Inspired tactics: Part 3 – Monetising beyond the initial subscription
By Bihag Karnani
As a senior product manager at Google, Bihag Karnani oversees the development of Reader Revenue Manager – a digital subscription service designed specifically for media companies. On average, he meets with approximately 50 to 70 publishers during the course of a year.
In Part 1, we examined first-party data and habit formation during the first 100 days. In Part 2, we discussed trials, paywalls and the science of conversion. In this article, we will examine what happens after the initial habit has been established – which is the expanded phase of Intercom’s CARE model – and where many news publications leave the greatest amount of money on the table.
There is a mind-set change involved. While most publishers view their growth as “getting more subscribers,” tech companies understand that the individual subscription is merely the entry point.
The true revenue generating product is created upon additional layers, such as ladders, bundles, add-ons, family plans, converting users from month-to-month to year-to-year and monetising users’ willingness to spend money on services that complement their primary subscription.
ChatGPT is the best recent example of creating a pricing ladder using anchoring. ChatGPT offers include Free; Go (8 euros a month) Plus (23 euros/month); Pro (103 euros/month); Team; Enterprise; etc. The Pro tier is simply there to create perceived value for the Plus tier. Few people are going to purchase ChatGPT for 103 euros per month. However, the existence of the Pro tier creates perceived value for the 23 euros/month Plus tier.
Many local dailies currently offer only one type of digital subscription plan. As such, they are unable to take advantage of the benefits provided by anchoring.
Readers see a single price and decide to either subscribe or not. Introducing a premium tier that costs twice as much as your current tier and includes features such as unlimited access to archived articles, ad-free reading, audio narration, and exclusive newsletters will provide readers with an incentive to subscribe to your basic tier. Your expectation should be that few readers will opt for the premium tier. Instead, its purpose is to create perceived value for your basic tier.
Laying down another rung on the tiered pricing ladder
In November 2022, Netflix launched a lower-cost ad supported tier at $6.99/month. By Q4 2024, in markets where it had been made available, 55 percent of all new signups to Netflix came through the ad supported tier. By Q1 2026, more than 60 percent of all new signups to Netflix were for the ad supported tier.
An ad supported floor provides two key benefits simultaneously. It allows price sensitive users who wouldn’t have paid full price to purchase a subscription, and it also allows you to retain subscribers at risk of cancellation by offering them a less expensive version of your service.
A similar move can be taken by news organisations that can also be highly profitable. Specifically, introducing an ad-supported tier at $2-$4/month is among the highest ROI opportunities currently available to the industry. Ad supported tiers have already proven successful in streaming media.
Publishers should sell to households rather than individuals and lock-in time horizons
Perhaps the largest difference in thinking between consumer subscription businesses and most news publishers is that consumer subscription businesses typically sell to households, teams, or time horizons while most news publishers sell to individuals who may or may not continue their monthly payments.
Bundles are perhaps the ultimate example of selling to households rather than individuals. Apple One bundles together several different Apple services including icloud.com storage; apple.com/music; apple.com/tv+; and arcade.apple.com games. The Disney Bundle bundles together Disney +; hulu.com; and espn.com.
Amazon Prime bundles together shipping; video streaming via amazon prime video.com; music streaming via amazonmusic.com; photo storage via amazonsmilephotos.com; and book buying via abebooks.com. Bundles allow for increased retention since readers are no longer able to easily unsubscribe without affecting multiple habits.
The New York Times has been particularly successful in executing bundling strategies across various types of content offerings. They have bundled together News; Games; Cooking; Wirecutter; The Athletic; and Audio into their All Access package.
Ben Cotton, Head of Subscription Growth at The New York Times, has stated “the way we describe this is if our products at The New York Times are the solar system, then news is the sun in the centre and everything else builds off of that.” (WAN-IFRA)
The statistics support Cotton’s assertion regarding bundles. In Q3 2025, bundle/multiproduct subscribers reached 6.27 million – 51% of The New York Times’ overall subscriber base – resulting in significant increases in both average revenue per user (ARPU) due to bundle purchases and retention metrics due to each subscriber having multiple ties to the publication.
Family plans were developed to apply similar reasoning to the home environment. In 2021, Spotify reported that “the improvement in churn remains attributable to the increased adoption of higher-retention products such as Duo and Family Plans.”
The income generated from each seat is lower, however the cancellation rate decreases significantly since a customer is no longer making the decision to cancel individually. For example, Le Figaro created Family Pack subscriptions primarily to limit the number of accounts shared within a household while still generating revenue based on the entire household.
For B2B content providers, the gap in the majority of provider catalogs is between individual and enterprise – both Anthropic’s Claude Team and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Team plan to fill this gap. There are few options currently available that fall into a mid-tier category (e.g., 5-10 users), priced in the hundreds versus thousands of dollars per user, that are widely available.
Time is another factor. A monthly subscriber is required to make a recurring decision every month; across 12 months this creates 12 possible decisions to cancel.
