Paywall and subscription tests publishers ran in 2026, collected by Audiencers:

> Stop advertising what's locked, start advertising what's free. The New York Times and The Verge both run "free to read" sections on the homepage, reversing years of premium tagging. The logic: conversion should happen on the article itself, not be pre-empted by a warning icon that ends the journey early

> Sell access in smaller units. The Washington Post's day passes, week passes and pay-per-article found an untapped market, with 42% of flexible access buyers brand-new anonymous users. Over 180 days, up to 8% of week-pass buyers, 4% of day-pass buyers and 3% of pay-per-article buyers became full subscribers

> Let readers set the price, then anchor it. Quebec's Les Coops de l'information took an average of $3.12 a month against a $1 minimum for the first three months. The suggested figure in the field did the work: $5 lifted the average to $3.39, $6 lifted it to $3.50. 84% of acquisitions had never subscribed before

> Sell less, not more. SFGATE kept its entire site free and sold a separate paid app alongside it. Les Echos' "La Sélection" is 9 to 15 articles a day chosen from a daily output of 120 to 150, at an early bird €9.90 a month

> Don't ask on day one. Figma asks six onboarding questions before showing pricing, and The New York Times tested a homepage whose only button top right said "log in". Each step gets a single goal, and early on that goal isn't the sale

Until recently, many publishers have used icons or tags to mark premium content, informing non-subscribers that the article is premium before they visit the page and get blocked by the paywall. But there are a variety of reasons why this is potentially shooting ourselves in the foot. Lars K Jensen discussed this in an article on Audiencers back in 2023.

“What you are trying to do is to put the conversion (from free user to paying subscriber) into the user journey as soon as possible. Because that’s what you want… By having a nice “beware, premium content ahead” icon (or, should we say warning), you are short circuiting that thought process and user journey. Conversions need to happen based on the article on your website, not how you market it in a newsletter or on the homepage.”

It’s perhaps one of the reasons why we’ve seen increasingly more publishers trying the opposite, i.e. signalling when content is free to access.

The New York Times and The Verge for instance have been testing this for a while now, dedicating a whole section of their homepage to “free to read” content.

The Independent in the UK also has a tag on a newsletter promotion, highlighting the 1 month free.

Subscription without blocking content

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. The web stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been. What’s new sits next to it, a separate, paid app.

This means that the web traffic and engagement on-site is preserved whilst the brand also monetises their most engaged, loyal readers through an additional product.

> Read the full story of SFGATE’s subscription launch

Subscriptions focused on community and relationship-building

In an age of content abundance, where generic content becomes easier to produce, the advantage shifts to what is harder to replicate: original journalism, trusted relationships and communities that give audiences a reason to return. It’s what FT Strategies has labelled as the Community Era, and it’s exactly what many publishers are moving towards with subscription products built for lasting relationships.

The Economist launched Play, a $15/month audio and video-only tier that sits inside the existing Economist app. It sits alongside a second, deeper relationship-building product: The Economist Insider, a premium video series featuring the editor-in-chief and senior journalists interviewing figures like Christine Lagarde and Mark Carney. A year after launch, 75% of subscribers have engaged with Insider at least once, and churn drops further the more deeply someone engages with it, holding even through a recent price increase.

Together, Play and Insider represent two ends of the same strategy: Play is built to start a relationship with a reader who isn’t ready to commit to the full product yet, Insider is built to deepen the relationship with a subscriber who already has.

WIRED also relaunched their subscription offer in Summer 2025, priced at $48 a year (roughly $4/month) with a focus on connecting “our humans to all of you humans.” (Katie Drummond, WIRED):

• A five-newsletter subscriber suite. Two entirely new verticals launched alongside three previously free, popular newsletters moved fully behind the paywall. All five are written conversationally by senior correspondents and built to work as standalone “inbox reads,” not link round-ups, which is what makes them habit-forming rather than skimmable.
• Structured, cadenced livestream AMAs, running at least twice a month, with a staff moderator and two senior beat reporters per session. The tight panel format, rather than sporadic ad-hoc video, self-selects WIRED’s most loyal readers and puts them in direct, live conversation with the reporters covering their beat.
• Expanded commenting, rolled out across a much wider set of articles than before, specifically to turn passive readers into visible, active participants in the conversation around a story.
• Subscriber-exclusive narrated articles, giving the subscription a genuine audio dimension rather than treating audio as an afterthought.

Alternative ways to bridge the gap to subscription

Anjali Iyer, Global Head of Subscriptions at The Washington Post, delivered a session at the Audiencers’ Festival in London focused on how news organisations must adapt to modern consumer habits by expanding beyond rigid subscription structures.

Anjali shared how data exposes a massive gap between the willingness to pay and the willingness to commit. Modern readers, particularly younger cohorts, operate in a fragmented digital landscape shaped by streaming services, search loops, and social algorithms. They demand short-term choices and are often willing to pay a premium price for temporary access over a recurring subscription package.

The Washington Post’s solution is flexible access models. By testing micropayments (weekly and pay passes, as well as pay-per-article with an in-paywall mobile payment module), they’re uncovering an untapped market: 42% of flexible access buyers are brand-new, anonymous users outside the existing ecosystem.

Interestingly, this also serves as a nurturing mechanism for long-term subscriber growth. Over a 180-day period, up to 8% of week-pass buyers, 4% of day pass buyers, and 3% of pay-per-article buyers eventually became full subscribers.

> Read the full story from The Washington Post

A handful of publishers are also testing “pay what you can” subscription models.

For instance, Canada’s Les Coops de l’information, a cooperative of six Quebec news outlets, let readers name their own price for the first three months.

Against a C$1 minimum, the average paid was C$3.12 a month, and some new subscribers chose more than the regular subscription price. The suggested figure in the price field did the work – suggesting C$5 lifted the average to C$3.39 and suggesting C$6 lifted it to C$3.50, with more people simply taking the suggestion each time.

84% of the acquisitions were from readers who had never subscribed before, which is the number that matters most for a local publisher wondering whether it has exhausted its market.

> Read more about Les Coops’ pay what you can campaign

Selection over unlimited access

Faced with information fatigue, unlimited access as a subscription product is not always the answer. Les Echos is instead making the opposite bet, that of selection. “La Sélection” consists of between 9 and 15 articles a day, chosen from a daily output of 120 to 150 pieces, following a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) and a strict quota discipline.

Three platforms (a dedicated tab in the app, a section on the site, a daily newsletter), a weekly long read on Saturdays, and 5 shareable articles a month. Early bird price sits at €9.90 a month.

> Full article on Les Echos’ “La Sélection” here

Not trying to sell on day 1

When benchmarking 100 subscription businesses, including the NYT, Figma, Miro, Calm and Masterclass, we noticed that conversion almost never happens in one step. It happens through micro-conversions, each with its own objective. And more importantly, even conversion itself seems secondary. The real priority for those companies is to create value for their user as a first goal. To build engagement. To make the product feel indispensable before asking for money.

The critical principle behind this model: each step has one single goal.

Figma: $12.5B company.
Homepage: “Get started for free.”

Then the onboarding starts: What’s your name? How do you plan to use Figma? What do you do for work? Where do you work? Have you used Figma before? What do you want to make first?

Six questions before you see anything about pricing. And when the plan page finally appears, it includes a free Starter option, so even the pricing step isn’t a hard sell.

The New York Times even tested this earlier in the year. The only action button in the top right corner (on the left) says “LOG IN”, because at this stage, the goal is registration, not subscription.

Countdowns

Whether on the paywall, subscription offer page or in the registration onboarding journey, publishers are using countdowns to create urgency and encourage conversion. It’s a small change but one that’s proven to convert.

