At a recent INMA master class, The New York Times revealed a surprising discovery. 

Valerio Poce, The Times’ executive director of ad product marketing, told participants of INMA’s September First-Party Data Activation for Advertising Master Class that the readers who engaged with The New York Times the most — visited most frequently, stayed longest, and built the strongest habits across The Times portfolio of brands — were not only the most likely to subscribe. They also turned out to be the most valuable, attentive, and responsive to advertisers.

“The most engaged readers are much more valuable consumers and much more receptive to advertising,” Poce said. “We started calling them super users.”

In Dublin at last week’s INMA’s Media Innovation Week, Gabriel Dorosz, INMA’s Advertising Initiative lead, and Greg Piechota, who heads the Readers First Initiative, took up the thread, and asked the question: Are super users unique to The Times or is there a larger opportunity for publisher revenue strategies? 

And could that insight — that subscriptions and advertising are not separate but two sides of the same customer relationship — become a turning point to reframe the supposed rivalry between the two businesses?

In other words, instead of asking whether advertising was a distraction from subscriptions, or whether subscriptions would cannibalise ad revenue, could it be a way to help executives begin to see both models as complementary, serving the same highly engaged audience?

Dorosz’s and Piechota’s joint session argued that it could. Across the industry, they said, engaged audiences drive both subscription and advertising revenues. And if news publishers reorganise their strategies around them, they can stop chasing scale and start building sustainable growth.

“Subscriptions and advertising are not rivals but rather two wallets of the same super user,” Dorosz told attendees.

The super user discovery

The New York Times’ findings, presented by Poce at the INMA master class, demonstrated how research into reader behaviour can challenge assumptions.

The team discovered that a segment of the audience — the most engaged — delivered disproportionate value. These heavy consumers were the backbone of the subscription business. But they were also more attentive to brand campaigns, more valuable consumers, and more responsive to advertising across a wide variety of consumer categories.

So The Times has begun to make them available to advertisers as a target, and, as Poce reported, the campaign results to date are exceeding expectations.

In theory, rather than undermining each other, the two revenue models overlap. The best subscribers can also be the best advertising targets.

As Dorosz and Piechota proposed, that overlap can become the basis for the “super user” concept. Instead of optimising advertising purely for reach, news companies can demonstrate to advertisers that engaged readers are a higher-quality audience. At the same time, subscription teams can show that reducing ad loads for these readers risk leaving revenue untapped.

Super users reframe the problem: The goal doesn’t have to be to choose between ads and subs but to maximise value across both.

INMA’s search for evidence

In Dublin, Dorosz and Piechota asked: Was this just a Times story or a pattern across the industry?

INMA’s research suggests the latter. Piechota noted that globally, consumer revenue now accounts for 46% of publishers’ income while advertising makes up 43%. Despite all the focus on digital subscriptions, advertising remains almost equally important.

“This business stands on two legs: subscriptions and advertising,” Piechota said. “One foot may be a little longer but both are vital.”

Across the INMA sample of 288 news brands, just 2% of subscribers account for 27% pageviews for a median site (and up to 40% of pageviews for the upper quartile). At Clarín in Argentina, 1% of subscribed users generated 72% of total revenues (ads + subscriptions).

The implication is that super users are not just a New York Times phenomenon. Across markets, the audiences who consume the most — who come back daily, who trust and value the brand — are the ones who sustain both revenue streams.

Piechota urged publishers to stop fixating on news avoiders, who consume little and are unlikely to convert. “Stop fearing news avoiders. Embrace super users instead,” he said.

By focusing on the lovers rather than the avoiders, news companies can find a common growth engine for both sides of the business.

From scale to engagement

For decades, the media advertising model was built on scale. More pageviews meant more impressions. More impressions meant more revenue. Subscriptions, by contrast, rewarded depth and loyalty.

That divergence created silos inside companies. Advertising teams chased traffic spikes; subscription teams cultivated habits. Each had its own KPIs, its own dashboards, its own logic.

Dorosz described them as “two playbooks.” Advertising stuck to pageviews and CPMs; subscriptions embraced average revenue per user (ARPU) and lifetime value (LTV).

But in today’s environment, scale has become harder to sustain. Referral traffic from search and social is declining (as is explored in these two INMA reports on search and social released this year). Platforms are shifting away from news. Audiences are fragmenting.

That reality, Piechota argued, makes engagement the only viable north star. “Optimise per user, not per channel,” he urged.

In practice, this means both advertising and subscription teams must adopt per-user metrics. Instead of asking how many impressions an article generated, ask how much total revenue each reader contributed. Instead of optimising for clicks, optimise for loyalty and time spent.

By aligning around engagement, news publishers can stop treating ads and subs as trade-offs and start seeing them as mutually reinforcing.

Organising around super users

Recognising super users is one thing. Organising a business around them is another.

Many news organisations still divide their commercial operations into two silos: one for subscriptions, one for advertising. Each team has separate targets, separate reporting lines, and separate incentives.

That structure, Dorosz argued, often creates conflict. Subscription managers may limit free access to maximise conversions, frustrating advertisers. Ad teams may increase inventory, annoying subscribers And worst of all, publishers offer “ad-free experiences” if audiences subscribe, devaluing their inventory.

A better model, he suggested, is to put both under a unified revenue strategy or even a chief revenue officer. But success must be measured on balanced KPIs that reflect the total per-user value, not just one stream.

Alignment requires not only new leadership roles but also new metrics and new cultures, Piechota said. Everyone in the organisation must recognise that super users are the core asset. Whether a team is selling ads, designing retention campaigns, or building new products, the goal is the same: to deepen engagement with those most loyal readers.

Expanding beyond ads and subs

Once super users are identified, news companies can build new businesses around them.

Events are an obvious example. Loyal readers are also more likely to attend conferences, pay for experiences, or join membership programmes. Branded content and native advertising can be more effective when targeted to engaged audiences who already trust the publication.

As Dorosz said, “For publishers like The Atlantic, Editora Globo Brazil, and Semafor, events are now 25%, 40%, even 50% or more of their revenue. Yet events are still grouped under ‘other’ and perhaps that should be reconsidered.”

Dorosz suggested these extensions are not add-ons but natural outgrowths of the super user strategy: “If you know who your super fans are, you can serve them in many ways.”

This approach reframes diversification. Instead of chasing every new platform or format, publishers can ask: What else would our most loyal readers value? The answer may be newsletters, podcasts, or live events — but the common thread is that they are built on engagement.

An industry-wide takeaway

The session on subscriptions and advertising in Dublin may not have featured flashy new technology or sweeping predictions about AI. But it delivered something just as valuable: clarity.

By placing super users at the centre, Dorosz and Piechota offered news companies a way out of the false choice between advertising and subscriptions. They showed that the same readers can power both businesses. They called for a shift from scale to engagement, from silos to integration, from fearing avoiders to embracing lovers.

For the executives gathered in Dublin, the message resonated. In a time of platform upheaval and market uncertainty, Dorosz and Piechota pointed to a stable foundation: Focus on your most loyal readers, and build both sides of the business around them.

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