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.

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Anil Chitrapu is a Senior Product Manager at Wirecutter (The New York Times), focused on audience growth, AI, and personalization.

In this article, Anil takes a closer look into the operational choices, guardrails, and tech powering Wirecutter For You, the new email that tailors article recommendations to each reader – without compromising editorial judgment or inbox trust.

> Wirecutter shipped Wirecutter For You, a personalized weekly email, in under a month. It worked because the scope was deliberately narrow: editorial content only, no product recommendations, built on existing New York Times infrastructure

> The algorithm only picks from an editor-approved pool, kept small enough that editors recognise every recommendation. Sensitive categories and stale pieces are excluded before the model sees anything

> The sharpest decision was a no-send path built in from day one. If the system can't confidently assemble a strong lineup for a reader, it skips that week rather than sending something subpar

> They optimised for session quality rather than click-through rate and ran a holdout group from the start. So far there is no sign the personalized email is cannibalising their existing editorial newsletters

> Anil Chitrapu's conclusion: "personalization doesn't have to mean prediction. It can mean respect: understanding what readers already trust you for, and delivering more of it, deliberately"

Wirecutter, The New York Times’ product recommendation service, shares the same commitment to rigorous journalism that defines our broader newsroom. The mission has always been to help readers make confident, informed decisions about the products in their lives – from the best gifts to the most reliable home appliances – through reporting that is diligent, transparent, and practical.

But reaching readers today requires more than great reporting; it demands a thoughtful approach to how we surface that journalism. As information overload grows and attention spans shorten, the challenge expands beyond what we publish to how we make sure each reader finds what’s most relevant to them. Within Wirecutter, we’ve long debated how to use technology to serve that mission responsibly. Our goal has never been to replace the editorial voice that makes our product recommendations distinct, but to use personalization as a way to extend it: to help every reader find the next right thing at the right time, in a way that still feels unmistakably like us. Every design decision flowed from that principle: personalization should extend editorial judgment, not replace it.

This idea led to the creation of Wirecutter For You, a weekly email that pairs our journalism with a robust personalization model to deliver tailored article recommendations. The system we created is designed for flexibility and oversight, allowing us to refine its rules and outputs in tandem. In the sections that follow, we’ll share why we built it, how it works, and what this taught us about bridging editorial craft and algorithmic systems.

Why we built it

As we entered Q4 (our yearly peak shopping period), Wirecutter wanted to build a resilient and automated channel to help our readers find their way to more of our journalism. Even with our deep library, many readers only ever see a fraction of Wirecutter’s journalism. Personalization gave us a way to surface the right story at the right moment. Our goal was to develop a product that would be able to learn from a reader’s browsing history while maintaining Wirecutter’s standards.

At a high level, we wanted to answer a simple question: how could we introduce personalization to Wirecutter in a way that still felt entirely editorial and intentional? For us, that meant starting in a space where we could test carefully, learn quickly, and retain full control over tone and trust – and email was the perfect place to do that. It gave us a contained environment to experiment with personalization primitives, measure impact, and ensure deliverability, all without changing the on-site experience until we got signal.

We designed the program’s format with three primary goals.

• First, we wanted to build a weekly reading habit that complemented our existing editorial newsletters – adding value without displacing what readers already trusted.
• Second, we used the email as a controlled space to learn: testing personalization logic, tracking engagement and trust metrics, and validating that the signals we captured could scale across unique email sends.
• Finally, we treated this as an early framework for how personalization should operate across Wirecutter: establishing the rules, measurement standards, and editorial guardrails that future products could build on.

Because this was new territory, we defined success less by traffic spikes and more by durable reader signals: quality over clicks, inbox trust and deliverability, and long-term engagement that deepened – not diluted – our relationship with subscribers.

What we launched

After a small hardcoded pilot earlier in the year gave us confidence in the format, we began developing a dynamic weekly email that could scale – one capable of dynamically tailoring article recommendations for readers while staying true to our editorial standards. The goal was simple but ambitious: to create a product that felt more personal than automated, guided by the same standards our newsroom applies to any published work.

