DC Thomson is a family-owned publisher headquartered in Dundee, founded in 1905 and best known outside Scotland for the Beano. Its two regional dailies are the titles in this story: The Courier in Dundee and the Press and Journal in Aberdeen. 

Graham McDougall is Head of Trading and Retention, responsible for pricing, packaging and offers across both titles and the wider portfolio. The company’s digital subscription launched in lockdown, grew by roughly 10,000 a year and last reported around 50,000 subscribers. One product inside that number is a digital-only Sports Pack, now £4.99 a month, built for readers who only wanted sport.

> Scottish publisher DC Thomson (The Courier in Dundee, the Press and Journal in Aberdeen) had one of its biggest content areas by engagement producing almost no subscriptions. Match reports and team news are commodity content any reader can find free within minutes

> The fix was a digital-only Sports Pack cut from content already in the full pack. Nothing new was commissioned and editorial was not asked to change anything. It sells in-article at £1 for the first month then £4.99, and around 95% of sales happen there rather than on the subscribe page

> Trial conversion and retention both beat the full pack. 15-20% of buyers upgrade, half of them within a month, and the rest stay on the cheaper pack. A reverse test settled the cannibalisation worry: offered both packs on the same sport articles, readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster

> Exclusives did the converting. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the Press and Journal sent a reporter to his home country and nobody else had the story. The sports desks dropped Saturday match reports and Friday team news for what readers could not get elsewhere

> No deep discounts anywhere. Every trial is one paid month, the price has risen from £3 to £4.99, and readers who try to cancel are offered an annual contract paid monthly rather than a percentage off. Graham McDougall, Head of Trading and Retention: "If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it's going to be a lot harder"

Sport had the audience but none of the subscriptions

Sport was one of the biggest content areas on The Courier and the Press and Journal, and readers spent a lot of time on it. Almost none of them subscribed to read it. McDougall boils this down to the fact that match reports and team news are commodity content: the clubs publish them, fan sites repeat them, and any reader can find them free within minutes.

“It was really good for engagement of subscribers, but wasn’t something that would convert users,” McDougall says.

Competition and reader feedback pushed DC Thomson to act. Football-only websites were appearing in Scotland, focused on the big Glasgow and Edinburgh clubs, with Aberdeen an obvious next stop. And viewers of Highland League Weekly, a highlights show for the north’s semi-professional league, kept saying that content was all they wanted. “We assumed that everybody would want their local news as well.”

Existing content, sold on its own

The Sports Pack is the sports section of the full digital pack. Nothing new was commissioned. “We just took what we had and tried to package it up in a way that our Potential subscribers were going to like.” Each title’s pack follows its audience: The Courier’s is football (Dundee, Dundee United, St Johnstone, Dunfermline); the Press and Journal’s adds the Highland League and shinty, a traditional Highland team sport similar to field hockey.

Sport readers buy through an in-article payment screen and rarely see the subscribe page. Around 95% of Sports Pack sales happen in-article, so the pack is often left off the subscribe page entirely; its three slots go to whatever needs volume that month.

> Another regional publisher acing subscriptions: How Irish News is growing digital from a strong print legacy

Exclusive reporting made it grow

Once the pack showed sport readers would pay, growth came from exclusives. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the P&J sent a reporter to his home country to find out who he was. Nobody else had the story. “All of a sudden we started to see huge success,” McDougall says. “It started to teach the journalists what kind of content would really resonate, and what people would be willing to pay for.”

The sports desks stopped writing Saturday match reports and Friday team news, and started reporting what readers could not get elsewhere: youth players coming through, a different lens on the club. “It heroes the journalists. If they create great content, it will convert and retain subscribers.”

It retains better than the full pack, and most buyers never upgrade

Trial conversion and retention are both significantly better on the Sports Pack than on DC Thomson’s other products. Drop-off comes after months one and two, then flattens. McDougall credits the focus: a Dundee United fan goes to one page, finds everything, and follows a team with a passion that general news does not attract.