> Find 100+ paywall benchmarks here

> UK publisher Immediate (Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra) has over 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital, against a company target of 3 million by 2030

> Print subscribers were never migrated. Immediate built and bought digital products for people who had never bought a magazine: the Good Food app is at just under 200,000 from a 2022 standing start, Nutracheck at 580,000 since its 2023 acquisition

> Paywalled articles only sell if the content is genuinely must-read, and evergreen lifestyle content isn't. Good Food charges for utility instead: cook mode, planning tools, and app takeovers exclusive to subscribers

> There's no single Immediate paywall. Stickiness, response rates and build costs differ by brand, so each gets its own model, and Immediate only builds where it leads the category

> A separate commercial team holds the budget and funds products against fixed thresholds: 40-55% trial-to-paid conversion, 65-80% at the next renewal, monthly retention above 90%, and 3:1 lifetime value to acquisition cost within two years

Rather than migrating print customers to digital and putting the magazine websites behind a standard paywall, Immediate built and bought standalone digital products, each sold on its own terms, and each aimed at people the print magazines had never reached.

“We didn’t look at this as let’s substitute one for another. Why would you? That’s leaving cash on the table,” Burney says. Print subscribers are highly profitable, the volume decline is gentle, and their engagement is incredible. So, the apps were sold to people who had never bought a magazine. “What we’ve done is create a new audience which previously did not exist. So our growth has been genuine, rather than simply substituting one channel for another.”

• The Good Food app came first, launching around 2022. It now sits just short of 200,000 paid subscribers, from a standing start
• Nutracheck, a diet and nutrition tracking app, was acquired in 2023 and cross-sold to the Good Food audience. It is profitable, has roughly doubled since then, and currently has 580,000 subscribers
• Radio Times followed with its own paid products, including What to Watch, alongside HistoryExtra.

How Immediate decides which brands get a paid product

Importantly, the team hasn’t built a digital product for every brand. Key questions need to be asked before anything is built:  

• Is the audience large enough, and will it return regularly rather than just twice a year?
• Will people habituate to the brand, or is the relationship occasional?
• What can you realistically charge, measured against whoever else already meets that need?

Then the maths: how many subscribers at what acquisition cost, what happens at the first renewal, and what happens at every one after that?

Categories that clear the bar are the ones where Immediate can lead and defend. Food and Wellness through Good Food and Nutracheck, and entertainment through Radio Times. Because each audience answers those questions differently, no two products are priced or packaged the same way.

The same questions explain why paywalling the magazines was never the plan. “If you’re just paywalling content, it doesn’t really take you far enough, unless it’s real must-read content to get people to subscribe and stick around.” Evergreen lifestyle content lacks the urgency of news, so unlocking it alone is not enough. The value has to come from utility instead: cook mode features, prep and planning tools, celebrity takeovers and app-exclusive material.

The websites became the marketing machine

A product that clears the test still has to reach people cheaply enough for the maths to work. Immediate’s answer was already sitting in the business. It kept the free, ad-funded websites that Radio Times, Good Food and the rest already ran, and gave them a different job. They are now the top of a funnel that ends in an app subscription.

“We’ve got big websites for Radio Times, for all of our brands, and we use that to market the products that are appropriate for those audiences,” Burney says. “So it’s a marketing machine, really.” Recipe traffic is directed to the Good Food app, and TV listings to What to Watch. Social reach feeds the same funnel, and paid campaigns run off the back of it.

The machine also runs on creator and influencer talent. Immediate is home to a roster of chefs, presenters and social-first creators, with a dedicated ‘Faces and Voices’ team to cover talent management, including both staff and external names.

“It would be misleading to say that the talent is just going to drive subscribers. The talent is ultimately top of funnel,” Burney says.

Good Food works with talent, including Chetna Makan, Max La Manna, Sophie Wyburd and Angela Hartnett, fronting social campaigns for recipes such as chocolate cake, marry me meatballs and, randomly, rhubarb, at very low cost per order. “I think our best campaign got about 20,000 subs in January.” The same names then run app takeovers that are exclusive to subscribers, so the talent that pulls people in also gives them a reason to stay.

Not all of the talent is bought in. Alex Horne of the UK comedy show Taskmaster featured in an app takeover campaign, and Ricky Gervais did the same for the Radio Times app. So did Perry, a community manager on Burney’s own organic social team, who is massively into musicals. One of his posts about Wicked was retweeted by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and passed a million views. 

The talent stays the same down the funnel, but the message changes, from inspiration at the top (cook this dish, here is your Christmas plan, here is what is on TV) to utility at the bottom, the closer someone gets to paying.

One platform, and the commercial discipline underneath it

A funnel that runs from a free recipe page to a paid app subscription needs a technical stack that can manage the entire journey, and Immediate’s stack had grown incrementally. They spent 18 months replacing it. Paywall, billing, revenue platform, and first-party data now sit in a single system driven by a customer data platform (CDP), which was bought and extensively configured rather than built internally. “Building something in-house of this complexity would be out of the means of most publishers,” Burney says.

The result is an AI-driven paywall that the company expects will significantly boost numbers, as well as enable print and digital packaging options which were previously impossible. A separate commercial analysis team holds the budget on what gets funded: acquisition cost against lifetime value, three to one on a digital product over a couple of years. “People either overinvest and see a very poor return and then get disheartened and give up, or see a really good result but then don’t realise that it’s not replicable.”

What good looks like

Subscription only works if you know what a healthy product looks like. “Talk to some subs people, they can get lost in the detail that sits behind it,” Burney says. “But it’s a science and an art at the same time.” A free or low-priced introductory trial would be expected to achieve a 40-55% conversion to paid status. Below that, the return will not be there. The next renewal period should land between 65 and 80%. For monthly retention, anything under 90% is a problem, with 95% as the target.

“Typically, people don’t invest enough in retention. When you’re in growth mode, acquisition is the lifeblood, and that’s also the thing that everyone loves because it’s all high numbers coming in.”

Where the next 1.8 million comes from

The 3 million target rests on international expansion for Good Food and Nutracheck, particularly in the US, as well as organic growth, new products in markets Immediate already knows, and bundling. On bundling, she personally is more sceptical than many other publishers that this has to be one-size fits all. Nutracheck’s growth came from cross-selling into the Good Food audience and applying industrial subscriptions expertise to a small startup.  She notes, “While we are now experimenting with bundling, it’s actually cross-selling.”

“Your success in the current year hasn’t got a lot to do with what you’re doing in the previous year, because the subscribers you acquire are really building future value. What you’ve done in previous years is what’s making today work,” Burney says. “It massively increases the predictability of future earnings. Massively.”

What this means for you

Most of what worked here is separable from Immediate’s scale. The company refused to trade print for digital revenue, so nothing had to be cannibalised. It ran a product test before a content test: would people use the product repeatedly? And was the commercial model tight enough to identify a repeatable win from a one-off?

Publishers should take different things from their experience.

• Single-title magazines: the portfolio logic does not apply, but the product test does. Ask honestly whether your audience would habitually use an app, and whether the utility you could build is worth paying for. If not, an advertising model might be a legitimate answer.
• Regional and local news groups: the estimation discipline and the retention benchmarks travel directly. So does the argument for protecting a profitable print budget rather than forcing migration to a digital solution, and creating something new for audiences
• Large portfolios and media houses: the transferable strategy is refusing a single payment model across brands. Segment by whether the audience is sticky, whether the brand leads its category, and what the build costs, then invest only where all three hold.
• Nationals and news publishers: Burney’s exception is your advantage. News is one of the few categories where paywalled content alone converts, which makes utility a retention question for you as well as an acquisition one.

