Audiencers

A 233-year-old title, launching its first-ever digital subscription, and choosing not to tier it. Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer, at The Observer UK, explains why simplicity beat segmentation at launch, and why the hardest part hasn't been the tech. 🎟️ One tier, one price, £16/month. No 99p pricing tricks, no premium gate. With only 6 months of data, Riley reasoned that tiering decisions now would rest on very little evidence, so simplicity was the safer bet. 🎭 Culture Club, £800+ in arts and culture perks, goes to every subscriber, not just a premium band. The logic is retention over acquisition: subscribers who attend an event build a relationship a login alone can't create. 🧭 Breadth of engagement, not one flagship story, is what's actually predicting who stays. Subscribers touching multiple parts of the product (recipes, crosswords, podcasts) are significantly less likely to cancel than single-entry-point readers. 🛑 The hardest part has been discipline, not building. When new features can be prototyped in an afternoon, the real skill is knowing which ones not to ship. Full story on Audiencers: https://lnkd.in/emijtwmv

What actually differentiates you from every other newsletter, podcast, or publication your reader could be paying for instead? At the Audiencers Festival Montréal, independent audience researcher Emily Goligoski and Skift's Rachel Mines tackled that question from two angles: how to find out, and what to do once you know. 🔍 The gap that matters isn't between you and your competitors, it's between what you think makes you unique and what your audience can actually name. Emily's fix: ask them directly 🧩 Once you know your differentiation, packaging decisions get easier. Rachel's 3-question test before bundling anything: does it strengthen or dilute each product's identity? Are the audiences actually converging? Can your ops hold it together without the seams showing? ✋ Sometimes the research tells you to do nothing. One of Skift's four products stayed untouched, on purpose, and it's now one of their steadiest, best growing subscriptions. Full session from Emily Goligoski and Rachel Mines: https://lnkd.in/e-Q3iUWt

In its 5th year, 118 contributions, nearly 5.5 billion monthly page views... The Tech Stack study (with Sciences Po Journalism School) just published its 2026 edition, and the headline finding isn't what's missing from publishers' stacks. It's what they're failing to connect. 🧰 French publishers are now properly equipped. Marketing, editorial, advertising and technical tools all score within 0.3 points of each other (7.1 to 7.4/10) 🔌 The real gap is orchestration, not equipment. Everyone wants the same thing next: a unified data layer, a CMS that connects planning to publishing to measurement, a way to reconcile fragmented signals across tools. 🏗️ In-house solutions consistently score best, when they're built with the teams who'll actually use them. Off-the-shelf fit matters less than the right fit. ✨ AI adoption is nearly universal on the marketing side (9 in 10 publishers) but still stuck at individual productivity, not integrated into the core stack. And sovereignty (reducing dependence on US vendors, controlling licence and token costs) is becoming a real selection criterion, not a nice-to-have. Full findings from the Tech Stack association: https://lnkd.in/ez9mq7Eq

Reach and pageviews built the last two decades of digital publishing. But as AI answer engines intercept traffic before it ever reaches your site, Mark Zohar argues they're no longer the north star metric to optimize for survival. There's one that is: 🔁 Frequency, not reach, is what signals a real business. A reader who visits twelve times a month because they want to be there is a subscriber in the making. 🤝 AI can summarize your content, but it can't replicate community. Comment threads, live Q&As, real conversation, that's the layer that keeps readers coming back for something AI can't fake. 📈 The numbers back it up: engaged community members visit 6 to 8 times more often than fly-by users, and registered users convert to paid subscriptions at roughly 45 times the rate of anonymous visitors. Mark's diagnostic for your next board meeting: don't show them a traffic chart, show them your Frequency curve. Full piece from Mark live on Audiencers: https://lnkd.in/edexng9z

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Shirin Shity, Senior Marketing Manager at Project Syndicate, shared how transitioning from an aggressive friction model to an open, communication-first strategy revitalised user engagement and subscription conversion. By treating the registration layer as a value journey rather than a restrictive barrier, the publication grew their logged user base, increased the number of registered users converting into paid subscribers by 52% and saw a 22% uplift in overall RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) scores. Full article summary on Audiencers: https://lnkd.in/ebxtTbf2

"The Audiencers Festival occupies an unusual position in the conference calendar: small enough that the networking is genuine and the sessions practitioner-led, and granular on subscription, audience engagement and product strategy in a way most larger events are not." Kind words and a great write up of our London Festival last week from John Rahim: https://lnkd.in/eJ6PpjzA Thank you again to everyone who spoke and attended for making this such a brilliant community event!

We're barely down from the high after our London Festival and we're already onto the next - Montréal 🇨🇦 -> June 25th at Radio-Canada -> 14 brilliant speakers covering everything from engaging niche communities and using AI in the newsroom to packaging subscriptions and conversion success stories -> Apéro networking after (of course!) -> And our first bilingual event, with translations available throughout the day between French & English > Full program & final tickets available here: https://lnkd.in/eESVA9PF See you there 💃 🕺 Nolwenn PASQUIER Marc Gendron Max Moné Marion Wyss Catherine Léger, PMP Gilles Lajoie Mathieu Therrien Emilie Harkin Emma McKay Corinne Osnos Rachel Mines Jean-Pierre Bastien Chloé Sondervorst Emily Goligoski Ludivine Paquet Cédric Mate Letterhead Darwin CX Poool Madeleine White

The publishing industry has spent a decade chasing traffic. The Audiencers Festival in London last week made the case that this was the wrong race. Six case studies, one consistent finding: the publishers generating sustainable revenue are the ones investing in direct reader relationships, not page view volume. Some of the numbers that stood out: 👉 Ringier's logged-in users generate 40 times the combined ad and subscription value of anonymous visitors 👉 Broadsheet's registered newsletter readers drive 43% of all subscription conversions from less than 1% of the audience 👉 The Washington Post found 12 million US consumers willing to pay for flexible news access a market their binary paywall model cannot reach 👉 Le Monde's English edition has nearly 16,000 subscribers and is breaking even a year ahead of plan The registration layer, the app, the newsletter, the pricing architecture none of these is a technical detail. They are the relationship. Full write-up on The Media Stack link in the comments below. #Audiencers #Poool #DarwinCX

The Audiencers' team spent the first three days of June in Marseille for WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers' 77th World News Media Congress. Three days, one dominant question: what does AI mean for the value, and future of journalism? We sat through a dozen sessions to share a wrap-up of the event, and the conversations that mattered most. > “Information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable”: AG Sulzberger, Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times, opened the Stewart Brand quote the industry has been misquoting for 20 years, and laid out an 8-point plan against AI’s “original sin” > “ChatGPT converts 17x better than Facebook and 173x better than Google Discover”: louis dreyfus on the Le Monde & OpenAI deal, and why 25% of the revenue goes to the newsroom > “Your next customer won’t be a human, it’ll be an agent”: the new three-layer infrastructure (Rights, Access, Payment) that lets publishers charge the machines > “The metric I look at every morning is the share of our content that AI cannot copy”: VG’s Gard Steiro on speedboats, and hiring “the profiles we hired in the 90s” -> Full summary on Audiencers: https://lnkd.in/exkvjTeB