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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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

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.

Invited by event partners, Arc XP, the platform and CMS for media companies, Anjli outlined The Washington Post’s shift toward a broader monetisation strategy centred on flexible access, shifting the way that value is captured.

The incomplete subscription model

Publishers share a collective obsession with subscriber growth. However, maintaining and expanding this base is becoming increasingly difficult as churn grows more expensive. Over the past few decades, media organisations built vast digital subscription operations by asking their most loyal readers to commit long-term.

While successful, this framework is facing a critical bottleneck. Industry data reveals that out of 100 anonymous users who hit a hard paywall, 74% will simply abandon the site, while only a single reader (1%) will convert into a subscriber.

Of that tiny conversion pool, retention is highly fragile:

• 13% churn on day one, meaning the user bought a subscription solely to access a single, moment-driven story, and immediately cancelled once their immediate need was met.
• 40% churn within the first six months.

This reality 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.

Defining the flexible access market

To capture the vast audience that traditionally walks away from a hard paywall, publishers must widen their monetisation funnel. The Washington Post’s market research in the United States identified a substantial untapped addressable market:

• 38 million engaged citizens are actively interested in news.
• 19 million of those consumers express explicit interest in flexible access options.
• 12 million are actively willing to pay for the right short-term product at the correct price point.

When publishers offer flexible access side-by-side with standard recurring subscriptions, overall user conversion increases 1.2x, and long-term subscriber retention improves by 6 percentage points.

Testing the flexible access products

To determine how to capture this demand without devaluing their core subscription model, The Washington Post conducted extensive customer testing across three primary transaction models:

1.  The week pass: Appealing to 62% of surveyed consumers, this product is highly popular during intense, moment-driven breaking news cycles where readers want to follow a developing story for a few consecutive days.
2. The day pass: Appealing to 57% of consumers, this option provides a friction-free, low-commitment window for casual site visitors.
3. Pay-per-article: Appealing to 46% of consumers, this model allows readers to immediately unlock a single piece of journalism via a frictionless digital wallet transaction.

During live pricing experiments for the week pass, the team tested price points at $4, $7, and $10 as standalone, one-time payments shown side-by-side with recurring monthly and yearly subscription prompts.

For the pay-per-article interface, they deployed a highly optimised widget directly inside the paywall layer. A reader can enter their email address and use a frictionless mobile payment method (such as Apple Pay or a credit card) to execute a one-time $2.00 purchase (plus local sales tax) that unlocks access to that specific article for one calendar year.

The profile of a flexible access purchaser

The data explicitly proves that flexible access buyers are not just early-stage subscribers who are downscaling their commitments. Instead, they represent an entirely different audience profile that hard paywalls completely lock out.

• Content preferences: Unlike core subscribers who are driven primarily by heavy politics and opinion pieces, flexible access buyers over-index significantly on non-political lifestyle, wellness, deep investigative features, and historical archive content.
• Device and payment footprint: This audience is heavily mobile-first, with more than half visiting via mobile devices and purchasing via Apple Pay compared to subscribers.
• Discovery pathways: They are 1x to 2x more likely to discover articles via search engine optimization or social media channels, arriving with highly specific, momentary search intent.

The pathway to long-term subscriptions

While flexible access is built to capture transactional, short-term demand, it also serves as an elite nurturing mechanism for long-term subscriber growth. Over a 180-day horizon, there is a strong statistical probability of transactional buyers upgrading to recurring, full-time subscriptions:

• 8% of week pass buyers transition into full subscribers.
• 4% of day pass buyers upgrade to full subscriptions.
• 3% of pay-per-article buyers eventually become subscribers.

When evaluating who is performing these upgrades, the lifecycle acts equally as a net-new acquisition tool and a win-back loop: 

• 40% of upgraders are existing site registrants
• 35% are entirely new registrants
• 25% are previous subscribers returning to the brand. 

Furthermore, these flexible entry points attract high-intent customers, with 13% of all upgraders bypassing the basic subscription tier to jump directly into the highest-yield premium tier.

While approximately 91% of flexible access buyers remain single-use transactions, a growing, habitual cohort is developing, with 9% of pay-per-article buyers, 8% of week pass buyers, and 5% of day pass buyers demonstrating repeat purchasing behavior.

Driving overall organisational growth

When evaluating total paying user growth across the entire funnel, pay-per-article options deliver the highest overall volume lift at 83%, followed by the day pass at 35% and the week pass at 19%. Because pay-per-article operates as a frictionless entry point, it yields the highest efficiency and retention results among readers who are structurally unready to commit to a long-term media subscription.

Ultimately, this represents a major philosophical pivot for modern publishing groups. Rather than treating monetisation as a choice between a hard subscription paywall or zero return, organisations must build a diversified revenue tier:

1. Off-platform partnerships & licensing: Reaching audiences beyond owned and operated properties.
2. Flexible access: Transactional, non-recurring options designed to monetize an untapped, high-intent audience.
3. Core subscriptions: The foundational, enterprise, and standard domestic news consumer.
4. Premium subscriptions: Higher-yield tiers that include multi-account sharing capabilities.
5. WP Intelligence Subscriptions & Councils: B2B analytical products for subscriptions and invite-only councils specialized executive loops tailored for policy and corporate leaders.

Implementing this layered approach transforms user monetization from a simple transactional gate into a holistic, long-term ecosystem. It effectively captures diverse consumer demands across different points of the user journey, creating a sustainable foundation for modern newsrooms.

Thank you to Anjali for sharing these insights, and to Arc XP for supporting our event.

About Arc XP: Arc XP is a cloud-native enterprise content management system (CMS) built for publishers and broadcasters. Designed as a complete media operating system, Arc XP connects content, identity, personalization, monetization, and AI — empowering media brands to own their audience, activate first-party data, and build sustainable, independent revenue. Media companies use Arc XP to create, deliver, and scale digital experiences across every channel.

The post The Washington Post tests flexible access models, addressing the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to commit appeared first on Audiencers.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Arnaud Aubron, Director of Diversification at Le Monde, took to the stage to share the journey of Le Monde in English, a project that the organisation has dreamed of for 50 years. 

With technological advances and the move to digital, Le Monde in English was launched in 2022, and has since gone from strength to strength. 

Why an English version and why now?

The fundamental reason for publishing in English is simple: to speak to the world, you have to speak English. If Le Monde wanted its journalism to have a truly global impact, keeping it exclusively in French was no longer an option.

But the more pressing question was why now?

1. Reaching the glass ceiling in France

As of December 31, 2025, Le Monde ranked number one in digital subscriptions in France, boasting 602,218 purely digital subscribers. Additionally, Le Monde drove 35% of all digital subscriber growth in France in 2025.