> "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

I’ve run this process with several businesses this year, and it holds up every time. You don’t decide what the subscription includes and test it against the market. You pull apart your own traffic and behavior data, and only decide whether to keep building once that data has told you there’s something worth building. Here’s the process.

1. Start with frequency

The first thing I want to understand is what people already come back for.

For a publisher, that might be a morning briefing, live coverage, a specialist vertical, or a particular columnist. Pull the behavior of your most engaged users and look for repeat patterns. Which products correlate with higher visit frequency? Which newsletters reliably drive people back to site? Which features appear disproportionately among your most active readers?

You’re looking for evidence of habit. A large audience visiting once or twice a month may still support a strong advertising business, but it’s weak evidence for a recurring consumer proposition.

2. Use registration as the next test

Before asking for a credit card, see whether people are willing to identify themselves.

Registration introduces a small amount of friction and asks the user to exchange something of value, usually an email address and some data, for a better experience. That makes it a useful halfway point between anonymous consumption and payment.

Look at registration conversion by audience segment, then compare registered and anonymous users on frequency, depth of engagement and eventual propensity to subscribe. If your most engaged readers still resist creating an account, that’s worth understanding before a payment step goes in front of them.

If registered users who adopt a particular feature come back twice as often, that is a much more useful metric for proposition design than a brainstorm full of ideas about premium benefits.

3. Build paid around behaviors that already exist

Once you know what your most engaged registered users are doing, the paid proposition should give them materially more of it. That might mean greater access, deeper utility, more convenience, exclusivity or a better experience. The important part is that the benefit connects to something the audience has already demonstrated it values.

If live coverage drives unusually high frequency, ask what a paid live product could add. If specialist newsletters show the strongest retention signals, deeper analysis or additional editions may have more value than an unrelated bundle of perks. If users who save articles and follow topics return more frequently, better personalization may be more compelling than another piece of “exclusive content.”

This is also where proposition bloat creeps in. If the pricing page needs six unrelated benefits to make the subscription feel substantial, that’s usually a sign no single benefit is compelling enough. The pricing page should be the output of the proposition work rather than the place where the proposition gets decided.

4. Be deliberate about what remains free

Publishers have an added complication because the free product often drives discovery, advertising revenue and the future subscriber funnel.

Moving too much behind a paywall can reduce the audience available to convert later. Leaving too much outside makes the paid proposition harder to distinguish. The answer depends on what role each piece of content or product plays in the journey.

A story that brings thousands of first-time visitors into the funnel may have a very different job from a specialist product consumed repeatedly by known users. Treating them identically because they both sit on the same website is usually where the trouble starts.

5. Forecast before you keep building

Most subscription models get validated backward. Leadership picks a revenue number it needs, and the team keeps building a forecast toward it without checking whether the underlying audience can actually get there. The proposition work continues on momentum, not evidence.

Build a forecast from the same data steps 1 to 4 produced instead. Take your traffic and frequency segments, apply a realistic registration rate, apply a free-to-paid rate benchmarked against comparable products at a similar price and frequency, then apply a retention curve for that price tier. You’ll get a range, not a number. Compare it to what the business actually needs. If the range falls well short, that’s the signal to stop building and rethink before the pricing conversation even starts. Better to find out before another quarter of work goes into a proposition the audience was never going to support.

Do the work in steps one through five before you launch anything. Some of what comes back will tell you to stop, and that’s a better outcome at step five than a year into a proposition the audience behavior was never going to support.

If those behaviors aren’t there, you’re not a subscription business. Yet.

Jonathan Gupta-Buckley founded The Twenty One and Kaai after a decade leading audience and subscription growth inside News Corp, including building the largest paid subscriber base in Wall Street Journal history. Today, TTO embeds senior operators inside the world’s most ambitious businesses to solve growth challenges in practice, build internal capability, and leave teams with systems they can run themselves. Kaai is TTO’s proprietary AI growth analytics tool. It is currently deployed at a number of global media businesses. 

> SFGATE didn't add a paywall to its free site. It built a separate paid app instead, so the free web experience that built its audience stays untouched

> The name "Friends of SFGATE" beat "subscription" and "membership" in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund

> Nearly 90% of readers who took the 7-day free trial converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it's still early days

> The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time, not just once by anyone

> The launch required real org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming

The premium experience offered in the app

The app isn’t a stripped-down version of the site. It’s built around giving already-engaged readers more ways to spend time with SFGATE’s journalism and journalists.

• Pop-up newsrooms (launching soon) in parks across San Francisco, where readers can meet a journalist in person. Editor-in-chief Grant Marek cited a statistic that only 23% of people have ever met a journalist face to face, and framed the initiative as a direct attempt to change that for SFGATE’s own readers
• Planned live journalism events across California, built around specific local reporters who are, in some cases, literally living the stories they cover. Julie Brown Davis, a reporter covering the Lake Tahoe housing market, was born and raised there, and was herself pushed out to Reno by rising housing costs. The plan is to put reporters like her in community spaces with readers who already trust them
• A California-themed mini crossword, distinct from a generic puzzle in that some clues specifically reward local knowledge. The app adds a streaks feature (consecutive days completed) and a leaderboard letting readers see how they stack up against SFGATE’s own staff
• Audio versions of articles, extensive bookmarking, and premium maps that plot SFGATE’s historic archive geographically
• Granular push notification controls, roughly 30 different alert categories, built specifically because California’s geography doesn’t map neatly onto any one set of interests

Why Friends?

Before landing on ‘Friends of SFGATE,’ the team tested more classic subscription names, including SFGATE+ and SFGATE All Access. But they found that ‘subscription’ read as too transactional for what they were trying to signal, and ‘membership’ carried strong associations with charities and causes that people support out of obligation rather than affinity. ‘Friends’ tested as warmer than the former and less formal than the latter, reflecting a relationship that already existed with SFGATE’s most engaged readers, rather than inventing a new transactional one.

Redefining what success looks like

Marek described a shift in how his newsroom is measuring its own performance since the move towards reader revenue. Total visits, historically the default newsroom metric, matters less to this project than repeat visits. How many times can someone who’s already shown up once be brought back a second and third time. 

That reframing also changes the editorial calculus. While competing on the exact same breaking story as ten other outlets used to be table stakes, Marek’s team is now weighing differentiated, SFGATE-specific coverage more heavily, on the logic that unique journalism is what actually builds the habit loop the app is designed around.

The early numbers

Four weeks post-launch, one figure stood out to Campbell specifically: of the readers who took the 7-day free trial, close to 90% converted into paying Friends. It’s an early signal rather than a settled result, but this number represents a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate than he’s seen in close to three decades of doing this work.

This is, in part, due to active retention early on, during these 7 days:

• An email series that includes a personal message from Marek himself, alongside reminders of specific app benefits
• Push notifications, tuned to each reader’s chosen interests from day one
• The crossword’s streak mechanic, which Marek described as quietly addictive once someone gets a few days in
• Daily social content (SFGATE has the largest Instagram following of any Hearst Newspapers title) introducing different app features on rotation, audio, bookmarking, events, to readers whether or not they’ve installed the app yet

What changed internally to make this possible

The launch required real organizational change, not just a new product wrapper:

• A newly created role, Community Engagement Program Manager, currently being hired for, is a first for SFGATE
• A second hire added to the video team, driven by strong reader response to journalists as recognizable, followable creators (Melissa Cho, known to readers as “SFGATE Girl,” for instance)
• An existing audience desk editor, with prior app programming experience at The Athletic and SmartNews, moved into leading app programming for SFGATE specifically, work Marek described as sitting dormant until this launch gave it a purpose
• On the marketing side, Hearst’s existing team and infrastructure stayed the same in headcount. The real work was calibration, such as learning to write copy and design interstitials that actually sound like SFGATE, a two-way collaboration between the marketing lead and SFGATE’s news team

Marek connected this to a broader shift he’s watched happen over his career. Journalists who started out purely writing have had to add video, then podcasting, and now, in his framing, business literacy generally. Understanding Campbell’s side of the operation, and vice versa, is what he considers necessary now for finding initiatives that contribute to reader revenue. 

