> Svenska Dagbladet went from 98,000 to more than 158,000 digital subscribers in two years, over 60% growth, and hit its full-year 2026 target by August

> One North Star: publisher Lisa Irenius replaced separate goals for reach, logged-in users and social with one, more subscribers. A weekly reach of 1.7 million Swedes against roughly 100,000 subscribers was read as headroom, not a problem

> Content has two jobs. Quick news builds habits and traffic, while "aha" stories convert. During the Swedish election traffic spiked, but many of the best-converting articles weren't political: readers came for the news and subscribed for something else

> Paid by default: most articles publish behind the paywall, so the newsroom decides what to leave open, not what to lock. An algorithm flags trending open articles so they can be closed mid-life

> Around 80% of SvD's audio subscribers are new to the brand, people text had never reached. And content commissioned for impact rather than conversion often brings in the most subscribers

Christoffer’s background helps explain his view. He started out as a local journalist, joined Schibsted in 2008 on the advertising side, and now runs subscriptions for SvD. So he knows the commercial levers, but also how a newsroom actually works.

Schibsted is a matrix organisation, with separate subscription and advertising organisations. Christoffer sits on the subscription side, responsible for SvD, and his team has worked closely with SvD’s editorial teams for several years.

Because content is the thing that matters most, the subscription team is deliberately clear about where its role starts and stops:

• Make subscribing frictionless. The team runs A/B tests on the paywall to make it as easy as possible for readers to sign up.
• Share data and insight. It gives the newsroom perspective on how stories are performing.
• Leave the editorial calls to editorial. “When it comes to deciding which kind of story to go for, it’s totally up to the editorial team,” Christoffer says.

He describes his team’s contribution as giving perspective and collaborating, rather than steering. For anyone who’s struggled to bring a newsroom along on the subscription journey it’s a useful framing: the business side earns influence by being helpful, not by setting the editorial agenda.

Lesson: if content is what sells subscriptions, the subscription team’s best work is everything around it. Remove friction at the point of conversion, and give journalists insight they can actually use.

One North Star for the whole organisation

So how do you get editorial and business to genuinely work together? When I asked what had helped most, Christoffer didn’t hesitate: a single, shared goal.

When Lisa Irenius became SvD’s publisher two or three years ago, she set a single North Star: reach more subscribers. Before that, SvD had separate strategies for reach, for logged-in users, for social media engagement and more.

It sounds simple, but bringing goals together under a single KPI made it much simpler to understand what everyone was aiming for. It also gave teams a shared starting point for the harder conversations: what do we need to do to get there, what are our strengths together, and what do we need to work on?

The numbers made the goal feel obvious. SvD reaches 1.7 million Swedes every week. When this push began, it had around 100,000 subscribers.

For Christoffer, that ratio between reach and paying readers wasn’t a problem. It was a sign of huge potential.

Lesson: if your teams are pulling in different directions, cut the number of goals. A single, easy-to-say target gives editorial and commercial a shared language, and comparing reach with subscribers shows everyone how much room there is to grow.

Habit content and “aha” content: you need both

SvD is very focused on conversion. But the most useful thing Christoffer shared was how the newsroom thinks about two different jobs content has to do.

Job one: habit. Quick overviews of what’s going on in the world and what you need to know today. This content “doesn’t give us new subscribers,” he says, but it delivers the daily engagement and routines SvD relies on.

Job two: conversion. Lisa talks internally about creating “aha” moments: pieces that offer insight, appeal to the intellect, make readers feel a bit smarter, or simply bring some joy. These deeper stories are what bring in new subscribers.

Neither works on its own. “You need to have both of those to have a news experience that is worth paying for over time,” Christoffer says. One type of content explicitly feeds the other.

Interestingly, SvD doesn’t formally work with the classic user needs model, though Christoffer says it has drawn some inspiration from it.

The big story isn’t always the one that converts

Sweden’s recent election offered a clear example. Traffic spiked, as you’d expect. But the articles converting readers weren’t mainly about politics.

People came for the news of the moment, then found something else on the site worth paying for. That’s why a broad news experience matters: the story that brings someone in isn’t necessarily the one that makes them subscribe.

Lesson: map your output to the job each piece is doing. Measure habit content on engagement and return visits, and treat traffic peaks as a doorway to the rest of your journalism.