While the publication possesses elite know-how in digital subscriptions, the French market itself is capped. The total addressable market in France sits around 3.3 million total news subscribers across all publications. With Le Monde capturing such a significant portion, the team faced a looming question: Can we hit 1 million or 1.5 million subscribers in a market this small? They simply didn’t know. To sustain further growth, they had to look beyond their domestic, and linguistic, borders.

2. The tech triggers

Two key factors finally made the project feasible in 2022:

• Artificial Intelligence: AI finally matured enough to drastically lower the financial and temporal costs of translation.
• The digital subscription model: Unlike the 1970s print attempt, which incurred immense logistics costs to print and ship copies across the UK and US without any guarantee of sales, digital distribution completely eliminates the friction of international expansion.

Aubron contrasted this with The New York Times, which launched a Spanish edition in 2016 but shuttered it a few years later. The New York Times relied heavily on manual translation without AI and built a business model dependent on advertising rather than subscriptions, a strategy that ultimately proved unsustainable.

The launch and operational workflow

Following Aubron’s appointment in September 2021, the project launched in April 2022 to coincide with the French presidential elections.

At launch, the assumption was that AI could handle the heavy lifting, followed by a quick proofread. In reality, it required much more human intervention.

1. DeepL translation: The software was used to generate the initial baseline translation. While highly rated, the technology in 2022 still required heavy editing to meet Le Monde’s journalistic standards.
2. Professional freelance translators: To ensure maximum quality for a premium subscription product, two translator agencies were brought in to meticulously review and correct the AI-generated text.
3. In-house editorial team: A dedicated team of 8 journalists was embedded directly within the French newsroom. This physical proximity allowed them to collaborate, anticipate news, and edit translations seamlessly alongside the original authors.

Article selection: quality over quantity

Le Monde in English does not create original content; it exclusively translates a curated selection of the French edition.

• 30% of French articles translated: The team skips live coverage, podcasts, and strictly local French wire stories (e.g., specific domestic politics, local school or banking issues) that hold little relevance to an international audience.
• +10 daily dispatches: They supplement translated deep-dives with roughly ten English news dispatches per day to provide hot news.

Pricing: A “second read” strategy

Because an international reader is highly likely to already hold a primary subscription to a domestic title like The New York Times or The Guardian, Le Monde in English positions itself as a “second read.”

To account for this, the pricing structure had to be highly accessible:

• Introductory price: €2.50 per month for the first year.
• Standard price: Loops up to €10.00 per month progressively.
• Average price point: As of March 2026, the average revenue per user sits at €4.66.

Aubron noted that an attempt to raise prices in 2025 stalled subscriber growth because the price increase came at a time when audience acquisition hadn’t scaled sufficiently to absorb the change. Lesson learned: a secondary read strategy demands highly sensitive, highly competitive pricing.

Four years later: audience & subscription performance

The strategy has paid off, yielding steady traffic and subscription growth since the launch 4 years ago.

• Current Subscriber Base: Hovering near 16,000 active subscribers.
• The American engine: A staggering 50% of all subscribers come from the United States. Aubron attributed this to a stark cultural difference in the propensity to pay for news: while only roughly 10% of French consumers pay for digital news, closer to 20% of Americans do. The subscriber base consists heavily of students, retirees, and individuals with an existing personal, educational, or marital link to France.
• Global traffic footprint: The platform pulls in approximately 5 million monthly visits.
  • United States: 38.5%
  • United Kingdom: 12.2%
  • Canada: 9.5%
  • France: 7.3% (although access to the English edition from France is limited to subscribers on higher-tier plans)
  • India: the fastest-growing traffic segment
  • Germany: the first non-anglophone country.

What do they read?

True to Le Monde’s core strengths, the most read sections are international news, French politics, and economy. Surprisingly, culture and lifestyle pieces perform exceptionally well; articles about new Parisian restaurant openings or art exhibitions see massive engagement from readers living as far away as Texas and Florida.

Subscriber acquisition strategies

To recruit international subscribers, Le Monde deploys a three-pronged approach:

1. Leveraging LeMonde.fr’s SEO hierarchy: Internal debates weighed whether to launch on a standalone domain (LeMonde.com) or a subdirectory (LeMonde.fr/en). Choosing LeMonde.fr proved to be a major SEO blessing, allowing the English edition to instantly draft off the massive domain authority of the main French site.
2. Paid acquisition adjustments: Google advertising is a core driver. Aubron also highlighted a massive breakthrough in their Meta acquisition costs: after peaking at an expensive €86.90 cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in late 2025, optimization strategies successfully drove that CPA down to just €9.30 by March 2026.
3. Strategic publisher partnerships: By setting up reciprocal marketing exchanges with premium Anglo-Saxon publishers (The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic), Le Monde cross-promotes free trial offers directly to highly qualified audiences who are already accustomed to paying for premium journalism.

Achieving break-even

The most significant milestone of the session was the announcement that Le Monde in English has officially achieved financial break-even in 2026, a full year ahead of the initial business plan.

Revenue breakdown:

• Subscriptions: 66.2% (The core driver of the business).
• Licensing: 16.9%.
• B2B: 12.3%.
• Advertising: 4.6%.

Product evolutions: what’s new today?

Since its 2022 launch, the operational model has undergone substantial changes, heavily driven by advancements in generative AI:

AI-driven productivity gains

• The transition to ChatGPT: Le Monde migrated its primary translation workflow away from DeepL to customized ChatGPT protocols. This allowed the team to deeply bake Le Monde’s distinct editorial tone and style guides directly into the translation layer.
• Eliminating the translation layer: The quality of generative AI advancements and the know-how developed by the team of journalists completely eliminated the need for external freelance translators.
• Creating journalism jobs via AI: Instead of using tech to downsize, Le Monde redirected those cost savings into expanding its internal editorial team from 8 to 10 full-time in-house journalists. AI handles the mechanical translation, freeing human journalists to focus purely on editing, nuance, and curation.

Platform and multimedia expansion

• A bilingual app: They integrated a native toggle inside the core Le Monde app, allowing users to switch effortlessly between the French and English editions. While app users represent just 4% of total English traffic, they account for a massive 49% of all English subscribers.
• A dedicated YouTube channel: Rather than merging video content, they launched a standalone English YouTube channel. High-end video investigations have achieved breakout success: their video on Dubai money laundering garnered 760,000 views (vs. 1 million for the French original), and their documentary on the November 13 Paris attacks pulled in 2 million views (nearly matching the 2.2 million views of the French version).
• Apple News+ integration: Le Monde in English is now available directly within the Apple News+ ecosystem to capture a broader layer of casual readers.
• M International magazine: In March 2025, they went “back to paper” by launching a premium, biannual print magazine called M International (themed “The French Touch”). They distribute 25,000 copies across 350 elite newsstands in 20 countries and 37 global cities.

