first chapter covers obsession number one: exhausting ourselves by criticizing platforms.

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 symptoms of this disconnect are measured each year by the Digital News Report and the figures for France are damning:

• Trust in free fall: Only 29% of French people still trust the media, compared to 39% 10 years ago. This score places us among the lowest in Europe, just ahead of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary
• An audience that shuns the news: More than a third of the population (36%) actively avoids the news, exhausted by information overload and paralyzed by information anxiety
• A value that is no longer perceived: Barely 11% of readers are willing to pay for online news

In any other industry, such a verdict would be final: the loss of product-market fit. The absolute priority would then be to stop everything and go back to talking to our users, understanding their pain points and needs, and reinventing our value proposition.

How did we get to the point where our product no longer meets an essential need of its audience?

Yet where do our eyes and conversations among media professionals turn? To the evolution of algorithms and the experiences of Google, Meta, X, and OpenAI, which are drying up our traffic sources. Or to the adoption of ad blockers and the end of third-party cookies, which are jeopardizing our advertising revenue… We are obsessed with other people’s products, those that impact our distribution. Meanwhile, a new generation of content creators is exploding, forging direct and authentic bonds of trust with their audience, something we no longer know how to do with ours.

Of course, the risks posed by platforms are real, and the political, legal, and economic battle to defend our value is necessary. But it must not become an excuse to paralyze what is essential: the work of our editorial, product, and marketing teams to urgently regain that product-market fit. We must focus our efforts on what we can control and accept the rest. Fear does not prevent danger.

Let’s dare to use a metaphor that’s not so far from reality. Imagine for a moment that traditional media are like historic car manufacturers, spending their days complaining about gas prices, CO2 emissions regulations, low-emission zones, or the end of combustion engines in 2035. Meanwhile, in a decade, electric cars have become more accessible and cycling in cities has made a strong comeback. Users have moved on: you don’t fight product-market fit, you pursue it.

It’s time to radically shift our obsessions. We need to abandon toxic topics over which we have limited influence and refocus on our main lever for action: our relationship with our current and potential audiences. In this series for The Audiencers, I invite you to explore five of these toxic obsessions that paralyze our teams. The hope is to replace them with five obsessions centered on the needs of our audiences and thus find our way back to product-market fit.

Toxic obsession 1/5 : Criticizing platforms

Our first toxic obsession is to waste time and energy denouncing platforms. We criticize their products, algorithms, and decisions, but let’s be clear: these companies are empires that write their own laws and have the means to listen to (almost) no one except Donald Trump, who supports them. Some executives even display a visceral, personal contempt for the press. Why, then, would they negotiate sincerely with us, when our dependence gives them all the leverage?

The fight for neighboring rights or against uncontrolled crawling is legitimate. But to wage it from a position of quasi-absolute digital vassalage is to condemn oneself to reaping only crumbs. The real leverage for negotiation lies neither in Brussels nor in the forums we sign, but in our direct relationship with our audience. To start a serious conversation with Google, it would be wise not to depend on its services (Search, News, Discover). For many media outlets in France, Google accounts for more than 50% of traffic, and in some cases more than 85%.

Faced with changes to their products—AI Overviews in particular—our instinct is to want to slow things down and demand guarantees. This ignores the reality of their market. Google is not on a crusade against the press; Google is fighting for its own survival in the face of the massive adoption of LLM chatbots as response engines by users. Google’s goal is to stay in the game by responding to this new need. In this battle of titans, we are neither their ally nor their enemy; we are simply the battlefield.

To replace this trait: Grow our audiences through short supply chains

Our obsession with platforms keeps us in a reactive, sterile, and exhausting position. Since the balance of power is stacked against us on their turf, the only viable strategic response is to change the playing field.

Rather than fighting to optimize increasingly precarious traffic, we must devote our resources to building short circuits with our audiences. It’s up to us to transform volatile, algorithm-dependent readers into a loyal and engaged audience that we can activate ourselves. This approach makes our newsletters, apps, events, and communities the main tools of our resilience strategy to resume negotiations from a better position.

[/restricted-content]

The post The media industry’s 5 toxic obsessions: no.1 criticizing platforms appeared first on Audiencers.

This article summarizes the session given by Fabien Mulot, Marketing Director at L’Équipe, at The Audiencers’ Festival in Paris on September 16, 2025.

