The situation before 2020

At the start of the project, Le Monde’s digital subscription offer was €1 for the first month, then €9.90/month for the first year.

This offer made it possible to acquire a significant number of subscribers…

…but failed to retain them in the long term as the price rose to €13 per month in the second year, then to €17.90 in the third.

A new set of offers (after 2020)

Thanks to the development of an internal fraud detection system called “Capping” — which blocks users who are simultaneously trying to access to articles from multiple devices using the same account, i.e. account sharing — Le Monde was able to confidently promote multi-account subscriptions (B2C and B2B)….

This has led to an increase in “duo” and “family” subscriptions, which are sold at higher prices.

Next step: price increase

The Le Monde team conducted an A/B test of a price increase on 10,000 subscribers, who were divided into two groups: +$1/month and +$2/month. An informational email was sent in December for an increase to be applied in January.

The results were analyzed the following March:

“Following this test, we observed slightly better retention with the €1 per month increase compared to the €2 increase. Out of caution, and given that this was the first price adjustment under the new pricing structure, we chose to start with the €1 monthly increase, which was considered less risky—while still generating a significant increase in revenue. For certain cohorts with lower initial prices, we opted for increases greater than $1, based on the findings of this initial test.”

What Le Monde took away from it

Their ARPU has been growing steadily since 2020, and the presentation of subscription offers has been optimized for greater clarity and conversion.

Rather than starting with price, Le Monde begins by improving the offering, perceived value, user experience, and fraud prevention. Only then do they adjust the price. This is a deliberate “price-last” approach.

The Atlantic: make the value tangible for subscribers

With prices set at $79.99/year (digital), $89.99/year (print + digital), and $120/year (premium ad-free), The Atlantic is below its competitors in terms of price, but above average in terms of retention and growth: +15% subscribers YoY, and a retention rate of over 70%.

Mariah Craddick divides subscriber benefits into three categories:

• Essentials: unlimited access, newsletters, mobile app, narrated articles, digital issues.
• Utilities: article saving, sharing, reading mode, app customization.
• Bonuses: subscriber-only podcasts, games, live events, merchandise.

They measure value through:

• the percentage of new subscribers who performed a key action within the first seven days.
• the proportion of subscribers with “engaged” or “core” status.
• a retention rate that is four points higher among those who completed on-site onboarding.
• Articles narrated via 11 Labs, the article sharing feature, and the premium mobile experience (particularly on iPad) are key differentiators.

One of the secrets of their success? On-site onboarding.

Subscribers who complete the onboarding process on The Atlantic website retain 4 points more than those who do not!

Onet Premium: the most daring bundle in Europe

In Poland, Ringier Axel Springer launched Onet Premium, a bundled subscription giving access to more than 15 major brands (Onet, Poland’s leading news site, Newsweek, Forbes, Politico, Business Insider, National Geographic, and others). Together, these brands reach 22 million Polish users every month.

The offer includes:

• exclusive items from several brands.
• 150 episodes of exclusive podcasts per month.
• 30,000 audio articles per month.
• an average listening time of 67 minutes and 10 hours per month per user in the audio app.
• cross-promotional newsletters, subscriber events, and editorial formats shared between brands.

To achieve this, they created a unified identity driven by editorial consistency and cross-brand storytelling, proving the value of the bundle through its impact beyond each individual brand and building a community around the power of critical thinking.

As a result, between 2019 and 2024, they achieved rapid growth:

• +91% average annual revenue growth;

• -32% churn rate;
• +15% share of highly engaged subscribers;
• +58% revenue growth between 2023 and 2024.

Key takeaway: To prove the value of the bundle and move from a “price-first” to a “price-last” model, the value proposition must be consistent, clear, accessible, and obvious to the user.

Clarify why

Before beginning development on a new product or feature, we step back and ask: Why? Why this feature? Why now? And why should we do this versus something else? Often, it’s insights — information gathered from quantitative and qualitative data that helps us better understand our audience — that enables us to answer these questions.

Having a clear motivation is helpful in organizing teams, especially cross-functional ones. And the more rooted in data, whether it’s direct customer feedback or data analysis, the stronger the case for why.