Key takeaways

Aubron concluded his presentation with three definitive lessons learned over the four-year journey:

• It’s not about translation: Translation is now a commoditized utility. Success comes down to content market fit, product distribution, and understanding the distinct profile of your international audience.
• Hard to imagine working in another language: Due to global curiosity around French art de vivre, culture, and global politics, in the US, the English edition works beautifully. However, Aubron noted he would not attempt to launch a Spanish or German edition of Le Monde yet, as those markets lack the critical size and same unique cross-border structural demand.
• AI can create jobs: The project stands as living proof that when publishers embrace automated productivity tools like generative AI, they can reinvest the dividends directly into hiring more human journalists to elevate the final product.

The post Inside Le Monde in English: Four Years in and already profitable appeared first on Audiencers.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London 2026, Patrick Rademacher, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Ringier Media Switzerland, shared how breaking down internal silos and calculating holistic Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is transforming their revenue model, and informing decision making across the entire organisation. 

For the first time, the publisher has the hard data to prove that investing heavily in deep, direct user relationships is entirely worth the effort.

“One reader is not two different entities” 

For a long time in the media industry, publishing teams have worked in silos. Users were treated as entirely separate entities depending on the department looking at them:

• The advertising side: Focused purely on maximising reach and ad impressions to drive advertising revenue.
• The reader revenue side: Focused on exclusivity and conversions to drive subscriptions.

This division creates a constant conflict: advertising teams demand more reach to scale ad revenues, while subscription teams countered by demanding more exclusivity to lock content behind paywalls.

However, in reality, one reader is not two different entities, it is one and the same person. A single user can generate both advertising and reader revenue simultaneously, meaning the perceived target conflict doesn’t actually exist. 

What’s more, publishers have long suspected that registered audiences hold a significantly higher value than anonymous users. But without the concrete data to prove it, this debate remains stuck in opinion-based, gut-feeling discussions. 

So, Patrick and the team set about establishing a holistic, comprehensive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that combines both revenue streams.

To break this down:

• Reader Revenue CLV is calculated by multiplying the Average Revenue Per User by the subscription lifetime.
• Advertising CLV is calculated by multiplying the Average Revenue Per User by the readership lifetime.

Measuring users on two dimensions

Testing this new metric out, the team started with Ringier’s digital-only, German-speaking reach brand in Switzerland, Blick.ch.

While the project started as a complex manual spreadsheet exercise, the team is currently working on automating the process directly within their data lake. Patrick emphasized that these preliminary results are meant to show “t-shirt sizes” (relative proportions) rather than precise, absolute financial figures, the main goal being to prove that the ads vs subs conflict doesn’t exist.

The Blick user base was analysed across 2 distinct dimensions: funnel depth and loyalty.

Dimension 1: Funnel Depth

Dimension 2: Loyalty

What the data revealed

1. Funnel depth unlocks LTV

The data clearly proved that moving a user deeper into the funnel unlocks exponential lifetime value. Preliminary results suggest:

• Giving consent increases the value compared to “No Consent”.
• A logged-in user delivers a significantly higher CLV, well over 30 times that of a “Consent Only” user
• Moving from a login to a monthly subscription doubles the value, and a yearly subscription multiplies that even further

2. Subscribed users still drive ad value

The results exploded the myth of the ads vs subs conflict: subscribed users continue to generate strong advertising value. When looking at monthly and yearly subscribers, their advertising value remains high because they are highly engaged with the platform. 

This was also something shared by Bonnier Media at WAN-IFRA’s World Congress in Marseille: subscribers not only have a subscription ARPU of €300, but an advertising ARPU of €75.

3. The more loyal, the higher the LTV

When analysing the loyalty dimension, the lifetime value growth was even more staggering. A Brand Lover has a total CLV well over 50 times higher than that of a casual or one-time reader.

The final monetisation matrix

When combining these dimensions into a heat map, the value disparity becomes clear. In short, a high CLV directly correlates with high loyalty and a deep funnel stage.

While the high-value buckets are incredibly lucrative, the core issue for Blick.ch, and most reach publishers, is that the vast majority of the audience currently sits in the “Consent Only” bucket, which yields relatively low monetisation per user.

Speaking on a panel about registration as a solution to this challenge, Patrick highlighted how this data provides a clear financial incentive to log audiences, guiding users deeper into the funnel. 

However, Patrick clarified that registration isn’t a magic wand – the value does not come from the act of logging in itself. Rather, it comes from two secondary effects:

1. Engagement: Logged-in users consume more page views, creating more ad impressions and higher ad revenue.
2. Lifetime: Having a user’s email address establishes a direct relationship, reducing churn and making it far easier to eventually convert them into monthly or yearly subscribers.

Putting CLV into practice

To put these CLV insights into practice, Ringier Media Switzerland has shifted from just gating content to building features designed to deepen user relationships.

Because Blick.ch is well-known for its sports coverage, they launched a feature called “Follow My Team.” Sports fans can select and follow their favorite local clubs, national teams, or specific sports, creating a highly personalized feed and specialized team detail views. Of course though, if a user wants to save these preferences and access this tailored experience, they must register and log in.

By building a product that naturally incentivises identity over anonymity, they are successfully guiding casual users into the logged-in ecosystem.

Patrick highlights that understanding user value is becoming yet more critical with the rise of AI search and AI browsing modes. In an AI-driven ecosystem, publishers are most likely to lose the traffic of users with low loyalty who visit anonymously without a login or subscription. Building a walled garden of logged-in, loyal users is no longer just a revenue optimisation strategy, but a survival mechanism.

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By aligning their teams and product strategy with a holistic Customer Lifetime Value, Ringier Media Switzerland doubled their number of daily logged-in users over the last year.

For the first time, the publisher has the hard data to prove that investing heavily in deep, direct user relationships is entirely worth the effort.

The post Knowing the value of our users: Ringier combines revenue from readers and advertising to calculate holistic Customer Lifetime Value appeared first on Audiencers.

Rachel Shields, UK Editorial Director at The Sun, and Sarah Ransome, Principal Product Manager at The Sun, explain the commercial logic behind Sun Club, what a year of subscriber data has revealed, and where the product goes next.

TL;DR
- Sun Club launched in 2025 as a freemium membership product at £1.99 per month, layering subscription revenue and first-party reader data on top of The Sun’s existing free audience. A growing proportion of content is now members-only.
- One year in, 65% of members are women, and Sun Club has opened a route to an entirely new audience: TikTok-acquired subscribers are 85% female and 15 years younger than the average Club member, engaging with content created specifically for them.
- First-week app activity is the strongest predictor of long-term retention; the most loyal members read over 100 articles a week, almost entirely via the app.
- Sun Club has exceeded its initial targets; the team has several retention projects underway to build on that momentum and deepen early-life engagement.

Key lessons:
- Value-driven perks sit at the heart of Sun Club’s membership proposition; for this audience, they are a vital retention tool.
- A freemium model can serve advertising and subscription goals simultaneously; a known, logged-in audience is a commercial asset that strengthens both.