What’s still being figured out

On acquisition, Campbell’s team is four tests into learning what actually drives trial sign-ups, testing different feature framings and on-site placements, with paid acquisition still to come.

On audience targeting, Campbell said the current approach has been intentionally broad – go wide and go loud, but the next phase, drawing on lessons from Hearst’s other subscription brands, is sharper segmentation, including identifying which readers are statistically most likely to convert to a Friend, and targeting acquisition efforts accordingly rather than treating the whole audience as one pool.

The bigger shift this represents

Campbell framed Friends of SFGATE as evidence that the old binary (a site that’s either a subscription business or a free one) doesn’t have to hold. 

It’s a structurally similar idea to the ‘willingness to pay versus willingness to commit’ gap The Washington Post has written about in its own flexible-access research. Rather than forcing every reader through the same single gate, SFGATE has effectively added a new, optional tier above the free web experience, built specifically for readers who were already deeply engaged but never had a way to formalize that relationship or directly support the journalism.

SFGATE has, for its entire history, had no answer for the reader who finishes a story during a big moment and asks how they can support their work. Now there’s a concrete answer. And one that has been designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. 

Thank you to Grant & Mark for their time!

> The Economist has launched a dedicated subscription tier for access to audio and video formats, priced lower than the core digital subscription to attract new audiences

> The "Halo Effect": From early signals, the team has observed an uptick in core Premium sign-ups. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product acts as an anchor, nudging undecided visitors to pay a little extra for the full suite.

> Net-New Audience: Conversions through Play have been driven almost entirely by brand-new readers rather than existing subscribers trading down.

> Play is part of The Economist's wider strategic development (alongside podcasts, short-form video and "Insider") towards building deeper, more "human" relationships with audiences

The reasoning behind building it as a tier rather than a separate product, in Arnot’s words, was straightforward: a growing audience across all age ranges, not only younger readers, is consuming news in audio and video form specifically in the in-between moments of a day, commuting, walking a dog, running errands. The Economist wanted a way to show up at this moment without asking people to pay full price for a format mix they didn’t want yet. It’s also, deliberately, a lower-priced entry point aimed at bringing younger demographics into The Economist’s orbit before they’re ready for the full written product.

Arnot was clear that this is not a sign of declining interest in text. Older subscribers still demand “the whole buffet” of text, audio, and video. However, AV formats are specifically what attract the next generation, audiences who are likely to skew toward 90% audio-video consumption and 10% print.

How Play is marketed and priced

On the acquisition side, paid media campaigns in test markets lead directly with the Play proposition. However, when prospects land on the offer page, they see all three tiers side-by-side: Play, Premium (Digital), and Premium Plus Print.

Play receives the same intro mechanics as the core subscriptions: 30% off an annual pass or a one-month free trial.

Early signals, three weeks in

So far, subscription growth is looking very promising and, critically, existing Premium subscriptions in those markets have stayed healthy. Arnot even noted an uptick in Premium sign-ups that they attribute partly to Play’s presence on the offer page. Seeing a cheaper, format-specific option next to the full product seems to be nudging some undecided visitors toward paying a little more for everything, rather than pulling people down to the cheaper tier. So far, everyone acquired through Play has been genuinely new to The Economist, rather than existing subscribers trading down.

Importantly, Arnot’s team is watching closely to check that the new lower tier isn’t cannibalising their classic subscription. The logic they’re applying: it’s fine to accept some cannibalization risk as long as incremental new subscriptions outweigh it, and so far, that hasn’t materialized as a problem.

Product portfolio realignment: Play vs Espresso

The Economist already operated a lower-cost daily news offering, Espresso, alongside Economist Podcast Plus. However, Espresso offers only a handful of written pieces per month—a materially thinner proposition than Play’s full audio-video catalog.

To prevent audience confusion and eliminate product overlap:

1. The Economist delisted Espresso from app stores entirely within the Play pilot markets.
2. The team funneled all lower-friction entry points toward one unified brand experience inside the primary app ecosystem.

The wider relationship-building strategy

For Arnot, Play is one piece of a long-term evolution toward human-centered publishing:

1. Podcasts (top of funnel): Un-paywalled podcasts introduced audiences to journalists as real people—a shift for a publication that historically ran without bylines.
2. Short-form video (mid funnel): Put journalists directly in front of the camera, deepening visual familiarity.
3. Insider (retention & loyalty): A premium feature launched in late 2025 that brings subscribers into the newsroom through editor-led shows, biweekly newsletters, and newsmaking interviews with global leaders. The value of these “human” formats was echoed by Diana Babei, Principal Product Manager, at Audiencers’ Festival London, who shared that insider is already proving to build loyalty and trust in ways that article text doesn’t, including high engagement with this product (75% of subscribers) and lower churn among Insider viewers. 

4. Play (acquisition & conversion): Uses the same human-first AV formats that drive Insider’s loyalty, but packages them at a lower price point to build habits and acquire audiences who haven’t yet subscribed

Arnot connected this directly to the pressure AI search and AI-generated summaries are putting on publishers broadly: as it becomes easier for a reader to get information without ever visiting a publisher’s site, the case for a human-centered, personality-driven product only gets stronger, not as a defensive move, but as one of the few remaining things a subscription can offer that a summary can’t.

Insider and Play, in that sense, aren’t two separate initiatives so much as two different answers to the same underlying bet: that in an AI-saturated information environment, the publishers who win will be the ones readers feel some kind of human connection to, whether that connection starts with a $15 audio tier or a premium interview.

Key takeaways for publishers

• Lower barriers, high intent: Play acts as both an affordable entry tier for news consumers and a funnel toward the full-fat product
• Single-app ecosystem: Consolidating tiers inside one core app keeps brand equity intact and simplifies the upgrade journey
• Format-led segmentation: Rather than gating by topic, gating by format (AV vs. text) aligns naturally with mobile habits and daily routines
• Human-first defensibility: Prioritising formats that showcase real journalists builds trust and retention that AI summaries cannot replicate. 

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

Let’s take a closer look at how it works in this excerpt from the book:

• Reach

Reach includes every interaction with potential subscribers, whether through your own channels or through partners, referrals, paid advertising, or other touchpoints.

a) Anonymous contacts: most of these contacts remain anonymous. They have interacted with your brand, but you cannot identify or contact them directly.

b) Leads: Leads are potential customers whose identity is known and who can ideally be contacted directly. Examples include newsletter subscribers, freemium users, registered accounts, or prospects collected through sales or telephone campaigns.

• Trials

Trial users are people who are testing the subscription through a free or discounted offer while deciding whether the product provides enough value to justify becoming paying subscribers.

• Active subscribers

Active subscribers are customers who have paid at least one regular subscription fee. Later in this article, I’ll explain in more detail where I draw the line between trial users and active subscribers.

Within the subscriber base, customers often move between different pricing tiers through upgrades and downgrades, increasing or decreasing their customer value.

A subset of active subscribers consists of customers with expiring subscriptions. When subscribers cancel, their subscription usually remains active until the end of the current billing period. In other words, the cancellation has been submitted but has not yet taken effect. During this remaining term, there is still an opportunity to persuade customers to reverse their cancellation.