Around 15-20% of Sports Pack subscribers upgrade to the full pack, with half of them doing so in the first month. The other 80% stay. Internally, that raised the cannibalisation question. A recent reverse test answered it: DC Thomson offered both packs on the same sport articles, and readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster than those who chose the Sports Pack. “Sure, they might have gone onto the web pack, but maybe they would not have enjoyed paying for all the content they weren’t wanting to read.”

A smaller product at a rising price

The Sports Pack launched at £3 for three months, about half the price of the full pack, purely to find out whether sport readers would pay anything. They did, so the question became what a credible price looked like. Over the last year, DC Thomson has switched from chasing volume to growing revenue. Every trial is now one paid month, and the Sports Pack costs £4.99 after a £1 first month. When the main pack’s trial was cut, the cheap pack’s trial was cut with it.

Win-backs exist in the cancel flow, but there is no 90%-off deal for anyone who phones and asks; on a £4.99 pack it would be pennies. Instead, subscribers who try to cancel are offered an annual subscription paid monthly: a lower monthly price in return for a twelve-month commitment. McDougall says it makes far more money than a large percentage discount.

“If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it’s going to be a lot harder. We’ve got to get people to see that the product is worth something.”

DC Thomson is now looking at the same idea by geography: packs for Aberdeen or the Moray coast, built on data about what people read. “We’ve got to be really careful that we don’t offer another pack at £4.99 when people could be paying £9.99 for the content and getting more.”

What this means for you

Find the section that gets the most engagement and the fewest subscriptions, then try selling it on its own. DC Thomson didn’t need new content, nor an app and editorial mandate. The product succeeded with existing articles, a simple payment screen and a lower price. How far that travels depends on what you publish.

• Regional and local publishers: Football is the obvious choice where a club has a real fan base, but build the pack around what your readers actually follow: the P&J’s includes shinty, a sport rarely covered elsewhere. Sell it in-article, keep the trial identical to the main pack, and run the reverse test before anyone asks about cannibalisation.
• Nationals: a sport-only pack competes with dedicated sports subscriptions. The transferable part is the method: pick an under-monetised segment (a section, a region, a day pass), test it against the full product on the same pages and judge it on retention as well as conversion.
• Magazine and specialist publishers: your product is already a niche, so slicing it thinner is risky. Take the pricing rules instead: one trial length across products, a term commitment in the cancel flow rather than a percentage off, and retention tracked for every offer cohort.
• Single titles and small teams: if no section is big enough for its own pack, the cheapest thing to copy is an annual contract paid monthly.

McDougall’s warning is to ask first what problem the pack solves and which readers it is for. DC Thomson had readers asking for it and reporting nobody else had, and the pack needs both.

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This article was originally published by Frank Bi on Hacks/Hackers, republished with permission.

> Journalism has to be right the first time. Product work learns more from what doesn't work. Frank Bi, AI Strategy and Product Advisor at Hacks/Hackers, argues that when products are held to the journalistic bar, nothing half-baked ever launches, so nothing ever teaches you anything

> Build a public sandbox. A labelled subdomain (beta, labs) resets the expectations readers bring to the homepage while still producing real behaviour data. Bi launched the Minnesota Star Tribune's AI restaurant guide Culinary Compass on the main domain instead, where readers judged a four-week experiment as a Star Tribune guide

> Set the end date before launch, ideally by picking something with a natural start & end. Bi's Fair Bot ran only the 12 days of the Minnesota State Fair, so nobody ever had to make the call to shut it down

> Show your work. Newsrooms already have a practice for issuing corrections, so extend a version of it to experimental products and publish what the team believed and why, before that thinking disappears at launch

There’s a tension between journalism and product innovation, and it comes down to a clash of mental models. Journalism requires getting the facts right the first time. On the other hand, product innovation learns more from what doesn’t work than from what does, and sometimes that means putting something half-baked in the wild to find out what audiences will actually respond to.