We thought people would pay for quality journalism, and they did

Like most news publishers, The Sun had been challenged by the decline in referral traffic. That brought the loyal core digital audience into sharper focus. The question was whether tabloid readers could be persuaded to pay for digital journalism, and what the product would need to look like to make that happen.

Rachel Shields says: “We were confident that UK readers were far more willing to pay for quality content now than they were a decade ago. At the same time, while we had huge reach, we wanted to turn those anonymous clicks into known users, and create a richer experience based on their preferences.”

Research indicates that as audiences feel swamped by AI-generated content, the perceived value of verified, quality journalism is rising. The launch of Sun Club a year ago was well timed.

“We’re still ‘the People’s Paper’ and are conscious that there is a strong proportion of our journalism which should remain free online, around big health or political stories, for example,” says Shields.

A year on, Sun Club has exceeded initial targets. Part of that success is down to the value-driven membership proposition, which combines Sun content and a raft of unique money-saving offers.

The post Sun Club at One: what The Sun learned from a year of freemium appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This is the last episode in a 6-part series where I share what I learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. 
> Episode one: 100 subscription business, 15 industries, 1 moodboard
> Episode two: What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-off
> Episode three: Why the best subscription businesses don’t try to sell on day 1
> Episode four: The subscription pricing page we've all built at least once
> Episode five: The first 100 days: why most of what we call retention is really just micro-conversions (again)

Why we’re ending with this

Over the past five episodes, we’ve gone deep into how the best subscription businesses do things to scale, using examples from the NYT, Spotify, Figma, L’Équipe, Jeune Afrique, and many others.

This last episode is different. It’s the one where we show you the weird stuff from our moodboard. The examples that made us smile, made us think, and sometimes made us wonder “wait, people actually subscribe to that?”

The answer is yes. People subscribe to pretty much anything and everything. And no matter how bizarre the product, the same principles from the previous five episodes keep showing up.

So here’s a tour of some of our favorites, organized not by industry but by what makes each one compelling for the person who’s paying. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it always comes back to: why would someone pay for this, every month, and not cancel?

“I feel good about buying this”: when the value prop is identity

Who Gives a Crap: £45.5M in UK revenue alone in 2024, over 1M subscribers globally, and over £10M donated to charities since launch. For toilet paper.

It’s toilet paper. There’s not much you can do to make toilet paper exciting. But they donate 50% of profits to sanitation charities, they have a brand identity that genuinely makes you smile, and their packaging is designed to be posted on Instagram (which, for a product you use in the bathroom, is quite the branding achievement).

The result: you don’t just buy Who Gives a Crap, you become a Who Gives a Crap customer and participate in something that is bigger than you (or at least you think you do). It’s an identity statement. You probably mention it at dinner parties (I mean, the name alone guarantees that). And that emotional connection is what makes people stay, because cancelling doesn’t just mean switching brands, it means giving up a small part of how you see yourself.

We Are Here does something similar with coffee: personalized beans, your choice of grind and delivery frequency, a custom sticker on the bag, and a donation to a different charity depending on which sticker you choose. It’s a coffee subscription that makes you feel like you’re expressing your personality every time you order.

This raises two questions that I think are worth thinking about for media:

First, are there publishers with a brand identity/voice so strong that people subscribe for what it represents, not just for the content? I can think of a few, and they’re not necessarily the biggest ones. Mediabask (you probably don’t know them) is an interesting example: people bought subscriptions before the website even launched, because of what the brand stands for and the community around it.

Second, could this become a model for media? Buy a subscription, and X% of the price (or profits) goes to a charity. Maybe subscribers even get to vote each month on which cause receives the donation. Green Got, a French bank, does exactly this with banking. Why not with a news subscription?

“I don’t have to think about it anymore”: when the value prop is friction removal

Dollar Shave Club doesn’t really sell razors, it sells the fact that you never have to think about buying razors again. And HelloFresh doesn’t sell meals, it sells the fact that you don’t have to decide what to eat or go grocery shopping.

What surprised me when building the moodboard is that even companies you wouldn’t expect are doing really sophisticated subscription work. Walmart+ and Instacart+ are grocery delivery services, but they have trials adapted to usage patterns, bundles to create lock-in effects (Walmart+ with Paramount+ and Burger King; Instacart+ with Peacock and NYT Cooking for annual members), and upsell paths that follow the exact same micro-conversion logic we described in episodes 3 through 5.

For media, the question this raises is not really about content. It’s about the experience around the content. What does a media subscription simplify in someone’s daily routine? The friction of hitting paywalls? The 30 minutes of browsing to find something worth reading? A curated morning briefing that replaces scanning 5 different sources? I think we could try build our subscription product that way as medias: what does our subscription remove from someone’s day?

“I discover things I’d never find on my own”: when the value prop is surprise

TokyoTreat sends you Japanese snacks, Kube sends you books, Le Petit Ballon sends you wine. Different products, same model: the value proposition is discovery itself.

You receive things you would never have chosen on your own, and the engagement comes from the anticipation and trust you build with the curator over time. The lock-in isn’t in the product (you could order Japanese snacks online anytime), it’s in the relationship with someone who knows your taste.

FindMyPast takes discovery in a completely different direction: you pay for access to billions of genealogy records, and every answer you find generates new questions. You discover a great-grandmother, now you want to know her parents. You find a marriage certificate, now you want the newspaper from that week. The product creates its own engagement loop naturally.

It’s the same mechanism that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly so sticky, but applied to family history and physical goods. For publishers with decades of archives, there’s something genuinely worth exploring here: how do you turn a static archive into a discovery-driven experience that keeps subscribers curious and engaged?

“This product gets smarter the more I use it”: when the value prop is personalization over time

Strava is an app for runners and cyclists that tracks your activities, shows your routes, and lets you compare with friends. The more you run, the more valuable the app becomes, because your entire history, your segments, your social connections, your training patterns are all there. Switching to another app means starting from zero.

It’s the same personalization lock-in as Spotify (episodes 4 and 5), applied to physical activity.

Claude (the one helping me write this series, full transparency) and ChatGPT push this even further with a model that barely existed a few years ago: a base subscription with tiers, plus usage-based pricing on top. The more you use the product, the more you pay, but also the more value you get.

Two things about AI subscriptions that I think are worth watching closely for media:

First, they all let you try the product for free almost immediately, because the product is powerful enough that the fastest path to conversion is to just let you use it (everything starts with engagement). Which is exactly the registration-as-the-first-micro-conversion logic we described in episode 3.

Second, hybrid pricing (fixed subscription tier + usage-based layer) is interesting as a concept. Imagine a media subscription with a base access fee, and a premium layer that adapts based on how much you consume or which features you use. It doesn’t really exist yet in media (as far as I know), but given how fast AI pricing models are spreading to other industries, it might not be far off.