Article gifting is a feature we launched late last year. The feature enables subscribers to share Atlantic articles with others (even those without a subscription) on a monthly basis.

We know our subscribers not only enjoy engaging with our journalism themselves, but also find delight in sharing it with others. However, if their recipient didn’t have a subscription, they often were unable to view the full article.

Our audience-research team reported that the lack of the ability to share access was one of the most frequent pain points noted by both active and prospective subscribers. Armed with this information, we considered how article gifting might fulfill this request and how it would work at The Atlantic.

Article gifting is not a concept we created. Many other news publishers, like The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post offer this type of functionality. While it was helpful to look to these as examples when considering our version of the feature, we wanted to make sure we built something specific to our audience’s needs that also aligned with our own business goals.

> How we introduced group subscriptions to The Atlantic

Set clear goals

Goal-setting is another essential step in the development process that creates focus for the feature and the cross-functional team working together to build it. By setting a clear goal up front, it ensures everyone is on the same page about what the solution is meant to do or solve for.

It can also illuminate when different teams are not on the same page about what the intended outcome should be. Still, it’s better to have that come to light at the beginning of the project versus after launch.

For the article-gifting feature, our goals were two-fold: 1) provide a new, highly-requested benefit to subscribers to improve satisfaction and 2) create a new way for those who aren’t subscribers to access our journalism.

While we believe our journalism is worth paying for, we also know that some readers need more time with us before committing to a subscription. With article gifting, we could give subscribers a way to be our advocates and share with family, friends, and followers — with hopes that they eventually become subscribers, too.

Source ideas from everywhere

Good ideas really can come from anywhere. Whenever it’s time to consider a new feature or product, the product team aims to include partners from across the organization. We host cross-functional brainstorms and design sprints, consistently share ideas and learnings from our peers, and collect feedback on requirements and designs. For product managers, sourcing ideas and leaning on our partners for their respective areas of expertise is our superpower.

For article gifting, we worked closely with design, marketing, copy, engineering, data science, and audience team members to define how the feature would work, what it would look like, and exactly what success would mean in terms of metrics. This also helped us think through potential risks and ways we might be able to mitigate them.

(Over)communicate

Good communication is often the difference between a successful project and one that stumbles to the finish line. But having open lines of communication is challenging, especially when every team is busy and has its own priorities and deadlines. This is why we’ve established some lightweight, repeatable ways for our teams to facilitate communication and foster collaboration.

For instance, with article gifting, we leaned on a project-based Slack channel and a weekly 15-minute check-in to communicate progress, major decisions made, or open questions that needed to be resolved. We also made sure the PRD (product requirements document) always had the most up-to-date information about the feature as well as how we were progressing against our timeline to launch. This enabled partners on other teams to stay updated without having to spend too much time in meetings.

> Also from The Atlantic team: bringing more value to readers and subscribers through our mobile app

Share results and learnings far and wide

After a feature launches, it’s important to understand its impact against the goals articulated at the onset. Like every other step of the development process, this shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. We often share post-launch performance reports soon after a launch that detail how the feature or product is performing, lessons learned, and any changes we plan to make. It’s important to share our learnings across the organization because it develops a shared understanding and sometimes inspires new ideas for us to pursue.

For article gifting, we learned quickly that subscribers were having a hard time distinguishing article gifting from our regular digital-sharing functionality. This led us to reconsider the user experience and update the flow to make it more intuitive. Monitoring subscriber behavior with the feature, as well as engagement with the gift articles by recipients, has inspired several optimizations we’ve made since launch.

Feedback from subscribers has been overwhelmingly positive in response to having this new benefit, many expressing gratitude for enabling this capability so that they can share with friends and family. Article gifting has also enabled our journalism to reach a wider audience, converting many into new subscribers, too.

This feature’s success was absolutely a result of many teams at The Atlantic being generous with insights, ideas, and feedback to ultimately deliver something of value to our subscribers. And it’s this spirit that we aim to bring to everything we build.

The Audiencers' Festival at The New York Times Building on March 15th brought together 150 digital publishing professionals to discuss everything from audience research to newsletters, engaging young audiences and maximizing on the value of registration.