Luke Williams, a former creative director at frog design who taught my innovation and design class at NYU Stern this spring, has a line for this: be wrong at the start to be right at the end. It resonated because I’ve been in news organizations where the journalistic mental model is applied, often for good reasons. But when the product is held to the journalistic bar, nothing half-baked gets launched to teach us anything.

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Jonathan Gupta-Buckley is founder of The Twenty One and Kaai, previously leading audience and subscription growth inside News Corp.

> "Subscription fatigue" is the easy explanation when a paid product struggles. The more useful question is whether there was enough recurring value to begin with, rather than benefits assembled to justify a monthly charge

> Start with frequency: what do people already come back for. Then use registration as the halfway test, because if your most engaged readers won't create an account, a payment step will not fare better

> Build the paid tier around a behavior that already exists, giving people materially more of it. If the pricing page needs six unrelated benefits to feel substantial, no single benefit is strong enough

> Be deliberate about what stays free. A story that brings in thousands of first-time visitors has a different job from a specialist product consumed repeatedly by known users, and should be treated differently

> Forecast before you keep building. Apply realistic registration, free-to-paid and retention rates to your own segments, and if the range falls short of what the business needs, stop before the pricing conversation starts

The post Do you have enough recurring value to launch subscriptions? The questions to ask yourself appeared first on Audiencers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khalil A. Cassimally is an audience consultant and coach who helps organisations align teams around change, user needs and AI.

Synthetic audiences promise fast, cheap reader feedback, but the claims made for them are easy to misread. Drawing on recent research and his own practice, he shares a practical four-step way to use synthetic audiences to:

• Recognise where synthetic feedback stops being trustworthy
• Run a panel grounded in material your newsroom already has
• Test language, narrow options and surface objections before committing

> Audience consultant Khalil Cassimally's rule is to use synthetic audiences to narrow, never to decide. They rank options and surface objections, but cannot tell you magnitudes like willingness to pay

> Start with the decision you need to make, not the question you want to ask. Most synthetic research fails by producing interesting material nobody was ever going to act on

> Ground the panel in words real readers actually wrote. Old interview transcripts, cancellation reasons, unread survey comments. The test is whether you can name the humans inside the system

> Most teams only ever count responses. The better question is where your draft conflicts with what you have documented about a reader, which is analysis rather than impersonation

> Tell it to answer as a reader rather than an analyst, and that indifference is valid. Then validate whatever survives with real people, which is where the saving comes from

Audience research in most newsrooms comes in two states. Either we talk to real people or we don’t do it at all. In my experience, the second is far more common than the first.

And where research does happen, rather than being systematic, it tends to happen once in a while. Worse still, its insights usually go into a report or a slide deck, which just sits in a shared drive.

What we lose by not doing research

Organisations that research their audiences well outperform the ones that don’t. The gap is not small. A study compared companies with mature research practices against those with weak ones across a dozen business outcomes. On revenue, 47% of high-maturity organisations reported a positive impact against 11% of low-maturity ones. On customer retention, 58% against 24%. Averaged across every outcome measured, the research-mature organisations came out 2.3 times ahead.

None of that is unique to the media but the mechanism is familiar to anyone who has been a part of a redesign that’s gone badly. Knowing what readers actually think changes what gets built. Not knowing means guessing, and guesses compound.

The questions most research doesn’t tackle

The post Synthetic audiences: where they help, where they stop, and how to run one appeared first on Audiencers.

Stefan Schneiderbauer is Senior Product Manager at Funke Mediengruppe, where he is responsible for product and development across 13 regional news app brands. Speaking at Audiencers’ Festival London in June 2026, Stefan shared a new framework that he developed to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgement, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.