Yes, even cars

SIXT+: a car subscription from $679/month. You pick a car category, a location, a pickup date. You subscribe monthly, cancel anytime, maintenance and roadside assistance included. You can even switch to a different vehicle or pause through the app.

I’m mentioning this one not because the model applies directly to media, but because it shows just how far the subscription model has spread. And even here, the same principles show up: try before you commit (24-hour notice), one clear offer per category, flexibility to upgrade or downgrade over time (micro-conversions, again), and the value proposition is friction removal (no ownership, no maintenance, cancel anytime).

What the toilet paper confirmed (love this title)

Over six episodes, I’ve talked about the NYT’s dynamic meter, Figma’s onboarding, L’Équipe’s first-100-days data, Jeune Afrique’s dynamic pricing, Spotify’s personalization, and now toilet paper and car subscriptions.

If I had to summarize everything in one statement, it would be this:

The subscription businesses that will thrive (media included) are the ones that combine a strong brand identity, a clear value proposition, and an obsession with user engagement with an infinite loop of micro-conversions.

This is true for media. It’s true for every subscription business. Because the moment you charge someone on a recurring basis, you need to keep earning their attention every single month. There’s no way around it.

Engagement drives everything: better conversion rates, better retention, higher lifetime value, better advertising revenue. We saw it in the data from the best performers, and … we saw it in toilet paper, and coffee, and cars (it’s the last episode, let me enjoy it)!

And maybe the most practical takeaway from the entire moodboard: some of the best ideas for your subscription business will come from industries that have nothing to do with yours. A coffee company, a fitness app, a toilet paper brand. The principles are the same. The execution is just different enough to spark something new.

What we’re building to make all of this possible

If you’ve read all six episodes (thank you, seriously), you’ve probably noticed that orchestrating all of these micro-conversions, from anonymous visitor to loyal subscriber, across every touchpoint, is complex work. Registration flows, onboarding sequences, dynamic paywalls, personalized offers, engagement actions, anti-churn triggers, cancellation optimization. Across web, app, and print.

That’s exactly why we’re building the solution with Poool and Darwin CX: the end-to-end subscription platform to master each of these micro-conversions, at every step of the journey. Everything we’ve described in this series, from episode 1 to episode 6, is what our platform is designed to help publishers execute.

If that resonates, or if you’re currently thinking about your subscription platform, let’s talk.

If you have questions, disagreements, or examples that contradict what we saw, we’re genuinely interested. This has been a conversation, not a lecture.

And if you’d like to see the full analysis, you can download the complete Subscription Masterclass presentation (Link here).

PS: yes that’s actually a “book a meeting link”

The post Toilet paper, wine, cars, and what they teach us about subscription: episode 6 appeared first on Audiencers.

Broadsheet, Australia’s leading cultural publisher, is embarking on a bold new chapter. Founded 16 years ago, the brand has become synonymous with the best in food, drink, fashion, and design across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. Now, they’re taking their successful model to London whilst also moving towards a reader revenue strategy.

We sat down with Nick Shelton, Founder & Publisher of Broadsheet, and Ross Wilmot, Director of Reader Revenue, to discuss their international expansion strategy and the development of a subscription revenue stream, layered on top of their advertising model.

A consistent lens for diverse markets

For Broadsheet, the move from Australia to London is built on a repeatable editorial framework. Nick Shelton describes Broadsheet’s core product not as a list of recommendations, but as a specific lens that can be applied to any global city.

“The way we think about Broadsheet editorially is that it’s a framework,” Nick explains. “What you see through that lens differs depending on the city, but the values of the lens itself – quality, celebration, and curation – remain constant.”

Rather than relying on local intuition alone, Broadsheet uses this framework to solve a universal problem for urban audiences: the paradox of choice. By applying the same rigorous standards in London that they do across Australia, they maintain brand integrity while respecting local nuances. This city-agnostic strategy allows the brand to:

• Curate rather than catalog: Instead of exhaustive listings, they use a highly curated approach where they “don’t write about things we don’t like.”
• Prioritize the premium enthusiast: By maintaining high editorial standards, they attract a specific high-value audience cohort regardless of geography.
• Operationalize local reporting: By treating London as just another “market” within a proven system, they can scale quickly without reinventing their brand identity.

“We learned this lesson in Australia long ago,” Nick notes. “Sydney and Melbourne are fundamentally different markets with different behaviors. Going into London wasn’t about having expectations of what the city would look like; it was about reporting on it through that consistent, high-definition lens.”

Engagement: the common thread between ads and subscriptions

One of the biggest challenges in the publishing industry today is the perceived conflict between advertising and subscription revenue. Broadsheet, however, sees these models as complementary, with engagement being the common thread. 

“We’re not a traffic-based model, we don’t sell programmatic advertising. It’s not about more people equals more money; it’s about the depth of engagement. And we’ve long had the muscle and mindset in the business of engagement. The better engaged the audience, the better we do as a business, something that applies across both advertising and subscription revenue goals.” 

In short: by focusing on engagement, everybody wins. 

Ross, Director of Reader Revenue at Broadsheet, who recently joined Broadsheet after working at a legacy media publication, explained that by moving even a small subset of their flyby audience into a medium-engaged cohort, they see an exponential increase in page views, the currency of traditional commercial models. This approach is useful for showing teams the clear benefit of engagement to the advertising side of the business while simultaneously building a base for subscriptions.

Whilst they measure a collection of engagement metrics, focused very much on quality over scale, frequency is their most important, north star metric. 

The five pillars of a successful subscription strategy

Broadsheet’s transition to reader revenue is built on five key pillars, as outlined by Ross:

• An audience-centric approach: A laser focus on the most engaged readers, understanding their motivations, pain points, and what adds value to their lives.
• Compelling value proposition: Ensuring the subscription product addresses the needs of engaged readers. Initial research at Broadsheet showed that their readers would be prepared to pay for high-quality content, but that it needed to be combined with unique experiences like exhibition tickets, and perks like free coffee as well as tools to help them curate their Broadsheet experience.
• Cross-departmental alliance: Moving beyond a traditional marketing-led view of subscriptions to ensure buy-in across the entire business, from editorial to product, data, and CRM. At Broadsheet, they already had established ‘Squads’ associated to 90-day, one-year and three-year goals, so when moving to subscription, a new audience monetization squad was formed.
• Culture of test and learn: Continuous experimentation with subscriber journeys, funnels, pricing, and offers to drive sustainable growth.
• End-to-end lifecycle marketing: Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, supported by a robust data infrastructure and access to the right platforms.

“There are of course many other aspects to consider, but in my opinion, these 5 are the ones that move the dial the furthest”

Building a value exchange through registration

A crucial component of Broadsheet’s reader revenue model is the registration wall. Launched in Australia in December 2025, a few months before their subscription model, the registration wall has already outperformed industry benchmarks: 

Specifically, a conversion rate (% of unique visitors who encountered the reg wall and converted) of 5.5% on the registration wall, compared to the industry benchmark of 3-5%.