• Former subscribers

Once a subscription has expired, customers become former subscribers. If they have given permission to be contacted, the win-back process begins. Former subscribers effectively become qualified leads again and can be targeted with dedicated retention and reactivation campaigns to encourage them to subscribe again.

Let’s go through these stages in detail:

1. Reach

The first step in any subscription business is making sure that potential customers become aware of your brand, your product, and your subscription offering. To achieve this, you should continuously expand the range of channels through which you reach your target audience. In addition to your own website, these channels may include social media, podcasts, public relations, events, partnerships, and many other customer touchpoints.

However, reach alone is not enough. What matters is reaching the right people. Ten million impressions may sound impressive, but they have little value if the audience has no genuine interest in your product. That’s why every subscription business should define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—a description of the customers who are most likely to become successful, long-term subscribers.

Very few products are truly designed for everyone. Instead, companies should focus on the people or organizations that have a real need for what they offer. If you cannot clearly define your target audience, you risk wasting both time and marketing budget on customers who are unlikely to convert. An ICP therefore defines not only who you want to attract, but also who you deliberately choose not to target.

The best starting point is your existing subscriber base. Analyze your most valuable customers, identify the characteristics they have in common, and use those insights to guide future acquisition efforts. At the same time, you should regularly challenge your assumptions and explore whether there are attractive customer segments beyond your current audience.

For the digital subscription of a regional newspaper, an Ideal Customer Profile might look something like this:

Potential subscribers have lived in the region for several years, feel connected to their local community, and are interested in topics such as local politics, schools, transportation, public safety, sports, real estate, and local events. They are typically between 35 and 64 years old, employed, and have started a family. Many own their homes and expect to remain in the region for years to come. Although this profile is still relatively broad, it also illustrates that younger audiences or digital nomads may currently be much harder to convert into paying subscribers and therefore might not be the primary focus of acquisition efforts.

At the same time, additional customer segments may exist outside this core audience. For example, people who no longer live in the region may still have a strong interest in the local football club. The German newspaper Ruhr Nachrichten identified exactly this opportunity and introduced a separate, lower-priced BVB subscription for Borussia Dortmund fans living outside its core distribution area. This represents a second Ideal Customer Profile that can be targeted independently and generates up to 2,500 additional subscribers during a single football season.

Once you have identified the right audience, the next challenge is to create a positive first impression and spark genuine interest. Or, as Lucas von Gwinner and Dirk von Gehlen would put it, to build a strong brand. In their book Macht Marke, they argue that a brand is far more than a company’s name or logo—it is its reputation.

Before people decide to subscribe, they need to understand what your brand stands for and why it solves their problem better than any competing alternative. Strong brands communicate a clear positioning that differentiates them from competitors. As a result, they not only increase awareness but also improve conversion rates and strengthen long-term customer retention.

2. Leads

Before asking people to commit to a subscription, it is often worth getting to know them first and gradually introducing them to your product. A well-designed lead generation strategy helps build a large pool of potential subscribers whom you can engage with on an ongoing basis.

Compared with anonymous visitors, leads are significantly more likely to become subscribers. Because you know more about them, you can tailor your communication and offers to their individual interests, needs, and stage in the customer journey.

One of the key metrics at this stage is the Lead Rate, which measures the percentage of people reached who are willing to share their contact information and give permission to be contacted.

For example, if 5,000 out of 100,000 people reached provide their email address and marketing consent, the Lead Rate is 5%.

Lead generation serves two important purposes. First, it creates an owned audience that you can contact repeatedly without relying solely on paid advertising or third-party platforms. Second, it allows you to build trust over time before presenting a subscription offer. Especially for products that require a high level of commitment or involve a longer purchasing decision, this gradual relationship-building can significantly improve conversion rates.

3. Trials

In most cases, customers can only determine whether a subscription is worth paying for after they have experienced the product firsthand. Free or discounted trial offers lower the barrier to entry and encourage potential subscribers to give the product a try.

There is no universal formula for determining the ideal trial length or discount level. Companies continue to experiment with different approaches, and in my interviews I have seen everything from one-day trials to introductory offers lasting two years. Some businesses prefer short trials that generate revenue quickly, while others use longer trial periods to help customers build lasting habits, making the subscription an integral part of their daily lives before they begin paying the full price.

One of the most important phases of any subscription begins during the trial: onboarding. Effective onboarding helps new customers discover the value of their subscription as quickly as possible. The sooner they experience meaningful benefits and establish regular usage habits, the more likely they are to become long-term subscribers.

The Trial Start Rate measures the percentage of people reached who begin a trial. For example, if 2,000 out of 100,000 people reached start a trial, the Trial Start Rate is 2%.

The Lead-to-Trial Rate, on the other hand, measures how many known leads convert into trial users. If 500 out of 5,000 leads sign up for a trial, the Lead-to-Trial Rate is 10%.

Not every trial results in a paid subscription. Users who decide not to continue after the trial often return to the lead pool. If they have given permission to be contacted, they can be nurtured through future marketing campaigns and may eventually decide to subscribe.

4. Active subscribers

Active subscribers are the foundation of every subscription business. They generate predictable, recurring revenue and therefore determine the long-term health of the business. At this stage, the primary objective is to retain subscribers for as long as possible while increasing their lifetime value through upgrades and cross-selling where appropriate.

The Conversion Rate measures the percentage of people reached who become paying subscribers. For example, if 1,000 out of 100,000 people reached purchase a subscription, the overall Conversion Rate is 1%.

Like most funnel metrics, this KPI can also be broken down by funnel stage. If 200 of those 1,000 subscriptions originated from 2,000 trial users, the Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate is 10%. Likewise, if 750 out of 5,000 leads purchase a full subscription, the Lead-to-Paid Conversion Rate is 15%.

One important question remains: When does a trial become an active subscription?

In practice, the boundary is not always clear. Many subscription businesses offer heavily discounted introductory pricing before customers begin paying the regular rate. However, not every discounted offer should be classified as a trial. A clear definition is essential because it directly affects the accuracy of key performance indicators such as retention and churn.

Consider the following examples:

1. DIE ZEIT

The German newspaper DIE ZEIT offers a print subscription in which the first 13 issues cost €5 each before increasing to €7.50. Since subscribers pay roughly two-thirds of the regular price from the very first issue and generate at least €65 in revenue, I would classify them as active subscribers from day one.

2. BILDplus

A BILDplus subscription costs €1.99 per month during the first year before increasing to €7.99 and can be cancelled at any time. In this case, I would consider only the first month part of the trial period. Once the subscription renews, customers become active subscribers, even though they continue to receive a substantial introductory discount.

3. The New York Times

The annual All Access subscription is sometimes available for $20 instead of the regular $90. Because these customers pay only around one-fifth of the standard price—and many are likely to cancel before ever paying full price—there are two reasonable approaches. They can either be treated as long-running trial users or as heavily discounted active subscribers.

Why does this distinction matter?

Cancellation rates during trial periods are typically much higher than among established subscribers. For that reason, trial users are generally excluded from core KPIs such as Retention Rate and Churn Rate. An inconsistent or poorly defined distinction between trials and paid subscribers can therefore distort these metrics and make performance comparisons misleading.

The Retention Rate measures the percentage of active subscribers who remain subscribed from one period to the next. If you begin the month with 10,000 subscribers and 9,500 are still active at the end of the month, your monthly Retention Rate is 95%.

The Upgrade Rate and Downgrade Rate measure how frequently subscribers move between pricing tiers. For example, if 200 out of 4,000 subscribers on the Basic or Standard plan upgrade to a higher-tier subscription within a month, the monthly Upgrade Rate is 5%.

4.5 Expiring subscriptions

Expiring subscriptions are subscriptions that have already been cancelled but remain active until the end of the current billing period. Although this stage is often overlooked, it can last for a surprisingly long time.