We launched Wirecutter For You as a weekly Sunday send, designed to deliver personalized story recommendations alongside a concise, editor-written lede. Each version draws from a reader’s recent engagement and a curated, editor-approved content pool. We started with a small, highly engaged audience to monitor performance and maintain deliverability as we introduced a new sender identity.

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User needs, personalization, dynamic experiences… The move to being more audience-centric is (finally) happening! But what about the article itself? Despite so many innovations across publishing products, articles still tend to look the same as they always have – very text-heavy and focused on form-over-function. 

What we really should be doing is flipping this on it’s head, considering first and foremost the function of the article, and adapting the form accordingly.

It means asking ourselves how we can make the content even more useful to our readers, helping them to fulfill a certain need, through the form as well as the content itself. 

And in doing so, we often help ourselves too, in the form of higher user engagement and propensity to subscribe.

To give you some ideas of what this looks like, and inspire your newsroom to do the same, here are 5 examples of articles where form follows function. 

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Julien Ancel is the founder of Anthm, a gaming platform designed for media organizations wanting to adopt the gaming strategy that revolutionized the New York Times. However, it's important to stress that the success of this strategy is not based solely on the fame of the New York Times, but on the meticulous application of sophisticated and innovative game mechanics, detailed in the article.

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Newsletters continue to be a valuable tool for cutting through the noise of shared online spaces and engaging audiences in direct and meaningful ways. To learn from a couple of experts in the field, Chartbeat’s Brad Streicher sat down with Elaine Piniat of Reuters and Maya Neria of The New York Times at The Audiencers Festival in New York.

They talked about how their roles help bridge editorial and business teams, how newsletter growth correlates to site KPIs, and what they find challenging about their work.

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The playful evolution of media: Bridging games, newsletters and engagement

Emerging at the crossroads of leisure and information, media companies are increasingly recognizing the potential of games.

One of the most significant tales of this trend is the acquisition of Wordle by The New York Times, transforming a simple gesture of love into a global phenomenon.

And as media companies become more and more about newsletters, and the art of engagement becomes more paramount in the digital age, there is a convergence of newsletters + media companies + games.

Let’s dive in to one of the largest media companies around — The New York Times — and how they incorporate games into their newsletter strategy to captivate and engage their audience.

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As part of a reorganization of The New York Times marketing department, Perrine Pavageau took on the role of "Program Manager" (PMO), a role at the crossroads of strategic vision and execution (read our article introducing her role here). Her main objective: to put in place operational mechanisms to ensure the success of marketing strategies. It's a function that answers the questions "how do we do it?" a contact person for teams to turn to express and overcome their organizational challenges. 

In this series of articles, Perrine recounts 5 operational projects carried out in this role for The New York Times.

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Perrine Pavageau worked for 4 years as Program Manager in the Marketing Department of The New York Times. Her main mission was to set up operational mechanisms to ensure the success of subscriber acquisition strategies. 

This article is an introduction to Perrine's role, the first in a series of articles in which she shares behind-the-scenes details of 5 projects she carried out in this role.

I’m going to tell you about a little-known role I had at The New York Times, that of “Program Manager”. A role in the marketing team at the intersection of strategic vision and execution.

My main objective in this role was to put operational mechanisms in place to ensure the success of marketing strategies.

Before this role, I was Project Manager for acquisition campaigns, coordinating their execution, from marketing brief to final delivery. So, Program Manager, what’s the difference?

Program Management can be identified with the function of a PMO (Project Management Officer), more commonly seen in Product or Tech Departments. A PMO provides teams with the methods and tools to enable them to achieve their objectives. A PMO can also manage their own projects, whose actors often have very different objectives. For me, the key words in Program Management are align, facilitate, organize, rationalize and communicate.

Needs that speak to you, in a context where needs are increasingly transversal, objectives increasingly ambitious, and teams are distanced by remote work?