To kick the day off, Gina Bulla, Executive Director Audience Research, and Mariah Craddick, Executive Director Product, shared how The Atlantic is using audience research to bring more value to readers and subscribers, with the example of their mobile app development.

> To add to your reading list: Audience research at The Atlantic, the questions that data can’t answer

Gina sees her work in audience research as falling into 4 buckets:

• Listen – keeping an eye on social media comments, care team feedback, reviews… you can learn a lot without ever asking a question
• Connect – directly connecting with audience via zoom to get feedback
• Educate – sharing learnings with the entire organization
• Advocate with balance – advocating for the audience whilst also bearing in mind that a lot of things go into a business decision

Audience research guiding principals:

• Seek out multiple perspectives – talk to people with different backgrounds and with different relationships with The Atlantic. For instance, not only super fans but also casual readers or those who don’t yet know or like The Atlantic
• Respect readers – being thoughtful about reaching out to readers, ensuring they understand why they’re being asked questions
• Interpret without bias – much of this research is qualitative, so ensuring they go in without preconceived bias, etc.
• Tell the truth – don’t only share positivity, but honest feedback. Don’t shy away from sharing the less nice stuff!

Audience research x product case study: Bringing more value to readers and subscribers through the mobile app

Mariah shared their product development lifecycle, with its 4 primary phases, and how they bring audience research into this. The goal is to not only use research at the discovery stage but throughout the building and post building steps to evaluate, test and optimize the product.

Looking at the example of optimizing their mobile app, internal data suggested that their app could play a bigger role in engaging and retaining subscribers.

• Engagement: subscribers who use the app have a more engaged “reader state” than those who don’t, meaning they were coming back and using the product more frequently than others
• Loyalty: they are also more likely to renew than subscribers who do not use the app
• Adoption: app adoption was lower than other products

However:

• Increasingly saturated: mobile apps struggle with discoverability and differentiation challenges
• Declining engagement: usage is down for the majority of newspaper and magazine apps in the past two years

So, they had a few key research questions to consider:

• Who is our mobile app is for? Thinking beyond demographics, such as what relationship app users might have with The Atlantic
• What are usage habits for magazine and newspaper apps in general and The Atlantic specifically? 
• How might we evolve our app to better serve readers and subscribers?

Step 1: listen

Firstly, surfacing knowledge from existing resources and sources…

Annual reader survey: 60K+ respondents findings, including open ended questions and working with the data science team to do some Natural Language Processing

Customer care team: 25K+ inquiries per month and a monthly report for the audience research team

App comments: 2K+ ratings and slack channel

Step 2: connect

Second, speaking directly with news/magazine app users…

Diary study: 12 participants are asked to track usage for 2 days, sharing why and when they used the app. This was executed via the tool dscout, useful to connect you to people who might not necessarily already be in your own email list

Survey existing app users: 500+ respondents, invited via app

Interviews: 6 subscribers, recruited via surveys

Step 3: educate

Shared our findings, firstly with product teams but also with teams across the company.

Step 4: advocate with balance

Recommendations that serve both the audience and business:

• There’s an opportunity for a broader Atlantic app audience
• Convenience and curation are the app’s most attractive attributes
• Some respondents wish The Atlantic app had more synergy with other platforms
• The Atlantic app can help make their journalism more manageable

How we used audience research to guide mobile app feature development

Strategic positioning: bolstered confidence in positioning the app as an engagement-driving tool in the wider portfolio

Identifying requirements: helped the team identify table stakes needs, what opportunities they’d missed, and what users already loved

Audience definition: clarified who the target audience should be to guide feature ideation

Packaging this up into something to use

• Distilled findings into a strategy brief recommendation focused on 3 primary opportunities in the app:
  • Helping users manage how and when they can read
  • Providing the ability to set and manage in-app preferences
  • Improving navigation and in-app feature discoverability

• Shared this brief cross-functionally and with leadership to get alignment
• Enabled us to move forward with a clear rubric and guide for what types of features to prioritize

From the early days of market research homing in on a target audience to finding ways to incorporate user feedback throughout the development cycle, the goal was “seamless.”

Sizing the opportunity

It all started with a scoping exercise, trying to forecast the total addressable audience. Our teams conducted extensive market research to assess where there was truly a fit and what The Atlantic’s unique offering would be.