“Registration serves us on several different levels,” Ross says. “It gives us the ability to communicate more directly with our most engaged audience, gather insights into their needs, and personalize their experience. And of course, it helps us reduce the reliance on third party platforms for our audience, which is going to be more and more crucial.”

Crucially, the registration wall introduces a clear value exchange on the site. “Previously, people were completely free to browse the site as they wished,” Ross explains. “The registration wall helps set the tone for the eventual introduction of a paywall, ensuring it’s not a shock when certain content becomes paid.”

Registration has also built confidence internally ahead of their paywall launch

“The insights from our research proved that there was definitely an appetite to pay as long as it’s the right proposition and that a subscription adds significant value to an individual’s life. And that’s where we’ve been focused on these three aspects of the subscription proposition, the content being the inspiration, the experiential side of things, and the utility aspects as well, pulling all those different ingredients together.”

Nick added that, ultimately, the team believed in the strength of their brand. 

“We’ve been running this for 16 years. We know we have a strong brand. We know we create a product worth paying for. So let’s do it. Having a reg wall in place was valuable for validating our assumptions on conversion rates through the steps in the funnel. We exceeded every single one of those assumptions. Of course, more people provide data for registration than handing over a credit card, but we consistently exceeded benchmarks since the launch, so we didn’t feel we needed to wait around for subscription. We just had to go for it, with confidence.”

London: building a cultural footprint, Australia: Broadsheet digital subscription

Currently, Broadsheet’s London operation is focused on audience acquisition and brand awareness. Before switching on monetization features, they are busy establishing themselves as the ultimate London city guide.

While London is about growth, Australia is the testing ground for the brand’s most ambitious move yet: Broadsheet digital subscription. Launched just days ago (April 2026), this membership program represents the official transition from a free-to-read model to a premium value exchange.

Ross highlights that early data from Australia has been “very strong,” already exceeding industry benchmarks for conversion. The model isn’t just about a hard paywall but rather an integrated experience:

• Exclusive experiences: Members get early access to ‘Readers’ Preview’ dinners at the city’s hottest new restaurants
• Perks and rewards: The program includes ‘The Vault’ (high-value giveaways) and daily rewards like free coffee or discounts at local partners
• Journalism access: Unlimited access to Broadsheet’s trusted journalism for A$1/week

The current content access model is a static meter, where audiences have access to a set number of articles per month before being asked to register and then subscribe, but the goal is to move towards a dynamic model adapted to a reader’s level of engagement via Poool.

What’s next?

Of course, the launch is just the beginning! Ross shared that the team is already focusing on:

• Identifying optimisation opportunities that exist within their key conversion journeys and subscription checkout funnel
• Leveraging those insights to inform a cross-departmental working group focused on CRO, building a roadmap of experimentation and executing
• Introducing new forums to share actionable insights with editorial: what content is driving conversion (last click and participation) and engagement to inform content and commissioning strategy; identifying opportunities to potentially convert a higher proportion of readers below the superfan engagement cohort 
• Building CRM muscle through talent acquisition and data engineering: unlocking capabilities within their Customer Engagement Platform (Braze) and Customer Orchestration Platform (Poool) to become more personalised and dynamic across owned channels 
• Building further value into the subscription proposition through product development of utility tools

The post From Melbourne to London: how Broadsheet is scaling culture and reader revenue appeared first on Audiencers.

FIPP's latest data shows a digital subscription market growing 24.7% and concentrating fast. The winners are bundling, embedding, and reducing their dependence on search. The losers are still renting their audiences from Google.

Nine international publishers, Le Monde, El País, The Irish Times, Politiken, Corriere della Sera and De Standaard among them, now sell subscription bundles that include access to The New York Times alongside their own journalism, according to Nieman Lab. The arrangement suits both sides. Local publishers add internationally recognised reporting to their value proposition without the cost of producing it. The New York Times Company extends its subscriber reach into markets where direct acquisition is slower and more expensive.

One of those nine publishers, De Standaard, sit inside Mediahuis, whose “essential subscription” is the clearest worked example of the strategy. As I wrote for Audiencers, Mediahuis has built a bundle that wraps journalism, e-books, masterclasses, a hiking and cycling app, and access to The New York Times into a single subscription. The early data is compelling: activated users churn 26.5% less, and the bundle is engineered to push subscribers up from the basic tier to a premium one priced at roughly double. The New York Times partnership is one component of that bundle, not a curiosity bolted on top.

That arrangement is the clearest signal of where the market is heading. FIPP’s latest Subscription Report counts 53 million digital-only subscriptions across 206 titles, and the headline 24.7% growth conceals a sharp split. Publishers that have built direct audience relationships, bundled product ecosystems and cross-title access are accelerating. Those still dependent on single-title subscriptions and search-driven acquisition are losing ground, in some cases losing subscribers outright.

The rapid expansion of AI into search has sharpened the divide. Referral traffic that publishers relied on for audience acquisition and advertising revenue is compressing. Publishers that were renting their audiences from Google are finding the lease harder to renew. The response from the strongest performers is consistent: own the relationship, deepen the product, reduce dependence on external distribution.

No company illustrates that logic more clearly than the New York Times Company, which is why the cross-publisher bundles matter: they are central to the strategy, not a side experiment.

The New York Times is no longer just competing. It’s embedding

The New York Times Company now reports 12.21 million digital-only subscribers and stopped reporting title-level numbers this year. The second decision reframes what kind of business the company believes it is in. The New York Times is no longer a newspaper with digital products attached. It is a subscription business that happens to include a newspaper, alongside Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, bundled into a single proposition designed to make cancellation feel like losing several things at once.

The cross-publisher bundles extend the same logic outward. As AI search compresses referral traffic, the value of a subscription with multiple compelling reasons to stay increases. Bundles reduce churn inside a single portfolio. Cross-publisher bundles spread that logic across the whole market and position the New York Times Company as the connective tissue of other publishers’ subscription strategies, not just its own.

The Nordics settled this argument years ago

While publishers in the US and UK are still debating the merits of bundling, Norway’s Amedia has been running the experiment since 2020, and the results are stark.

Its +Alt bundle, which gives subscribers access to all 127 of Amedia’s local newspapers plus a sports streaming service, now has 433,000 digital-only subscribers. Churn on the bundle runs at 0.7%. Churn for a single-title subscription is 16.4%. That difference translates into a subscriber lifetime value that is 26 times higher for the bundled product.

Norway, as a subscription market, grew 55.56% in the period, a function of a deliberate structural choice. Publishers there decided early that local relevance and shared digital infrastructure were not in tension; they were complementary.