For example, a customer with an annual subscription may cancel on the very first day simply to avoid missing the cancellation deadline. Even though they have already submitted their cancellation, they remain an active subscriber for another 365 days. That also means you have 365 opportunities to convince them to stay. In many cases, a cancellation is not a final decision against the subscription but simply a precaution to avoid an unwanted renewal.

The Cancellation Rate measures the percentage of subscribers who submit a cancellation request during a given period. If 300 out of 10,000 active subscribers cancel within a month, the monthly Cancellation Rate is 3%.

The Cancellation Rate should not be confused with the Churn Rate. The two metrics often differ because a cancellation usually occurs well before the subscription actually ends.

For example, if a customer cancels in January but still has six months remaining on an annual subscription, they contribute to the Cancellation Rate in January but only enter the Churn Rate in June—provided they do not withdraw their cancellation beforehand.

In addition, the Churn Rate includes not only voluntary cancellations but also involuntary churn, such as failed payments or expired payment methods.

The Reactivation Rate measures how many subscribers reverse their cancellation before their subscription expires. If 30 out of 300 cancelling subscribers decide to stay before the end of their billing period, the Reactivation Rate is 10%.

Finally, the Save Rate measures the percentage of subscribers who begin the cancellation process but never complete it. In other words, it captures the cancellations that were successfully prevented before they were ever submitted.

4.6 Former subscribers

Once a subscription has expired, the customer becomes a former subscriber and the win-back process begins. Provided you still have permission to contact them, former subscribers can be reached through email, phone calls, push notifications, or other marketing channels with tailored offers and messages designed to encourage them to return.

From the perspective of the subscription funnel, former subscribers effectively become highly qualified leads again. Unlike new prospects, they already know your product, have experienced its value, and have demonstrated a willingness to pay in the past. As a result, win-back campaigns often achieve significantly higher conversion rates than campaigns targeting first-time subscribers.

As a subscription business matures, win-back becomes increasingly important because a growing share of the addressable market has already subscribed at least once. Over time, acquisition efforts naturally shift from attracting entirely new customers to re-engaging former ones.

For that reason, it is useful to measure how many people you are targeting have previously been subscribers. The Former Subscriber Rate measures the percentage of contacts—such as recipients of an email campaign or visitors reaching a paywall—who have held a subscription before.

This metric provides an indication of how frequently you are “fishing in the same pond.” While it is often impossible to identify former subscribers across third-party channels such as social media, logged-in users on your own website can usually be matched to their subscription history.

In some industries, particularly video streaming, customers regularly pause and restart their subscriptions depending on the content available. In these markets, cancellation is often not the end of the customer relationship but simply a temporary break.

The Win-Back Rate measures the percentage of former subscribers who return within a given period. For example, if 1,000 out of 5,000 former subscribers purchase another subscription within one year, the annual Win-Back Rate is 20%.

Viewed as a whole, the subscription funnel is not a linear process but a continuous cycle. Every former subscriber represents a potential future customer, making retention and reactivation just as important as acquiring new subscribers.

With a hard paywall leaving practically zero articles for free, Foreign Policy prioritizes low-effort, high-impact tactics, three of which were shared at Audiencers' Festival Montréal:
> Build one segmented "win-back" email, targeting lapsed-but-recent visitors
> Test an exit-intent registration wall instead of loosening your paywall
> Turn your best columnist into a short email course for readers who aren't ready to subscribe yet

The paywall is genuinely strict, and getting stricter

FP offers essentially no free content. Osnos was upfront that this is unusual – freemium is perhaps the most popular model in Europe, whilst in Canada a lot of content is freely accessible and many media are government supported. And their model has only gotten more restrictive over time. In 2018, the meter allowed around five free articles a month. Today it’s practically zero. Because there’s no ad revenue to fall back on, every article needs to justify its existence through subscription value.

Four problems sitting underneath that strategy

Osnos framed FP’s current position around four challenges, several of which will be familiar to most publishers reading:

• Top-of-funnel erosion. Organic discovery through Google search, historically a major channel, has dropped off significantly, even though FP isn’t chasing traffic.

• A demographic gap. FP’s core paying audience skews over 50. But it also has a large 18-to-23 segment, driven almost entirely by university group subscriptions. Those students are a meaningful exposure channel (Osnos says it’s one of the most common things she hears from subscribers she meets: “I used to read FP at university”), but they arrive through IP-authenticated access, meaning FP has no contact information for them, and loses nearly all of them the moment they graduate.

• High pricing on a strict meter. Because there’s no ad revenue, FP has to price for value and hold the line on access, which creates real friction for readers who aren’t ready to pay upfront.

• Rising competition in a moment that should otherwise favor FP. Geopolitics is dominating headlines, which sounds like a tailwind, but it also means FP is now competing directly with much larger outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times for the same coverage. Osnos noted that FP used to see clear, isolated traffic and subscription spikes tied to major geopolitical moments (the clearest being the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war). More recent moments, including developments around Venezuela, have still moved the needle, but far less distinctly, because so many outlets are now covering the same stories simultaneously.

Given a small team (3 on the individual subscription side, 2 focused on group subs), Osnos’s operating principle is to prioritize low-effort, high-impact tactics, three of which she shared with us in Montréal: 

Win 1: The weekly trending digest

This is a weekly email combining a curated feed of articles, with marketing messaging at the top and bottom. Its effectiveness comes almost entirely from precise targeting and testing, not from the format itself.

Targeting: the email goes to users who visited the site in the last 30 days but haven’t visited in the last 7, a segment the team calls “Active 30, Dark 7.” These readers haven’t seen the last week’s stories, so the email surfaces what’s new rather than repeating content they may have already seen, and it re-engages them before they drift into a fully at-risk state. Readers still inside that 7-day window get more direct subscription-offer messaging instead, since they don’t need a content refresher.

Article selection: the team tested a blend of signals (last-touch conversion attribution, subscriber engagement time, and Apple News performance as a proxy for general news interest) against Sailthru’s personalization engine. Curated selection matched or outperformed the automated personalization engine consistently. Osnos’s read: curation still beats algorithmic personalization here, even though full automation would have been the lower-effort path.

Format specifics, tested directly: seven articles per edition, chosen after testing five, seven, and ten; seven won. The email always ends with an “end unit,” a final clickable item (a magazine issue, a new feature, a limited offer) so the reader has somewhere to go after the content rather than the email simply stopping. The top of the email is segmented into four different versions depending on who’s reading it, students and academics with .edu addresses see different pricing and messaging, former subscribers see a different version again, and existing subscribers never see price or offer messaging at all (they instead see messaging to reinforce sub benefits e.g. gift links, new issues, FP Live).

Effort and what’s next: the whole build takes under 30 minutes a week and consistently lands in FP’s top 10 monthly conversion sources (by campaign). The team is now testing an internally built AI tool that analyzes FP articles for conversion and subscriber-traffic performance and generates optimized headlines and decks, since the email leans almost entirely on headline and deck to pull readers back to the site.

Win 2: The exit-intent registration wall

FP has tested hard paywalls against softer meter strategies repeatedly, across every audience segment (known, unknown, newsletter subscribers, everyone), and hard paywalling consistently converts 5x better. That’s why 80% of FP’s traffic sees a hard paywall 100% of the time.

The remaining 20% is where the exit-intent wall comes in. When the system detects a reader about to leave the page (or swipe away on mobile) without paying, it offers a registration prompt instead: create a free account, get that one article. This avoids cannibalizing the primary hard-paywall conversion moment while still capturing readers who weren’t going to pay this time but are worth keeping in the funnel.