> Product decisions at most news organisations get made by whoever's loudest in the room, or by instinct built from experience. To overcome this, Germany's FUNKE Mediengruppe built a framework to replace that with something structured and evidence-led instead: a KPI tree

> Start with one metric at the top, not a dashboard. Funke picked Engaged Time, then broke it down layer by layer: what drives sessions, what drives active users, what drives new vs. returning. Each layer down gets more specific, until you hit something Stefan calls a movable metric, one a single product decision can actually shift

> Once you have even a partial tree, run a basic sensitivity check. Move two input variables by 5% each and see which one moves the KPI above it more. That tells you where to run your next sprint, not guesswork

> Only after the tree exists, build the org around it. Funke's four pillars (Reach, Engagement, Monetisation, Infrastructure) came directly from the tree's branches

> Don't start with the whole tree. Stefan's advice is to instrument one branch, show your team what it reveals, and let that build the internal case before you expand

Paradigms are shifting in real-time: News brands used to compete on access to information. That advantage is largely gone, due to the abundance of daily generated content from all different kinds of sources, AI generated content included. What remains is trust, and trust is earned through the quality of journalism, not the sophistication of the product. How the journalistic core gets expressed and amplified in a digital environment is the job of the product organisation. When the two work in isolation, even the best journalism struggles to build the sustained reader relationships that trust requires. To gain and earn the trust of readers, product and journalism need to work more closely together than ever.

This article is focused on the product side of that equation. Specifically, on how we built a framework at Funke News Apps to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgment, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.

I am responsible for app development across 13 news brands at Funke Mediengruppe. Over the past 12 months we repositioned our apps as a strategic growth pillar, which involved a redesign at scale, bringing development in-house, introducing user-segmented advertising, among many other great developments. I want to share the framework that sits beneath all of it.

The post From opinion to evidence: how we built a data-led product framework for news apps at Funke appeared first on Audiencers.

If you’re trying to scale a subscription or membership program, look at your current structure. Are you offering a clean, high-signal experience, or are you serving your readers “feature soup”?

At the Audiencers Festival in Montreal on June 25th, audience research leader Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines, Director of Subscriptions at Skift, took the stage to break down a critical digital publishing dilemma: How do you package subscriptions to drive business growth without alienating the very audience that keeps you alive?

> When you start testing value props and benefits, it's easy to mix and match features, and try to cram everything onto one page to make subscription "worth the cost". But research has proven that the biggest driver of loyalty isn't usually price or feature count. It's a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn't get anywhere else

> Your team can answer this easily, but the real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you're trying to reach. At a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already

> Once you know your differentiation, packaging decisions get easier. Rachel's 3-question test before bundling anything: does it strengthen or dilute each product's identity? Are the audiences actually converging? Can your ops hold it together without the seams showing?

> Sometimes the research tells you to do nothing. One of Skift's four products stayed untouched, on purpose, and it's now one of their steadiest, best growing subscriptions

Subscription fatigue is real

Reuters Institute research from earlier this year found that nearly half of people say they’re extremely interested in news, but less than one in five pay for any of it online. Those numbers don’t match — and if you’ve ever tried to count how many recurring charges are on your own credit card, you already know why. Streaming services, meal kits, toilet paper, fitness trackers, “subscriptions to manage your subscriptions.” People are tired.

That’s not entirely bad news for publishers. It’s an opening. Goligoski spent years running the research practice at NYU’s Membership Puzzle Project, interviewing supporters of news organizations — subscribers, members, donors — across roughly 500 news organizations worldwide. Her research question was almost embarrassingly simple: what frustrates you about mainstream media? People could talk for an hour.

What consistently came out of those conversations was that the single biggest driver of loyalty wasn’t price or feature count. It was a sense of uniqueness, something the reader couldn’t get anywhere else, followed by a calming, low-friction user experience that let them do what they came to do and get out.

The post Before you bundle: how to find out what your subscribers actually want appeared first on Audiencers.

Audience segmentation is more than a technical exercise, it is a critical strategic driver for any modern media organization. In a landscape where generalist appeal is fading, dividing your audience into distinct groups based on shared characteristics allows you to move beyond guessing and start delivering real value.