In Sweden, Bonnier News reached the same conclusion. Its +Allt bundle, combining national titles (Dagens Nyheter, Expressen), more than 40 local newspapers and magazine content into a single subscription, reached nearly 500,000 digital subscribers by the end of 2025, up from around 270,000 in mid-2024. Including print subscribers with bundled access, total reach is over 1.1 million.

Germany and France are also moving. Germany’s subscription market grew 35.83% in the period, the fastest of any major European market. France grew 31.21%. Both reflect the same underlying pattern: publishers deepening their product propositions and reducing their exposure to external distribution.

The UK is following. FIPP’s data shows the market up 22.61%, with Newsquest, DC Thomson and Mail+ among the standout performers on percentage growth. Mail+ grew 177.8% in the period, from a low base, but the direction is clear.

AI search didn’t break the business model. It revealed which models were already broken

The useful question is not whether AI search hurts publishers. It is which publishers. The FIPP data, read against recent industry reporting, makes the divide specific.

The content most exposed to AI overviews is the content most easily summarised in a sentence: car specifications, factual service journalism, commodity news. Bauer Media Group has said as much directly. When the overview answers the question, the click never happens, and the publisher’s role in the value chain ends with the model’s training set.

The content least exposed is reporting that does not compress. Analysis, investigation, distinctive voice, and depth all convey information that survives summarisation, because the value lies in the framing rather than the facts. The Telegraph’s SEO director has described search as being in “managed decline” rather than collapse, on the grounds that subscribers return for reporting summaries that cannot be replicated elsewhere. The framing fits the data.

The more interesting signal sits in the other direction. The Washington Post reports that readers arriving via large language models spend longer on the site and convert to subscriptions at higher rates than traditional search visitors. The volumes are small, but conversion quality matters: AI search may be filtering out low-intent traffic that inflated publisher metrics without ever converting into subscribers.

As Colin Nagy argued recently in Monocle, AI hasn’t created a new problem for publishing; it has clarified an old one. Publishers built around search traffic were never really building audiences; they were borrowing them, and the loan is now being called in. The publishers losing ground are not victims of a new technology. They are tenants whose landlord has changed the terms.

US local publishers are paying it

Lee Enterprises reported that its digital subscriber base fell from 728,000 in March 2025 to 609,000 by December: a loss of 119,000 in nine months. The USA Today Co, formerly Gannett, saw a 26% decline year-on-year, dropping from 1.95 million subscribers to 1.45 million.

Both companies attribute the declines to deliberate strategies focused on price optimisation and improving average revenue per user. That may be true. It also describes companies managing contraction rather than building growth.

The sharpest contrast sits within the same corporate structure. Newsquest, the USA Today Co’s UK division, grew digital subscribers 35% year-on-year to 139,000 over the same period. Same parent company, opposite trajectory.

What the winners have in common

Bloomberg grew subscription revenue 10% in 2025, taking paying subscribers beyond 707,000. It now produces 800 hours of video each month. Subscriber-only newsletters grew 20% year-on-year. Podcast downloads rose 26%. The pattern is consistent: more reasons to open the product, more often.

Substack, with five million paying subscribers, has built its growth engine around internal recommendations that move readers between newsletters inside the platform. It is less a publishing platform than a subscription marketplace, one that reduces its dependence on external traffic by creating its own internal referral economy.

Immediate Media, with 767,000 digital app subscriptions now accounting for 64% of group subscriptions, is using AI to identify which audiences are most likely to subscribe and when engagement signals are strongest. The objective is habitual use and longer subscriber lifetime value.

The thread connecting all of them is the same one running through the Nordic data, the NYT bundle strategy, and the divergence between US and European local publishers. Subscriptions built on borrowed traffic are fragile in ways that subscriptions built on daily habit, multiple products and direct relationships are not.

Growth in the market is concentrating around publishers who solved for retention before they needed to.

The post The New York Times is becoming subscription infrastructure for other publishers appeared first on Audiencers.

The line between subscription and membership is blurring, but that doesn’t mean membership is just subscription with a different name.

Subscription is a transaction. Membership is a relationship.

It’s the difference between “Pay to access content” and “Support something you care about, and be part of it”

To help you build a successful membership model, this article shares 4 publisher case studies, with strategies to steal from each. One of these publishers, The Guardian, would likely say they have a supporter model over membership, but the strategies built around conversion are very membership-like, meaning there’s still plenty to take away from their success.

1. The Guardian: turning readers into supporters

The Guardian’s journalism is free to access for everyone. But even without a paywall, over 1 million readers support them on a recurring basis.

What’s working

Although there are some concrete benefits to supporting The Guardian (such as exclusive newsletters, less ads and access to their app), supporters aren’t paying for access, they’re supporting and participating in The Guardian’s mission. It’s this emotional layer that’s paying off.

Messaging around gaining support is built around the 10 ‘supporter motivations’:

1. Editorial independence  
2. Protect the free press  
3. Investigative journalism  
4. Trustworthy, factual, high quality  
5. Holds power to account  
6. Open for all, no paywall  
7. International perspective 
8. Financial challenges in media  
9. Better understand world events  
10. It’s only fair to pay

These are then integrated into homepage banners, end-of-article ‘epics’ and emailing, where messaging is continuously tested, iterated and updated, often making use of current news events:

Every public-facing module is reviewed by an editorial eye to ensure the tone is a seamless extension of the journalism, not a jarring commercial break. This plays an important role in building relationships with readers.

In the US, this year-round messaging and UX testing helps to inform the team for their annual end-of-year campaign, running from early November, through Giving Tuesday and on to midnight on December 31st, the most critical window in their financial calendar.

In their most recent EOY campaign (2025), the final numbers were staggering: 

• Total raised: $3.1 million in liquid cash by Dec 31st (exceeding their $3M goal).
• Lifetime Value (LTV): The estimated total value of the campaign (including recurring commitments) is $8.6 million
• Year-on-year growth: This represents an 83% increase in campaign value compared to the 2023 “standard” year (because a presidential election year – as 2024 was – is usually an outlier).

What you should steal from The Guardian’s model

• Understand reader motivations for supporting or subscribing to you
• Continuously test messaging and offers, integrating supporter motivations
• Experiment with innovative ‘asks’, like The Guardian’s article count
• Bring the reader onboard with your mission, so they really see that their support is valuable to you

Dive deeper into The Guardian’s model

• The Guardian: reader revenue growth & proposition development
• Behind The Guardian’s record-breaking US End of Year campaign
• Relaunching The Guardian app: changing reader habits means we must also evolve

2. The Kyiv Independent: humanizing the newsroom

The Kyiv Independent is a young, English-language media, launched in a context of war, who has transformed from a 18-person startup into a globally recognized authority with over 27,000 paying members and 3 million monthly readers.