Annual subscribers pay once and do not need to think about it after the initial payment. In general, annual subscribers experience 30-50% lower churn rates than monthly subscribers, and create a positive cash-flow benefit above the positive effect on retention – the publisher receives 12 months of revenue up front, allowing immediate reinvestment.
The typical incentive provided to encourage customers to move from a monthly to annual subscription is approximately two months free. Dropbox provides a 20% annual discount. Adobe makes its annual-prepaid option the least expensive.
The discount associated with moving from monthly to annual typically covers the costs of improved retention many times over, and the benefits compound with bundle and family strategies – a family bundle using annual pricing will provide the most retentive subscription offered by a publisher.
Frictionless checkout
Zuora states this directly regarding frictionless checkout: minimise forms, provide support for local payment methods, allow instant access, and utilise automated retry mechanisms and card updater services. Every extra click experienced during the checkout process reduces the likelihood of completion.
Data regarding frictionless checkout experiences has been presented by several sources and is concerning. Data suggests that for each form-field added to the checkout process, the average conversion rate will decrease by approximately 10%.
Approximately half of all conversions may be lost due to friction alone in current news industry checkout processes, which generally require input of five or six fields (name, e-mail address, password, address, payment method).
The primary contributor to friction in the checkout process is requesting that a new subscriber create a password they will likely forget — and then requiring them to reenter that password before accessing subsequent articles.
Standard checkout flows from 2026 will include Apple Pay and Google Pay for one-tap subscription, Stripe Link for recognising repeat customers, PayPal Express for international transactions, and Klarna for splitting payments when applicable. Magic link, single-sign on, and identity-based authentication (Google, Apple, email-link) have already become the SaaS standard. News companies are behind the curve.
I have focused significant amounts of my time as Senior Product Manager on Reader Revenue Manager on this issue. Our company created a two-step subscribe flow utilising an existing Google account owned by our readers, eliminating password creation altogether.
The first step requires confirmation of which Google account the reader wishes to use. The second step confirms the subscription. No password. No form-fields. No need for readers to reinput their payment information previously entered in their Google account. We transformed the largest barrier to entry in the subscriber relationship into something resembling a tap-to-subscribe experience for publishers and removed the single largest cause of abandonment during checkout for readers.
Revenue beyond subscription payments
Successful subscription-based business models in technology rarely stop at subscription payments themselves. Rather, they leverage the subscription relationship as the foundation for revenue derived from adjacent offerings.
Events represent one major area of opportunity. Atlantic Live, NYT Live, FT Live, Bloomberg Live, Politico Live, WSJ CEO Council and The Information Pro Events are examples of events-based businesses that are cross-selling events to existing subscribers.
The economics work here because publishers already have an established audience. Therefore, the marginal cost of promoting an event to an existing subscriber is nearly zero. Additionally, event margins tend to be quite large.
Affiliates represent another major area of opportunity. The NYT’s Wirecutter generates over $100 million annually in affiliate commissions. The affiliate model works as follows: Subscribers trust their publisher’s recommendation therefore their publisher earns a commission off of any purchases made via those recommendations.
Affiliate revenue does not represent recurring subscription revenue however it represents transactional revenue from existing subscribers and increases total lifetime value.
Therefore, for any publisher with an existing subscription base, the takeaway is that your subscription is simply the starting point not the end-point.
Every subscriber who exists today could potentially attend an event hosted by your publication, purchase items recommended by your publication via affiliates, sign-up for premium newsletters, and/or purchase books from your publication.
Treat pricing as a continuous experiment
The first thing Zuora advocates for is treating pricing as a continuum of tests. Zuora suggests the publishers who are successful at generating subscriber growth treat pricing as an ongoing testing environment rather than a single decision point.
With modern “subscription” technology, you can create new pricing variations in hours and conduct dozens of different price tests across multiple micro-segments.
The New York Times raised their bundles from $25 to $30 in Q1 2026 without significant changes to churn. This did not occur by chance. It occurred after several months of reinforcing value – expanding bundle products, providing monthly usage summaries, launching new content – making the price raise seem a reasonable reaction to increased value.
When there is high perceived value, price raises survive.
What to do
- This week: Audit your pricing page. If you only have one tier add a premium tier over it. If you have two tiers, make sure your top tier is priced sufficiently high to serve as the base level for your mid-tier.
- This quarter: Launch one expansion play this quarter. A family plan, an annual discount promotion targeted toward engaged monthly subscribers, or a low-cost bundle combining news with an adjacent product. Select the option your customers will be best prepared for.
- This year: Build the checkout process you would want to use next year. One-click payments. Don’t force readers to remember passwords. Magic link logins.
In the end, the publisher who creates a checkout process – that is one-click easier to complete than its competitor’s checkout process, will win the battle for every uncertain customer.
About the author: Bihag Karnani is a Senior Product Manager at Google, where he leads Reader Revenue Manager (RRM), Google’s subscription platform for news publishers, and drives user personalisation strategy for AI Mode and AI Overviews. He works with publishers globally on subscription strategy.