> After the acquisition spike from the Paris 2024 Olympics, L'Équipe built 12 retention projects around four lifecycle moments: onboarding, stimulating usage, retention and re-subscription, each with its own indicator

> The number that drove everything: every additional paid article read in the first three days cuts month-one churn by five points. Onboarding now pushes new subscribers to read two

> That onboarding loop shows what the subscription includes, prompts personalisation through alerts, newsletters and favourites, then serves paid content matched to those stated interests

> The cancellation form was rebuilt through A/B testing. Adding a summary screen and showing personalised discounts both improved retention

> An RFV engagement score adapted to L'Équipe guides every decision, with a strategic threshold of 100. Two-thirds of subscribers sit above it

How can subscribers be retained once the Olympic Games are over? For L’Équipe, the challenge is immense: transforming the momentum of a global event into lasting loyalty. Fabien Mulot shared the methods implemented in 2025, which he summarized as “12 projects” organized around four stages in subscribers lifecycle: onboarding, stimulating usage, retention, and re-subscription:

Each stage has been assigned its own performance indicator:

1. Onboarding: the crucial first 3 days

Data analysis showed a strong correlation between immediate consumption and retention. Reading at least two paid articles within the first three days significantly reduces churn M+1.

This is the core of L’Équipe’s new onboarding strategy: a web and app loop that showcases the benefits of subscription, encourages users to personalize their experience (alerts, newsletters, favorites), and then prompts them to immediately read paid content tailored to their interests.

The post L’Équipe: 12 projects to retain subscribers following the Paris Olympics appeared first on Audiencers.

This article summarises the session given by Mathias Douchet, Chief Product Officer at The Telegraph, during the Audiencers’ Festival in Paris on 16th September 2025. The slides from his presentation can be downloaded at the end of the article.

> The Telegraph puts around 90% of its product resources into the mobile app, with teams built around it. App usage is now the single most predictive indicator of subscriber retention

> That displaced what they used to prioritise. Multi-channel engagement and newsletter signups were the signals they watched before, and app usage beats both

> The numbers behind it: app users have eight more sessions a week than web users, and 30-day retention is six percentage points higher. App usage grew 15% in a year

> Access is light freemium: the home screen and a few articles open, the rest for subscribers, with a 14-day trial for new app users in exchange for an email. It converts better than a standard paywall

> The catch they are open about is that people drop off when the trial ends unless the follow-up is well orchestrated, so activation after day 14 is the live problem

Founded in 1855, The Telegraph is one of the UK’s leading news outlets, with 30 million monthly readers across its website, app and print editions, and over a million subscribers.

The product culture is long-standing and well-established, with the ability to make clear and decisive decisions about subscriptions and the reader experience.

The mobile app: a flagship product

In 2022, The Telegraph merged its two apps: the first was a digital version of the newspaper – highly regarded but little used; the second was a live feed version – more widely distributed but not very popular.

The current app is the result of 3-4 years of work, with engaging additional features such as games, news feeds, discoveries and newsletters.

The Telegraph app in a few words: 
-> Freemium model: a selection of free articles, the rest is reserved for subscribers
-> A 14-day free trial is offered to new app users
-> App usage has increased by 15% in a year
-> 8 more sessions each week vs web
-> 6 percentage points higher 30-day retention vs web

Of all the projects tested in recent years, not everything has worked, and that’s key to the approach: test quickly, keep what works, and discard the rest.

The access model is simple: light freemium. The home screen and a few articles are visible to everyone, while the rest is reserved for subscribers. To compensate for the significant amount of closed content, new app users are offered a 14-day trial, available via email. This allows for data collection and has proved more valuable to conversion rates than a standard paywall. The downside however is that users may drop out after 14 days if the follow-up is not well orchestrated, hence the ongoing work on activation and retention after the trial.

The app significantly out-performs web

Mobile app users have eight more sessions per week than web users and show six more subscription retention points at 30 days.

App usage is becoming the most predictive indicator of retention, ahead of other signals that were previously considered priorities, such as multi-channel engagement and newsletter subscriptions. This justifies the strategic refocusing and budget shift.

The post The Telegraph: retaining subscribers with a killer mobile strategy appeared first on Audiencers.