What happens after account creation matters as much as the wall itself. New registrants go through on-site onboarding and a structured nurture sequence: an explanation of why FP exists, a set of “greatest hits” articles with the paywall temporarily removed, a note from a subscriber-favorite columnist, and promotion of newsletters, which the team has found to be one of the strongest drivers of paid conversion among registered-but-not-subscribed readers, along with FP Live, FP’s video series. The average time from account creation to paid subscription across this flow is 14 days.

Win 3: Newsletter courses

FP’s first newsletter course, an introduction to core international relations theory, was launched in 2026 and authored by Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor and one of FP’s top-converting columnists (also featured in the onboarding nurture sequence above). The format is a five-part email series covering foundational IR concepts.

The logic behind it: geopolitics is increasingly relevant to people well outside FP’s usual readership, but without some grounding in the basics, a general reader has a hard time getting real value from FP’s actual coverage. The course is designed to meet a younger, less specialized audience where they are and bring them into FP’s orbit gradually.

In its first six weeks, the course drew roughly 9,500 signups. 40% of signups were net new to FP, meaning they’d never previously been in FP’s email system. Paid acquisition for the course is running at a $1 cost per lead, against FP’s normal average of roughly $3. These users are driven to the FP website rather than using an ad platform email capture, a strategy that may lead to higher CPLs but means higher quality leads.

The course also functions as a self-contained subscription funnel. Throughout its five parts, it embeds subscription messaging: “homework” assignments using gift links to relevant FP coverage, and promotion of specific benefits, like FP’s podcasts, that the team believes will resonate with a similar audience. Rather than offering a broad free trial that risks prompting cancellations among existing subscribers, FP built a narrower incentive: completing the course earns a 30-day free trial, available only to that specific, already-engaged cohort. So far, 18% of readers exposed to the trial offer go on to claim the trial.

Because the course is built once and requires no ongoing maintenance to keep running, it fits the same low-effort, high-impact principle as the other two tactics: a small team’s structural bet, built on the front end and left to keep converting on its own.

For any publisher weighing a stricter paywall against the traffic it might cost, Osnos's session is a useful reminder that the constraint didn't stop growth, it forced the team to continuously innovate and develop tactics precise enough to convert when article access can’t.

> The Observer launched its first-ever digital subscription in November 2025 at £16 a month or £144 a year, with a single umbrella tier covering print, digital, audio and Culture Club benefits from spring this year.
> Culture Club, a set of arts and culture perks worth more than £800, is given to every subscriber instead of being held back for a premium tier.
> Early data shows subscribers who engage with multiple parts of the product, from Nigel Slater's recipes to the puzzles to podcasts, are significantly less likely to cancel.
> The Salt Path investigation and its podcast and documentary afterlife have been the single biggest growth catalyst since launch.

Lessons:
> A single, transparent subscription can beat early tiering when you are reintroducing a brand to its audience.
> Retention comes from breadth of engagement across a product, not from any one flagship story.
> Old brand equity can bridge readers into new daily habits, but only if the product is built to earn that habit.

Why there are no tiers

Where many publishers reach for tiers early, The Observer launched with a single umbrella subscription covering print, digital, audio and now, Culture Club (see below). “We wanted the subscription to be simple to understand, great value for money and comprehensive,” Riley says. Reintroducing a heritage brand to an audience that may not be familiar with it, or has never encountered it digitally at all, is not the moment to ask people to choose between packages.

A separate audio-only subscription, a legacy of the Tortoise audio model, exists through Apple Podcasts and Spotify for readers who want nothing else, and there is real cross-pollination between formats. But the umbrella model is deliberate: with only six months of data, Riley says tiering decisions now would rest on very little evidence. Simplicity was the safer bet, leaving room to see where the value lands before carving up the product.

Culture Club, for every subscriber

The Observer’s most visible product launch since the initial rollout is Culture Club, a set of arts and culture benefits bundled into every subscription: two-for-one tickets to the National Gallery, exclusive cinema screenings with directors, author events and book clubs held in the newsroom, and discounted theatre tickets. “It’s your cultural life, curated,” is how Riley describes it.

Rather than a separate product built for a distinct audience, Culture Club is included in the standard subscription and goes to every reader who pays for it, with no separate tier. Riley frames it as adding significant partner benefits to those that The Observer was already quietly offering, like giving a 70% discount on home cinema memberships through their partner MUBI and turning them into a coherent proposition tied to the brand’s editorial identity. Arts and culture were the deliberate focus rather than, say, food or travel: Riley sees it as a standout interest for Observer audiences that other subscription products in the market have overlooked. The commercial logic is retention as much as acquisition: subscribers who attend an event or use a benefit build a tangible relationship with the brand that a login alone cannot create.

Riley traces the conviction to the i newspaper, where he launched reader events and saw that most people find news organisations distant and faintly mysterious right up until they are sitting in a room talking to a journalist. Subscribers who have had that kind of experience with a brand, in his experience, are simply more likely to stay, which is the logic Culture Club now builds into the subscription itself.

Pricing without the tricks

The Observer priced its subscription at £16 a month or £144 a year, deliberately avoiding 99p-style pricing. “That was part of just trying to be really clear about what we think the value is of the work that we’re doing,” Riley says. An under-35 price point at 50% off acknowledges that younger readers are often priced out of premium subscriptions, with 35 chosen as a deliberate life-stage threshold.

The Observer has no obvious competitor to benchmark against. The Guardian’s UK voluntary model and the Times’ hard paywall represent decades of pricing evolution aimed largely at winning back or re-engaging audiences a mature business has already exhausted. The Observer has no such legacy to correct for, which Riley treats as an advantage: the headline price can reflect where the business is now, without unwinding years of promotional pricing.

What’s driving retention

Six months in, Riley says the clearest signal in the data is breadth of engagement. Subscribers who touch multiple parts of the product, reading Nigel Slater’s recipes, doing the crossword and listening to a podcast, are significantly less likely to cancel than those who arrived for one thing and never explored further. Because the product is still young, many subscribers do not yet know everything they have access to.

That is why subscriber messaging pushes Culture Club so hard: highlighting more than £800 in available benefits is a fast way to demonstrate value to someone who subscribed for a single podcast series before they reach a cancellation decision. The Observer has also seen a healthier-than-expected skew towards annual plans, which Riley reads as an early show of faith, buying time to build a relationship before the first renewal.

The Salt Path’s second life

The Chloe Hadjimatheou investigation into the bestselling memoir The Salt Path was a hit before the subscription even existed, driving millions of readers to the open-access site last summer and helping build the registration base the launch depended on. In January, a narrative podcast series built on the investigation became, in Riley’s words, the biggest catalyst for subscriber growth in the first few months after launch, driving uptake in both the standalone audio subscription and the full subscription that includes it. A Sky documentary over Christmas had extended the story’s reach further. A new Hadjimatheou series, We Call Her Emma, has just been released, an investigation focusing on the extraordinary rise of Asma al-Assad from West London girl to the heart of Syria’s brutal dictatorship: the next test of whether a story that brings subscribers in at scale can hand them on to the rest of the product.

Building fast without the legacy costs

The Observer’s product team has moved almost entirely to an agentic coding approach, using AI tools to handle the bulk of feature development. A small team of engineers from an outside agency works alongside an in-house tech lead and product manager. Claude writes most of the code for new features, while the engineers concentrate on harder technical problems and on testing and quality assurance, checking that the output does what it was meant to. The approach lets a young, lean organisation compete with newsrooms that have far larger legacy technology teams, freeing more of the business’s resources for journalism itself.

Riley applies the same instinct himself. After seeing a story-support widget demonstrated by a US publishers’ collective at the recent Audiencers Festival in London, he built a rough version of it within an afternoon, not to launch it but to show his own team the idea. Prototyping, he says, has become quick enough that showing is often faster than telling.