This role was created in a context of reorganization, with the creation of an internal media planning department, then the setting up of squads and a “Marketing Operations” entity. I reported to the SVP, Subscription Acquisition & Media, and then to the Executive Director, Marketing Operations.

The reorganization into squads was based on a principle of “missions” and “functions”:

Mission = equivalent to “squad”; cross-functional team composed of Marketing, Product and Tech experts, whose work was focused on a specific target, objective or product.

Function = hierarchical attachment. For example, a project manager could be part of the “Growth” mission, but their function lived within the “Marketing Operations” team. A media planner could be part of the “Customer Experience” mission, but their function would live within the Marketing & Media Strategy team.

The role of the Program Management function then became clear. A function that answers the question “how do we do it?” in such a context. A contact person to whom teams could turn to express their operational challenges. In a series of articles to come, I will tell you about concrete projects that I have carried out in this role.

Humanly, this role is exciting, but challenging. As a former project manager, this new role allowed me to work with a much wider range of people within the company, to learn about different jobs and to gain more exposure to management. On the other hand, I had to know how to navigate between different teams, listen to others, learn from them and get out of my comfort zone. A real satisfaction: succeeding in getting teams that previously worked in silos to work together. The hardest part was imposing certain tasks or methods on teams that did not report to me hierarchically.

The Program Management function at The New York Times still exists. It has been renamed “Strategic Programs and Operations”, which demonstrates its impact at the strategic level and not just at the operational level. The team consists of four Program Managers, each specializing in a particular expertise and business line, all of whom have an impact on achieving the ambitious goal of reaching 15 million subscribers by 2027.

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We take a closer look at arguably the most famous digital subscription publisher in the world, studying their dynamic model, paywall blocking method and uncovering key takeaways to apply to your own strategy.

 

In brief: 
- The NYT has developed a dynamic metered model that’s optimized for two metrics simultaneously - engagement and conversion to subscription 
- Although this model is complex and not something that every publisher can afford to build in-house, there are lessons to be learned
- Registration as a soft conversion step, developing numerous levers for value creation and not worrying too much about bypassing are just some of the strategies you can apply to your own digital model

In the beginning…

Back in March 2011, The New York Times did something that very few dared to do at the time. They blocked content online with a paywall. 

“5 Reasons Why The New York Times Paywall Will Fail (And Why It’s Really Dumb)”

“The New York Times’ paywall is doomed to fail”

*There were likely plenty more opinions like the above at the time but, let’s be honest, they’ve likely changed their mind since! 

Whatever people’s views on the matter, The New York Times was facing a crisis – ad revenue in freefall, income from print at an all time low, and online content disrupting the news business. It was time for a digital transformation. The start of a process to become subscription-first. 

At the start, The New York Times employed a metered strategy whereby readers could access a quota of 20 free articles a month before being blocked by the paywall. The idea here was that traffic from occasional visitors could be maintained, whilst more engaged readers would hit the article limit and be encouraged to subscribe.

This is the value in a metered paywall model – you allow for content discovery and engagement prior to presenting the paywall, helping to find the balance between frustration and engagement. 

Today is a very different story for The New York Times…

After acquiring The Athletic, The New York Times achieved its 2025 goal of 10 million subscribers a few years early, in February 2022, setting a new target of 15 million by 2027. 

The question then turns to how. 

How have the NYT gone from employing a ‘doomed’ strategy to running a successful premium model with over 10 million subscribers?

According to Rohit Supekar, Data Analyst at the NYT, there are two central reasons for this success: 

• Continuous testing, improvement and development of their premium strategy over the years
• But, most importantly, the publisher has moved from a one-size-fits-all approach to a dynamic metered model, driven by data

I.e. The New York Times paywall personalizes the meter limit to the reader. 

Dynamic metering at The New York Times

The engagement funnel towards subscription is composed of 3 stages: 

1. Unregistered, anonymous users arrive on the site and are presented with x number of free articles. 
2. After reaching this limit, the user is blocked by a registration wall and asked to create a free account in exchange for access to additional articles. 
3. Thanks to registration, activity can now be linked to the user’s custom reader ID with data being collected to help the publisher better understand this user’s current appetite for the NYT content. With this information, the dynamic model offers x number of free articles before presenting the paywall – x being a number that is determined optimal based on the registered user’s level of engagement.

