7 Insights from the INMA Subscriptions Summit

The INMA Media Subscriptions Summit gathered 300+ product, digital, and subscription professionals from the news media world in Amsterdam. From the rich three-day program, tons of notes, and takeaways, we distilled 7 key insights that stood out.

Time to redefine retention: A subscriber who churns is not lost forever

Riske Betten, B2C/Product Director at Mediahuis, brought a new perspective in the way we are looking at subscribers who cancel. Instead of describing them as forever lost, let’s view them as people who can come back. Doing a parallel to the video industry, Greg Piechota presented that 42% of video subscription cancellations in 2024 came from so-called “serial churners”. People who canceled and came back, even multiple times.

This has important ramifications for how to approach retention strategies. Perhaps we should be looking at offering:

• The ability to pause a subscription instead of canceling it.
• The possibility to downgrade instead of leaving.
• Better one-click restart user flows.
• The option to easily re-enable saved preferences
• More systematic win-back strategies

The use of dynamic paywalls has increased 4x since 2020

Almost every speaker at the INMA Summit talked about personalized paywalls. This is no surprise considering the use of dynamic paywalls with personalized pricing, personalized meters, or tailored offers has increased four-fold since 2020.

Much has been talked about this over the past years but now we are starting to see more and more results. For instance:

• The Philadelphia Inquirer saw a 35% lift in conversion after using dynamic metering.
• The Indian Times saw a 50% increase in ARPU and a 15% increase in conversion with personalized paywalls.

It is great to see initiatives that dare to optimize ARPUs as it should be a key goal for publishers in the fight for more digital revenues. 

We’re still defining “engagement”

The word “engagement” has been on stage at virtually every industry conference over the past 10 years. Hundreds of teams across the world are obsessing over how best to drive reader engagement. There are many engagement models, some based on time, recurrence, or number of interactions. The early models also took metrics such as likes on social or comments into account.

Aftenposten shared two stand-out ideas around engagement:

First, most readers consume 3-5 articles per day. Interestingly, this is typically a balance between 1-3 articles of general interest (e.g., major news stories) and 1-3 articles tailored to needs. Both are equally important, as the visual below from Aftenposten’s presentation suggests. Aftenposten hasn’t yet analyzed how these numbers correlate to a tipping point for retention, but it is certainly an analysis worth exploring.

How serious are you about getting to know Gen Z?

Der Spiegel gave 15,000 subscriptions away to people under 30 years old with the option for them to offer one extra subscription to a friend. The option sold out faster than some festival tickets. In less than 30 hours!

The main goal for Der Spiegel is to convert these young readers after their one-year subscription will expire in November. However, it also allows them to gather important data regarding the news-reading behavior of these young readers. Now, they have a pool of over 20.000 Gen Z that they can study every day.  

They know that 60% of their audience is willing to pay but can’t find the right product, so they hope the one year’s worth of data will help them design and build the right product that will make these young readers pay and stay.

A key insight shared already is that “There are no young topics, but young formats and young channels.”

Isabella Wohlwend, Head of Subscriptions at Der Spiegel explained that young people want to read the same content of news as most other demographics. However, they found that the ways through which they consume this news are different from other groups.

Paywalling old content brings additional subscribers

“Just do this. Just go back home and do this” was the call-to-action from Darya Ushakova, the Chief Marketing Officer from the Philadelphia Inquirer, regarding archive paywalling.

The Inquirer started paywalling all articles older than 28 days. This resulted in an additional 640 monthly subscription starts. They then tightened this to 21 days, leading to over 810 monthly subscription starts. Just do this.

Bundling remains as important as ever

Several speakers touched on the topic of bundling. Here are 4 key stats to know regarding bundle offers:

• 24% of the Amedia bundlers have read another newspaper
• 50% higher 5-year cumulative LTV for bundlers at the Wall Street Journal
• 1% retention only for bundle offer vs single at Wall Street Journal – a figure that Todd Olsen mentioned to be in line with the “modest” goal the team had set for the bundles.
• 7% increase in ARPU bundle vs news-only (New York Times case)

What’s in the bundle?

While bundles as subscriptions that give access to more sources have been a topic of interest, other ways of providing more value with the subscription are starting to take the spotlight. The popular Netflix and Spotift model of allowing multiple users on a single account has been more present at the Summit than in previous yers. This was done for a long time at companies like Le Monde and seems to be gaining traction in other companies as well.

AI, cherries, and bananas

Surprisingly, there was not a lot of talk on AI at the Subscription Summit, but one metaphor did stand out from Greg Piechota’s presentation.

• Bananas are commodity pieces. They can be AI-generated and are mainly used to inform the reader and drive ad monetization.
• Cherries are in-depth pieces (think: analyses and opinion pieces). They are the “man-made” pieces used to build relationships and drive subscriptions