This article summarizes Télérama’s session at the Audiencers’ Festival in Paris on September 16th, 2025. On stage: Fleur Lavedan, Chair of the Executive Board, Annabelle Bizard, Digital Marketing Director, and Tom Alexandre, Product Director.

> Télérama built a streaming guide from an asset it already had: 20,000 reviews written by 145 journalists, France's largest cultural newsroom, repackaged around the question of what to watch tonight

> The insight driving it was that editorial alone doesn't create a daily habit. Without a service layer telling you where a film is actually streaming, readers have no reason to come back every evening

> They combined rather than chose. Two prototypes were tested, an editorially curated hot-to-cold list and a single daily recommendation, and the launched product uses both

> The archive is joined to third-party availability data from Plurimedia and JustWatch, with every entry linking back to a Télérama review, so automation carries the service and journalists carry the judgement

> One month after launch: 3,360 new subscribers, a conversion rate 20 times the usual, and monthly visits up 6%

At Télérama, product innovation only makes sense if it serves the magazine’s founding ambition: to inspire a love of culture and guide curious minds through a world that has become increasingly rich and diverse.

Faced with the explosion of streaming platforms, the editorial team wanted to address a universal frustration: spending evenings searching for something to watch rather than actually watching. Their response: a “Platform” guide, designed as a digital extension of the TV schedule.

Télérama has a rare asset: more than 20,000 reviews of films, series, and documentaries produced by 145 journalists, the largest cultural editorial team in France. But to transform this heritage into a digital format, it was necessary to go beyond a simple editorial reorganization.

The Platform project was born out of the conviction that without a service dimension, it would be impossible to create a daily reflex among readers.

So it all started with… a drawing:

The product team tested several approaches, including a “hot-lukewarm-cold” system based on the logic of editorial lists…

….and a minimalist version focused on a single daily recommendation:

The end result combines both: a mix of edited content and automation, enriched by service data provided by Plurimedia and JustWatch, with a systematic link to a Télérama review:

The launch was treated as a genuine digital statement. Massive app installation campaigns, open days, support from Le Monde Group publications, synchronization with the brand campaign… everything was aligned.

The post 3,360 new subscribers in a month: Télérama’s new streaming guide product pays off appeared first on Audiencers.

Anthony Capon is Product Director for RMC and BFM’s digital platforms. Here, he discusses a landmark project launched in March 2024: the in-house development of a vertical video feed on their platforms. The format was designed to address three key challenges facing the group: increasing user engagement, attracting a younger audience, and creating new monetization opportunities.

> BFM built a TikTok-style vertical video feed inside its own apps and site rather than only posting to the platforms. Eighteen months on it averages 2.5 million views a month

> The engagement number is the interesting one. Each time someone opens the feed they watch seven to ten videos, which is exactly the behaviour they were trying to import

> The hard part was never the content. Their 16:9 player couldn't handle smooth vertical scrolling, and video preloading, essential on 4G or patchy coverage, was the most complex piece to solve

> Monetisation was designed in from day one rather than added later. Ads are preloaded too, on the same logic as the videos, so an ad never breaks the scroll

> The whole thing ran on a five-person pilot team with one person per discipline: product, engineering, editorial, ad tech and marketing, meeting weekly with clear decision rights

For BFM, one of France’s most popular news brands and platforms, video is a strategic asset, a source of expertise and a competitive advantage. And it’s all the more important in an ecosystem where the current challenge is to engage and retain our audiences on our own platforms.

So, it seemed obvious to us that we needed to develop this content, in all its forms, depending on news cycles, audiences, and consumption environments.

On our BFM platforms, we felt that there was a need for a format that could boost engagement, attract a younger audience, and serve our business strategy.

Vertical video was the obvious choice:

• It has a history with us, as we launched BFMTV’s live video in vertical format a few years ago
• It’s already a very important product for BFM, feeding into heavy usage among our most active audiences on social media (particularly Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube)
• It’s a good branding lever for our editorial teams and brands, not to mention an opportunity for monetization through advertising

But between the idea discussed in a meeting with the editorial team and the moment you scroll through your first feed in the app…

Let’s just say Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Reproducing the addictive scroll: behind the scenes of creating vertical video in-house

For the Product & Tech teams, our starting point was pretty simple: how could we replicate the swiping motion we all use on Instagram or TikTok on our own player, with our constraints, our content, and our UX?