On the harder question of AI companies and publisher content, Riley is careful not to stake out a fixed position. The Observer has partnered with Particle News, an AI-powered aggregation app, as its first UK publisher, and Riley points to Reuters Institute research showing a growing share of global news journeys now beginning inside a chatbot as a signal publishers cannot ignore, whatever position they eventually take on direct deals versus industry coalitions.

The hardest part isn’t the technology

Asked what has been harder than expected, Riley doesn’t hesitate: discipline. A brand this old, with this much editorial breadth, invites endless extensions: more tiers, more products, more features, especially now that the barrier to building any of them has collapsed.

“When Claude can build you a recipe site in an afternoon, you have to ask yourself: is that really what we want to build?”

Riley has previously cited The Atlantic’s decade-long path to a million subscribers as a realistic model for the kind of timeline this takes. His ambition for The Observer is to build a sustainably profitable media business on reader revenue and other income streams, and he argues that doing so without the legacy cost base of an older company changes the calculation. He won’t share subscriber numbers this early. Six months in, he says, The Observer is on track. There is, by his own admission, still a long way to go.

Jack Riley is Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, where he leads customer revenue strategy across subscription growth, marketing, data and product. He joined in 2025 from The London Standard, where he was Chief Digital Officer, and previously led Huffington Post’s turnaround to profitability as Managing Director. The Observer is owned by Tortoise Media.

> 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

The exercise: fill in the blank

To find that sense of uniqueness, Goligoski runs newsroom leaders through simple prompts about their organizations:

• First in the subject, region, or world to ___
• Best compared to competitors in ___
• Only organization to ___

The exercise surfaces an origin story fast. But it’s only half the picture, and it’s the easy half — anyone can answer these questions for themselves around a conference table. The real value comes from asking the same questions of the people you’re trying to reach, who often can’t name your staff or your specific value prop but can place you loosely (“oh, that’s the one about the business of fashion”). The gap between the two answer sets is the actual work. It tells you what you think differentiates you and what has actually landed.

Her rule of thumb for this kind of testing: n+1 is better than n. At a minimum, show your prototype to one more person than has seen it already. You’ll walk away smarter from even one conversation, and Goligoski says fifteen years into doing this work, people still thank her for simply being asked for their perspectives.

But watch out for “feature soup.” When you start testing value props and benefits, it’s easy to try to cram everything onto one page or into one pitch. If a first-time visitor needs a magnifying glass to understand what they’re being offered, you’ve already lost the differentiation you were trying to build.

A few examples she pointed to of publishers getting specificity right:

• Caper, a New York food media outlet, prices its annual subscription against hyper-local reference points: “less than a burrata pizza slice at L’Industrie, a potato pancake at Veselka” instead of the generic “less than a cup of coffee a day.” It grounds the price and quietly reminds readers how many small recurring charges they’re already carrying.

• The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review have a once-a-year summer bundle offer for two publications with possible audience overlap and growth potential, a financially compelling deal rather than a permanent merge.
• Capital B, a Black-media outlet in the US, sent an anniversary email that included an actual screenshot of the text exchange between its two co-founders deciding to launch. It reads as human in a way most subscription marketing doesn’t.

Goligoski’s closing asks for anyone doing this work: 

• Limit friction wherever you find it
• Take a less-is-more approach to any data you collect (only ask what you’ll actually act on)
• Keep a running, visible wishlist of the features and coverage areas you hear people ask for. That list becomes a genuine insight bank over time.

The Skift case study: is your product an audience or a feature?

Mines joined Skift, a B2B travel media and events company, two years ago and inherited what she called “a family I didn’t plan for”: four separate subscription products, none designed to sit together.

• Skift Pro: always-on travel news, home-grown, positioned as “the Bloomberg of travel”
• Skift Research: long-form, data-driven reports, also home-grown, aimed at strategy and analytics buyers making a major decision rather than staying informed daily
• Airline Weekly: a roughly 20-year-old acquired product, once faxed, now a newsletter with its own site, read closely by aviation executives (Delta CEO Ed Bastian has called it “the only thing I read every week”)
• Daily Lodging Report: a similarly old acquisition, a daily digest for hospitality and real-estate operators

Three questions before you package anything

1. Identity: does combining these products strengthen each one’s core value, or dilute it?
2. Audience: are these audiences actually growing toward each other, or are they deliberately separate?
3. Operations: can your UX, billing, and support genuinely hold a bundle together, or will the seams show? Mines runs subscriptions with a five-person team, a small product team, and a small design team, capacity is a real constraint.

Applying these questions to the Skift context

Airline Weekly: bundled the content, not the experience. Skift already had aviation coverage in both Pro and Research, plus an aviation conference. The instinct was to fold Airline Weekly’s coverage into all of it. But the products stayed on separate platforms — readers had to hop between a newsletter, a website, and (for a much smaller group) a conference ticket. Layering content across products without integrating the actual user experience just produced a disjointed one. Nobody complained loudly about it; it showed up quietly instead, in renewal numbers drifting down. 

Mines’ takeaway: audit the identity of what you’re bundling before you bundle it. Packaging without UX clarity is just confusion with a price tag.

Daily Lodging Report: the right move was nothing. This subscriber base — Mines described them candidly as mostly finance and real-estate professionals — wanted exactly one thing: the digest, in their inbox, undisturbed. Skift gave the product a new site and new data tools anyway. The response was, in effect, I don’t care, just give me the newsletter. 

So, they left it alone, and it’s remained one of their steadiest, best-growing products. Leaving a product untouched is a strategic decision, not a lack of ambition. Some products’ value comes directly from their constraints.

Pro + Research: complementary, not interchangeable. These two live in the same sales conversation but serve different budgets and different personas — daily information versus decision-support research. Combining them into one package would have devalued Research and bloated Pro. Skift’s framing: they don’t need the same package, they need the same conversation.

Mines’ shorthand for thinking about all of this is a marriage metaphor: some products should merge households (full integration makes both better); some should keep separate addresses (related, committed, but each keeps its own front door); some need couples therapy first (real potential, but only after the UX and integration work happens); and some are simply happy as they are, and the kindest, smartest move is to leave them alone.

From the Q&A: a few things worth stealing

Don’t let a new feature justify a price increase — check whether anyone asked for it first. When Skift acquired the Women Leading Travel membership group, the team raised prices and then went looking for features to justify the increase — a research report, an add-on. Mines stopped that process to ask a more basic question: did any of these members actually want the research report? They hadn’t. What they wanted was networking and job connections, and that’s where Skift redirected. Goligoski added a comparable example: ProPublica offers a branded t-shirt only after someone donates, framed as a thank-you rather than a subscription perk — about 17% of donors take it, self-selecting into people who’ll actually wear it and become visible advocates, rather than shipping merchandise nobody asked for.

Test new features free before you charge for them. Goligoski’s suggestion for the free-versus-paid feature question: launch new features free first, watch uptake, get people to describe the value in their own words, and work out the rough edges before you decide whether it becomes a paid add-on or a built-in part of the product.

When you research your gap between positioning and perceived value, don’t blend your audiences. Talk to loyal long-term subscribers, low-frequency readers, and non-subscribers separately, and be explicit — internally — about exactly who any given finding came from. Self-reported research also goes stale fast, so treat it as something to refresh regularly rather than a one-time study you cite for years.

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The takeaway to carry into your next packaging conversation: don’t start with pricing, and don’t start with the bundle itself. Start with audience needs and wants, including the friction points people tell you about. The best package isn’t the one with the most crammed into it — it’s the one your subscriber would actually notice if it disappeared.