What’s working

The team has successfully built a mission-driven membership model with a community of supporters around a shared cause. Part of this success is thanks to building trust with their audience, something that is done between people, meaning they work hard to humanize their newsroom.

Instead of hiding behind a corporate brand, the Kyiv Independent puts its journalists at the center of its marketing:

• They don’t shy away from talking about themselves: their work, almost never say no to interviews, a lot of commentaries and opinion articles…
• Marketing communications are built around journalists and their personalities

• Membership is a community, not a transaction. It’s not a key to a locked door, but a way to keep information free for everyone
• Communication is always transparent, giving a glimpse into the behind the scenes and creating visible experts through personality-led journalism

However the team doesn’t shy away from campaigns asking for support. Countdowns to reach their target, birthday campaigns, country-specific campaigns… these have been a vital part of their growth strategy, creating urgency but with purpose and identity.

What you should steal from The Kyiv Independent’s model

• Be openly transparent on your funding, editorial choices, impact…
• Translate what you stand for, and what would be lost without you in messaging
• Bring the newsroom along with you, putting them front and center in marketing campaigns
• Build channels for journalists and readers to connect, whether that be through Q&As, reader-led articles or discord communities
• Ensure supporters are valued as individuals whilst also helping them feel part of something bigger

Dive deeper into The Kyiv Independent’s model

• How The Kyiv Independent is growing membership through relationship-building
• Inside The Kyiv Independent’s membership model

3. Condé Nast: building a premium membership layer

Condé Nast already had strong brands and a mature subscription model, but wanted to build belonging amongst their most loyal audiences. The team therefore created a ‘Membership’ tier that sits above subscription.

What’s working

This new membership layer represents a fundamental pivot from serving passive recipients to active participants. 

This clearly differentiates it from subscription.

Whilst their traditional subscription represents a scale/volume tier…

• Audience: Broadly focused on volume
• Value Exchange: One-way (passive recipient absorbing content)
• Goal: Volume and scale-based value – content for scale

…Membership is the niche, high-value tier

• Audience: Caters to a very specific segment of the audience.
• Value Exchange: Two-way. Members are active participants contributing data, feedback, and engagement. They expect to belong to a community.
• Goal: Engagement and high retention, not volume – content is focused on the funnel.

This focus on belonging is reflected in their metrics, measuring loyalty and engagement over volume. The most critical metrics include ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), Renewal Rate, Recency (how recently they engaged), and Feature Engagement (which features are “stickiest”).

What should you steal from Condé Nast’s strategy?

• Don’t be scared of putting membership and subscriptions alongside each other, but make sure to clearly differentiate them
• Membership means moving beyond access to an elevated experience. For high-value tiers, Condé Nast commits to a white-glove treatment. This involves building dedicated membership teams trained to provide high-touch service. At industry events, these teams are equipped with “face sheets” to know members by name and be aware of their recent professional achievements, fostering genuine, human-to-human relationships instead of brand-to-consumer transactions.
• Measure membership differently – belonging and advocacy aren’t easy to define, but they definitely go beyond traditional engagement
• Segmentation matters: one size of subscription tier doesn’t fit all, and you’re potentially leaving money (and advocates) on the table by not creating a higher tier for them

Dive deeper into Condé Nast’s model

• When is a subscriber more than a subscriber? How Condé Nast is evolving its audience strategy with membership
• How Condé Nast is growing the “happy middle” of the audience funnel

4. Daily Maverick: involving members in journalism

The South African publisher, Daily Maverick, is an outstanding example of a successful membership model.

What’s working

One of their unique strategies that’s contributing to this success is a growing database of contactable “Insiders” (Daily Maverick members), providing expertise on every topic imaginable.

“You’re part of this community – it’s more than just a subscription and we need your help. We don’t know everything and there are experts amongst you. Be a part of Daily Maverick, share your expertise.”

Via a 3-step survey in the email onboarding series, Daily Maverick asked Insiders for their name, email address, phone number, job and other areas of expertise, their ‘superpower’ as it became known internally.

By sharing these details, an Insider could be contacted by the Daily Maverick team to participate in their journalism, provide expertise on a certain topic or even be invited to join a panel session at one of their events. 

It’s an impressive way of making a member feel like they’re directly supporting and involved in your journalism.

According to the reader revenue team, every newsroom should be looking for this sense of belonging, the feeling of being proud to be “a Daily Maverick reader”. And this “superpower” strategy, where community members are put at the centre of journalism, will help achieve exactly this, ensuring Insiders are a part of Daily Maverick.

What you should steal from Daily Maverick’s model

• Give readers opportunities to be involved in your work, whether than be through this form of database, commenting, debates or call-outs. Membership becomes real when people can do something, not just support something.
• Create direct channels between readers and journalists
• Build this into your value proposition – it’s a benefit for members, not just for your membership model

Dive deeper into Daily Maverick’s model

• Learning from Membership models: Daily Maverick’s superpower database
• Boosting membership conversion at Maverick Insider with FAQs

The post Steal this strategy: 4 membership models succeeding for publishers (and how to learn from them) appeared first on Audiencers.

The Norwegian group Amedia started with a troubling observation: its publications had more subscribers over the age of 80 than under the age of 40. To break this deadlock, their team tested a radical approach in two local newsrooms: tailoring editorial content exclusively to the behaviors of readers under 40. The result: a product deemed more relevant for all generations and, at one of its publications, Romerikes Blad, a 30% increase in the under-40 demographic over nine months.

How can you attract younger subscribers when daily analytics tools constantly push you to optimize content for your existing audience? The solution proposed by the Norwegian group is less about marketing and more about editorial strategy. It’s based on a simple idea: an editorial team eventually becomes very good at serving the audience that dominates its analytics dashboards. And at Amedia, that audience was too old to ensure the renewal of its subscriber base.

Janne Rygh, editorial content developer at Amedia, outlined this new strategy at the INMA Subscription Summit in Toronto.

This article summarized in 5 points

• The Norwegian group Amedia had more subscribers over the age of 80 than subscribers under the age of 40
• Rygh explained that the group’s dashboards naturally steered editorial teams toward the expectations of the majority audience, which was older
• To correct this bias, Amedia made 90% of its subscribers invisible in its management tools and isolated the metrics for those under 40
• This refocusing has shifted editorial priorities and improved both the overall readership and the share of young readers
• At Romerikes Blad, one of the titles tested, the under-40 segment grew by 30% in nine months

More subscribers over 80 than under 40

It’s worth reiterating the starting point: Amedia is not a group lagging behind in digital. It’s Norway’s largest newspaper publisher, with 110 newspapers, 20 partner newspapers, 2 million daily readers, and 580,000 100% digital subscribers. By the end of 2023, their subscriber base stood at 684,000, with over 68% being digital subscribers, and nearly 90% of subscribers reading content digitally.

The post Amedia ignored older subscribers to attract younger ones appeared first on Audiencers.