Before writing a single line of code, we launched a quick but effective discovery phase (a nod to ProductROI enthusiasts) because we knew where we were going.

The goal: beyond the extensive benchmarking (particularly among our US counterparts), we asked ourselves how we could understand the mechanics of vertical formats that capture so much attention—and how we could adapt them to our editorial and technical context.

Of course, we also added analyses of current video usage on our formats (themes and video formats that work, completion rates on our Live or VOD video formats, average session duration on video formats, etc.).

This phase allowed us to quickly identify what “hooks” our users: smooth scrolling, instant video playback, and the absence of functional friction.

From there, we moved on to defining and validating the user flow, followed by the initial designs.

Alongside these UX/UI advances, we still had the most complicated task ahead of us: the player…

The post The ins and outs of BFM’s new mobile-first vertical video format appeared first on Audiencers.

How can you set a price that reflects the value of your product AND is acceptable to your readers? This was the topic of a brilliant panel at the World News Media Congress 2025 organized by WAN-IFRA in Krakow. Three experts shared their very concrete strategies for increasing revenue while maintaining subscriber satisfaction: Flavia Barbosa Ferreira (Head of Retention at Le Monde), Mariah Craddick (Executive Director, Product at The Atlantic), and Danuta Bregula (Director of Paid Products at Axel Springer Poland).

> Le Monde, The Atlantic and Onet all describe a price-last approach: fix the offer, the perceived value and the user experience first, and only then move the price

> Le Monde built account-sharing detection first, which let it sell duo, family and B2B tiers confidently. It then tested a rise on 10,000 subscribers: plus one euro retained better than plus two

> The Atlantic sits below competitors on price yet above them on retention, over 70%, and growth. Subscribers who complete its on-site onboarding retain four points better than those who don't

> The Atlantic sorts subscriber benefits into essentials, utilities and bonuses, a taxonomy worth stealing. It measures whether they land by tracking key actions taken in a subscriber's first seven days

> Onet Premium bundles more than fifteen Polish brands, from Newsweek to National Geographic, behind one subscription. Between 2019 and 2024 revenue grew 91% a year on average and churn fell 32%

Le Monde: increase price but with ‘finesse’

With 665,000 paying subscribers, Le Monde is the leading French-language daily. Half of its revenue comes from subscriptions (35% digital, 15% print), making pricing optimization a direct lever for profitability.

Flavia Barbosa Ferreira is Director of Retention at Le Monde. Last year, her team conducted a series of experiments to increase prices without harming profitability or reader trust.

The post Pricing strategies from The Atlantic, Le Monde and Onet appeared first on Audiencers.

Since taking over as CEO of Groupe Le Monde in 2010, Louis Dreyfus has pursued a clear ambition: proving that high-quality journalism can be economically sustainable — primarily through digital subscriptions. At the World News Media Congress 2025 hosted by WAN-IFRA, he shared a series of concrete editorial, tech and marketing decisions that have powered the group’s consistent growth.

> Le Monde went from losing 10 million euros a year in 2010 to 25 million in EBITDA. The first lever was hiring: 310 journalists then, 560 now, an 80% increase

> Growth came from widening the editorial mission rather than narrowing it. New sections on intimacy, housing and parenting, 36 journalists on Africa, and a weekly magazine now supplying a quarter of ad revenue

> Some accounts were shared by more than 5,000 people. Rather than block them, Le Monde built prompts that upsell heavy sharers into duo and family plans, and now sells the tool to other publishers

> Le Monde in English runs on seven staff, translating 40 articles a day, and already delivers half of all new international subscribers. The US, UK and Canada lead

> ARPU stands at 11.84 euros a month, and the group expects digital revenue alone to cover the entire newsroom cost within two years. More subscribers means more journalism

1. Expanding editorial mission to broaden audience

Over the past 15 years, Le Monde has significantly widened its editorial scope to cover underreported topics and attract new readerships — without lowering its standards.

The post From €10M in losses to €25M in EBITDA: How Le Monde built a sustainable model appeared first on Audiencers.