How does this dynamic model work? 

This dynamic paywall strategy has been optimized for two metrics simultaneously. Specifically:

• Reader engagement
• The number of subscription generated by the paywall

As usual for any conversion strategy, it’s about balancing frustration and engagement. 

Increase the meter limit and your users will be more engaged. However, fewer readers will reach the paywall and be frustrated enough to convert. 

Conversely, if you keep the meter limit too low, you may have more registered members being exposed to the paywall, but these users haven’t been engaged enough to want to convert – i.e. too much frustration. 

Engagement is valuable and you should continuously seek to increase it. 

But the right amount of frustration is what’s going to encourage conversions and turn engagement into revenue. 

To find this balance, the model prescribes meter limits from a set of options, taking into consideration the user’s propensity to subscribe and their level of engagement. 

What can you take away from The New York Times’ dynamic paywall model? 

Nor everyone is as big as The NYT (that’s for certain) and developing this dynamic model in-house is pretty inaccessible for most publishers. Having said this, there are lessons to be learned to apply to your own strategy. 

1. Registration as a soft conversion step 

Registration (free account creation) has been a great asset to the publisher’s subscription acquisition efforts, increasing conversion rates by more than 40% according to The New York Times 2022 annual report. 

But the NYT aren’t the only ones to benefit from this strategy – in fact, increasingly more publishers of all sizes are seeing the benefits of this soft conversion step prior to the paywall. 

For instance, the data below from two of Poool’s clients demonstrates the huge increase in conversion rates for registered members compared to anonymous visitors. 

This didn’t require an expensive in-house model. Instead, the publishers segmented their audience based on level of engagement to build conversion journeys that found the best balance between frustration and engagement. 

Paris Match, for instance, presents less engaged users with a registration wall to help them discover more content and collect data to better understand their behavior. For ‘Fan’ readers however, who are highly more engaged, a hard paywall blocks content and requires them to subscribe. 

How to fully maximize registration – The NYT not only registers their users, but also leads them through an onboarding journey to increase engagement, such as encouraging newsletter sign-up and app downloads, just as they’d do with new subscribers. 

2. Develop multiple levers for value creation 

Whilst a subscription model will bring the most value to your business, you can do like the New York Times and establish numerous, synergistic revenue streams that seek to gradually increase customer lifetime monetization.

Anonymous users – for readers that have just arrived on your site (or are yet to create an account), you can firstly ensure that they accept cookies and then monetize from advertising.

Registered members – product driven engagement and first-party data collection will mean registered users support both ad and subscription revenue streams.

Single product subscribers – recurring, predictable revenue stream from your subscribers is what’s going to bring the most value. However, the key is to put significant time and effort into churn reduction to maximize customer lifetime value. 

Bundle and multi-product subscribers – (full access to two or more digital products) with bundles, publishers can increase conversion and retention rates by providing a wider variety of value under a single umbrella.

3. Bypassing isn’t all that bad, there’s other things to think about 

To give context to this point, The New York Times employs a frontal paywall blocking method, meaning that it’s fairly simple to bypass their wall. 

This begs the question of why one of the most successful digital publishers would employ a blocking method that results in an easy-to-bypass wall? 

In fact, the answer is quite simple – because there’s a lot more at stake when it comes to paywall blocking methods and other factors are more important to consider than bypassing. 

For instance, frontal blocking methods pose significantly less risk to SEO performance as all content is sent to the page, whether the user has access or not. 

What’s more, it’s worth bearing in mind that the users who do bypass your paywall are perhaps never likely to subscribe anyway. Instead, you should focus on the most important segment of your audience – those who are the most engaged and wouldn’t bypass your paywall anyway. These are your most valuable resource and, by employing a flexible model that performs well in terms of SEO and user experience, you can maximize the value that they bring to your business.

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