Impact first, conversions second

One of SvD’s standout pieces of journalism this year was “Why Did Max Die?” (“Varför dog Max?”), a three-part investigative podcast with accompanying articles. It looked at the death of a 13-year-old boy who had been bullied, how the school system failed to support him, and his mother’s fight for answers. According to SvD, it has led more than 4,000 readers to subscribe.

Yet Christoffer is clear the team never started from conversion. “In that case, we didn’t see it as, ‘Okay, is this going to give us a lot of subscribers?'” he says. The starting point was a sensitive, important investigation that needed to be told, and the question was how it could have the most impact. SvD then scaled it across the formats it does best.

Some pieces are planned with conversion in mind, he adds. This one wasn’t, and that’s exactly the point he was making earlier about content coming first.

Lesson: track conversions closely, but don’t let them drive every editorial decision. Serious, well-told journalism with real impact can turn out to be your best acquisition content.

Paid by default, with data deciding the exceptions

The paywall isn’t reserved for a special premium section. “Most articles are behind a paywall,” Christoffer explains. In practice, the newsroom publishes paid content from the start.

That flips the usual question. Rather than deciding what to lock, SvD decides what to leave open, and when. An algorithm advises the team rather than deciding for it: if an open article starts trending on social media or drawing heavy traffic, it may be moved behind the paywall along the way.

The next step is a dynamic paywall, setting access levels automatically based on signals such as engagement with the article, where the reader came from and their user profile. The aim, as Christoffer puts it, is to set access levels “without being a part of the process on a daily basis.”

Lesson: if most of your journalism is paid, put your energy into the exceptions, and let data flag when an open article has earned its place behind the paywall.

Audio reaches people text never did

SvD has been producing audio for several years and is honest that it’s still learning. Text remains its core strength. But audio is doing a different job.

Around 80% of the people who subscribe for audio are new to SvD, Christoffer says. These are readers, or rather listeners, that SvD had never managed to reach through text.

That raises the question SvD hasn’t fully answered yet: retention. How do you keep someone who arrived for a podcast? Christoffer sees two routes. Help them discover text journalism, and build other things they’ll want to stay for.

Getting more out of the text you already have

SvD hasn’t tested AI-generated article summaries. Instead, it has repackaged its journalism in three ways:

1. Read-aloud articles. Rather than AI voices, a reporter reads the article. This has had some success.
2. The Morning Brief newsletter. Sent at 7am every day, it covers what happened while you were sleeping. Its value is habit: it gives readers a reason to start the day with SvD.
3. An AI book recommendation bot. Built on the culture section’s archive of book reviews, it drew strong engagement, though Christoffer stresses it’s early days.

Across Schibsted, most AI work so far has gone into tools for journalists rather than reader-facing products.

Lesson: treat new formats as a way to reach new audiences, then plan the bridge to the rest of your product. And don’t overlook your archive: it can be the raw material for genuinely useful reader tools.

Free for 18 to 25 year olds: lowering the barrier

SvD now offers full free access to 18 to 25 year olds. It launched ahead of the Swedish election, largely as a marketing campaign, so it’s too early to know how many will convert when they turn 26.

Christoffer is refreshingly realistic about it. Given SvD’s current product, he thinks it would be optimistic to expect many people in that age group to pay right now. SvD is a text-heavy experience, competing with social platforms and content creators for younger audiences’ attention.

So the aim is simpler: remove the barrier, let them in, and build a relationship over time. Just as importantly, it gives SvD a group of younger readers to learn from. What works for them, what doesn’t, and what they’d like to see more of.

For anyone looking for inspiration here, Christoffer points to Amedia in Norway, who ignored older subscribers in dashboards to attract younger ones.

Lesson: a free youth offer is an investment in relationships and insight, not a quick revenue play. Watch how they engage and listen closely, so that the product you build for them later is one they’ll want to pay for.

> Subscribers keep growing while traffic falls. At the NYT, WSJ and The Guardian, growth now comes from higher prices (up 5% on average in 2025), upgrades and bundles, not bigger audiences

> With monthly churn often below 5%, small retention gains have an outsized revenue impact. Leading publishers treat pricing as a variable and the cancellation journey as a moment to reinforce value

> Bundles pay off through retention, not price. NYT bundle subscribers pay slightly less per user but churn significantly less. At Mediahuis, subscribers who activated the RouteYou app churned around 26.5% less

> Build outward from your journalism. Bundle additions closely tied to editorial content stick, bigger leaps don't. For membership, spell out whether readers pay for access, a cause or a community

> 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"

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.

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

> 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

> "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

> 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 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

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