Le Figaro has pulled off a tour de force: halving the time it takes to take out a subscription, from 50 to 25 seconds. Behind this substantial improvement lies a mammoth project dubbed “AMEX” (“Amélioration de l’Expérience Utilisateur” – Improving the User Experience), launched four years ago to internalize and modernize the entire subscription conversion process. We spoke to Valentin Jubert, Director of Digital Subscriptions, and Benjamin Lupu, Product Manager, Reader and Subscriber Experience.

> Le Figaro halved the time it takes to subscribe, from 50 seconds to 25, and lifted conversion from 0.7% to 0.9%. It took four years and around 100 people

> Subscription management had been outsourced to the print provider. Marketing waited weeks to launch each new offer. It now takes a few hours, which is the real return on the project

> Product, tech and marketing built it together with the CEO reviewing weekly. As one lead puts it, nobody was simply a customer of another team, they designed the tool for themselves

> The least-quoted result is the best one. Training a new call centre agent used to take three weeks, and three months to reach full competence. On the unified interface it takes two days

> Migration allows no do-overs, so they ran three rehearsals and checked every subscriber and invoice. Their one regret is bringing customer service and accounting flows into the project too late

A structured project driven by an in-house culture

The post Le Figaro halves the time to take out a subscription with their “AMEX” project appeared first on Audiencers.

After 8 months of A/B testing and several iterations, Le Monde‘s marketing team has decided on (for now at least) the French publisher’s new subscription offers page. I met Virgile de Tassigny, Growth Marketing Manager at Le Monde, who told me all about this major project.

> Le Monde designed its offers page for mobile first, where 75% of traffic sits, then adapted to desktop. Tunnel entries rose 26% on desktop and 18% on mobile against the old page

> Annual plans were pulled off the landing page and moved into the purchase tunnel. Annual conversions fell 16%, monthly rose enough to more than cover it, and total conversions went up

> Simplification overshot. Stripping out offer names and cutting to three benefits left readers unsure they had clicked the right thing, because the funnel still showed the old longer lists

> The fix was consistency rather than more copy. Offer name, account count and benefits now match on the landing page and in the tunnel. A page redesign is a journey redesign

> Student offers sat below the fold and were hard to find. Surfacing them lifted student conversions 25%. A black CTA also lost to the historic yellow readers already associate with subscribing

The original (or control)

Launched in 2020, at the same time as their new conversion funnel, the “control” displays 3 offers, with one (the “Duo” offer, ideal for couples needing 2 accounts) centered and highlighted as “Recommended”:

But after 4 years of existence, this page needed a thorough refresh.

1. Too much text kills the message (and conversion)

The old page was dense, with repeated information and several scattered CTAs. The result was a high cognitive load and an unruly user experience.

The first priority of Le Monde‘s redesign was therefore to simplify the offering. From now on, each formula will highlight a maximum of two to three key benefits (instead of a long list) with the aim of speeding up decision-making.

They also decided to elimination the little-understood labels, such as “Essential” or “Family”.

The first iteration led to this version:

The post Testing and optimizing our subscription offers page at Le Monde appeared first on Audiencers.

The Second Audiencers’ Festival in Paris, this November 21st, 2024, brought together the crème de la crème of French media digital marketing directors (and not only).

From identifying user needs and adapting formats, to finding the right price and retention, digital publishing professionals shared their tips on audience acquisition and monetization. To share these wider than the Festival attendees, I’ve summed them up in 10 commandments! Enjoy!

1. Know your audience

Les Echos, represented by Violaine Degas, created no fewer than 12 personas from their reader surveys on both B2C and B2B audiences.

The very precise personas detail centers of interest, as well as preferred information channels and timeframes.

This allows them to better target sales offers and marketing messages to each reader. For instance, why line up all 50 subscriber benefits on the offers page when only three are relevant to that specific user? Listing them all could even be a deterrent…

As for the newsroom, four or five personas can be used to identify reader needs and priorities to target each article, ensuring all published work has a clear goal.

Les Echos went even further, creating its own panel of 4,000 subscribers (60%) and prospects (40%) via the Alida platform. Young people and women are under-represented, but the group is working on it!

This allows them to regularly send panelists short quizzes, studies or videos, or even to spend a quarter of an hour chatting with them, to better identify reader needs and adapt editorial products (formats, distribution channels, publication timing).

2. Define and measure (your own type of) engagement

The post The 10 commandments of subscriber acquisition and digital reader revenue models appeared first on Audiencers.