We looked into academic institutions, corporations, and nonprofits. Each sector had its own needs and requirements.

“We are excited about the range of institution types that we’ll soon be able to support. To start, we decided to focus on education, given the strong demand and impact potential.” said SVP of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships Mary Liz McCurdy.

In our research, it was very clear early on that the academic market had the need to access our publication. The Atlantic’s modern-day and rich historical journalism is used in syllabi, read and shared by students and teachers, and cited in college papers and theses. However, there was no way for teachers or librarians to grant school-wide access to their students or teachers.

It seemed like a no-brainer. “It became very clear that it made the most sense to dive into the education sector: educators, professors, librarians, students,” said Deirdre Torrance, VP of Partnerships & Business Development. This way, from a strategic standpoint, we could also reach younger generations of readers where they are: in high school and college.

We needed, then, to understand how students and educators used resources at their schools, how institutions buy resources, and put together what made the most sense for our minimum viable product (MVP).

The Atlantic team are speaking at The Audiencers' Festival in New York on March 15th! Find the full agenda and reserve your spot here.

Giving access to The Atlantic at scale

Our team considered many options for the best way to offer group access to our website. We considered an IP-based approach, for example, meaning anyone using their institution’s network would be able to enjoy the subscriber experience on the site. Unfortunately, this approach had limitations. If a teacher or student chose to work or study off campus, they wouldn’t have access.

Group access can also be seat-based, giving each person their own unique username and password. Unfortunately for librarians, who are usually managing resources for academic communities, this approach is hard to maintain.

A third option we considered is single sign-on (SSO). With this approach, academic users wouldn’t need to create a unique username and password to enter the site; instead, they would be able to have access to an Atlantic account using their own institution’s sign-on system.

As Executive Director of Product Mariah Craddick said, The Atlantic “viewed SSO as the clearest way to reach the first milestone — providing a seamless sign-on. That was the number one tablestake.”

This option was beneficial for establishing a relationship with the members of each academic institution. If they have their own Atlantic account, they can sign up for a newsletter. They can manage their own settings. All these options empower users and add value to a subscription. With IP-based access, those actions simply can’t be taken.

A seamless user journey

For a product that will reach thousands of people, it’s crucial to create an experience that is easy to access and navigate. For our team, this meant changing the design and user flows of certain parts of the website to cater to our new academic audience. One of the greatest challenges we faced was balancing how to incorporate new academic group subscribers into the sign-on experience without confusing our existing individual subscribers.

To make sign-on seamless, we would need to simplify the experience through visual design and content hierarchy. On the sign-on page, we opted for a minimal call to action for group subscribers while maintaining the look and feel that existing readers recognize. Group subscribers arrive on a special landing page where they are prompted to sign in through their institution.

We discovered that our SSO approach came with a caveat: during the sign-on process, we do not retain any personal data of group subscribers, such as names or email addresses. While this met the needs of many academic institutions when it came to data privacy, it presented a potential barrier to personalizing and improving the Atlantic experience for teachers and students.

We solved this issue in the design of an onsite onboarding experience, which introduces these subscribers to The Atlantic’s offerings and newsletters. During onboarding, we also prompt users to enter their name, email, and a few additional details.

It made sense to give teachers and students the flexibility to choose where they want newsletters delivered. Collecting this information during onboarding also gives us a better understanding of the needs and preferences of this audience.

> You’ll also enjoy: Audience research at The Atlantic, the questions that data can’t answer

Looking beyond the classroom

After months of rigorous research, including user testing with actual high school and university staff and students, and fastidious development, we launched group subscriptions in the summer of 2023. So far, over 60 institutions from all over the country have purchased group subscriptions to The Atlantic.

As we introduce this new cohort to The Atlantic, we’ll continue to find ways to drive engagement.

“We want to help professors add our journalism to their syllabus and foster more use of The Atlantic in classrooms. Ultimately, we want to look into how we take seniors upon graduation and convert them into individual subscribers,” said Torrance.

Fortunately, while we narrowed our focus to the academic market for the initial product launch, we built group subscriptions to be flexible enough to expand to other sectors in the future. Now, we have a product to reach them, too.