At Audiencers’ Festival in Hamburg on March 3rd 2026, subscription consultant Selma Stern shared her recommendations for mastering audience segmentation to maximize the value of each reader.

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We interviewed Johannes Vogel, Chief Product & Revenue Officer at stern (published by RTL Deutschland) about how they relaunched a subscription offering from scratch, with teams & systems designed for digital reader revenue.

> stern, published by RTL Deutschland, had been built as what Chief Product & Revenue Officer Johannes Vogel calls "a portfolio machine", optimised for mass reach with the distinct identities of stern, GEO and Capital dissolved into digital scale. Workable for advertising, fatal for subscriptions

> Weekly pricing beat monthly on conversion, especially among readers with little prior attachment to the brand. The app stores went back to monthly after weekly renewal prompts created friction

> GEO and Capital now outperform on both conversion and retention, because a sharply defined brand profile answers a specific reader need rather than a general one

Lessons:
> For a general interest publisher, personalisation is not a feature — it will be the product

> The article that converts is not always the one that retains. Content consistency matters more than acquisition volume

When Johannes Vogel, Chief Product & Revenue Officer, joined stern in late 2023, the digital operation wasn’t obviously broken. Traffic was significant, the brands were well-known, and the technology was functional. The problem ran deeper.

The entire organisation had been built on a portfolio model with its core business being mass-reach advertising. “It was a portfolio machine,” Vogel says. “The important thing was not the individual title or the distinctive brand — it was the massive reach.” The distinct editorial identities of stern, GEO and Capital had been quietly dissolved in the pursuit of digital scale.

For advertising, that was a manageable trade-off. For subscriptions, it was fatal. A reader revenue model only works if you are offering something specific enough that an individual reader will pay for it and, importantly, keep paying. stern’s digital setup had spent years doing the opposite.

Subscription sales sat in a separate silo from editorial and product, with few shared goals and little shared accountability. Vogel and editor-in-chief Gregor Peter Schmitz decided early that there was no point trying to reform what existed. “We had the big chance to build a new team,” Vogel says. “We could work on a new philosophy and a new culture.” They started with seven people, one business, and product organisation.

Building the team

Seven became 75, now heading toward 100. The priority among those early hires was product managers, UX/UI designers, data analysts, software engineers, and subscription marketing specialists. In the editorial areas, the focus was more an transformation the organisation toward a digital-first mindset and way of working. The journalism already existed across three established brands. What was missing was the capability to build, iterate and measure a digital product around it. A subscription business requires product thinking, data infrastructure and commercial mechanics that most legacy editorial operations had never needed to develop.

The post Stern+: How one of Germany’s biggest magazine brands rebuilt a subscription business from scratch appeared first on Audiencers.

Hi, I’m Lennart Schneider, Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

In this article, we look at Duolingo – a leading e-learning app that has mastered the art of habit-forming, something that’s essential for subscription success.

> Duolingo's streak counts consecutive days with at least one exercise and resets if you miss. Nine million people hold streaks of a year or more, and the feature has run through 600 tests in two years

> They optimise for CURR, the share of today's active users who were also active in the past week, rather than daily actives. Focusing on it since 2018 grew daily actives 4.5 times in four years

> The wins are often tiny. Changing a commitment button from "next" to "I'll commit" measurably lifted retention, and reminders fire 23.5 hours after the last lesson

> Streak Repair used to cost money. It is now free but requires extra exercises, choosing long-term loyalty over the easy revenue

> Lennart Schneider's warning matters more than the tactics. Streaks work because every Duolingo user shares one goal. News audiences don't, and a comic animation rewarding an article on the Middle East confuses rather than delights

Duolingo, a rapidly growing language-learning app with a market capitalization of almost $15 billion, owes a large part of its success to its streak feature. A streak is a count of consecutive days a user has completed at least one exercise. If a user misses a day, their streak resets to zero. This simple feature has made Duolingo one of the apps with the best retention, with an impressive 9 million people maintaining a streak of at least one year. 

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