Mariah Craddick, Gina Bulla, Mary Liz McCurdy, and Deirdre Torrance contributed to this post.

After noticing Gina Bulla, executive director of audience research at The Atlantic, sign up to The Audiencers’ newsletter, I just had to get in touch to hear more about her role. What exactly is audience research? What type of research does her team run? And how are the findings used to increase engagement, conversion and retention at The Atlantic?

I was excited to learn more about our audience on a deeper level beyond what we could know about them from data and demographics. I saw an opportunity for those insights to strengthen our work across the organization. Fast forward a few years, and I pivoted to lead our Audience Research team. 

It’s a new role for me, but what made the leap easier is Audience Research is an emerging discipline in the publishing industry. So there’s an opportunity to determine what Audience Research means for The Atlantic along with the industry. And, The Audiencers helps connect me with others in similar roles—so thank you for that!

What is audience research at The Atlantic? 

I always say that my job is listening to people. We can glean so much data from our metrics, and our Data Science team are expert at analyzing and making sense of it. But there are also so many questions that data can’t answer. That’s where Audience Research comes in, to try to answer the questions that data can’t answer: why is something happening, how do people feel, and what are their unmet needs and desires?

It’s important to me that when we think about Audience Research, it’s not just our current audience that we want to connect with but our prospective audience as well. Of course, our super fans are an incredibly important voice, but to truly understand who our audience can be, we also need to connect with groups that are less (or not yet) engaged with us.

And probably the most important role of an audience researcher is to advocate for our readers and ensure their voices are heard when building new experiences.

What are The Atlantic’s research methods? 

We are primarily focused on qualitative research, so activities that allow us to solicit feedback verbatim from current and prospective readers, like interviews, forums, and surveys. We’ve been experimenting with diary studies–longitudinal research, where we can connect with participants over a period of time to understand their habits better. 

Because it takes effort for respondents to participate, we’re selective about the volume of these activities. Speaking to our readers and subscribers face-to-face is a privilege, so we want to respect their time, privacy, and opinions.

We are also tuned in (or listening) to our readers in what I’ll call non-active ways. What is our customer care team hearing? What are people saying on social media? What is resonating across the industry? 

How do you decide what to research? 

We try to balance the big, important questions that can help us define the future of The Atlantic with the more specific questions that can help ensure a product’s or project’s success. 

One of the big, important questions we’re focused on right now is: who are our future subscribers? We’ve just executed research to help us identify audiences that may be inclined to subscribe to The Atlantic in the near or not-so-distant future. We’ll use this research to ideate strategies to increase conversion, engagement, and discovery.

How are projects prioritized? 

That’s probably one of the biggest challenges. Every department in the organization wants insight from our audience, but as I alluded to before, we don’t want to oversaturate them with research requests. 

We ask two questions to filter the projects that we take on:

• Is it actionable, or will we make a decision based on the research?
• Is it really a question that our audience can answer for us?

Your work obviously relates back to a wide variety of teams at The Atlantic – including product, marketing, editorial and data. How do you make sure that each team is able to learn and act from your insights?

Synthesis and sharing out results is one of, if not the most important, steps in our process. For almost every project, we create a report and try to make it as engaging as possible (visuals, videos, etc.). Then we share it in a few ways: via group slacks, and research readout meetings that stakeholders across the company attend, emails, etc.

That way, Audience Research isn’t happening in a vacuum, and what we’re learning can inform any team’s work.

Can you give us an example of how something you learned from audience research was used to increase engagement, conversion, and retention at The Atlantic.

Something we hear a lot from readers as a barrier to subscribing, or sometimes a reason for canceling is that they don’t have as much time to devote to our journalism as they might like. So it’s encouraged us to think about how we can help our audience fit The Atlantic into their lives more seamlessly. I don’t want to say too much because we’re working on some new features right now but keep an eye out for some of those enhancements soon.

I’d like to say thank you to Gina for her time – I certainly learnt a lot and am now an advocate for every publisher employing someone in this kind of role! As she mentioned to me in the interview, Audience Research is a practice that’s fairly new in the industry, but something that’s becoming increasingly valued as publishers are becoming consumer businesses, requiring them to put readers first, understanding exactly what brings them to engage, convert and remain loyal to the brand.