Media companies around the world are approaching digital transformation in a way that best fits their unique combination of content offerings, market potential, and reader preferences. For many, that means developing a smart digital subscriptions strategy to support a sustainable news business.

Greg Piechota, lead of INMA’s Readers First Initiative, estimates the U.S. digital subscription market for news reached US$6 million to US$7 billion last year, surpassing the US$5 billion generated by digital advertising on news platforms.

“What we can see is the sort of tipping point in digital transformation,” he said during the recent INMA Subscriber Acquisition Master Class, 

Among 66 media companies Piechota studied, 50% of revenue came from digital sources, and 42% of business units could fund their editorial operations entirely through digital income. Top-performing companies even generated twice the digital revenue needed to cover newsroom costs — a benchmark many consultants believe is essential for a sustainable post-print future.

“This is a tremendous milestone in digital transformation,” Piechota said.

During the master class, media leaders from Alma Media, Medienholding Süd, and Mediahuis Ireland shared how their companies are implementing technology- and audience-focused strategies to power their subscriptions-based digital transformations.

Alma Media leverages an AI-powered dynamic paywall solution

When digital subscription growth slows, news publishers often face a hard truth: Static paywalls can’t keep up with shifting reader behaviour. For Johanna Strandholm, vice president of content business at Alma Media, that realisation marked the start of a transformative journey.

Strandholm shared how Alma Media — a leading Finnish media and digital services company — has evolved its paywall strategy from simple meters to an AI-driven, dynamic system that has revitalised subscriptions for Kauppalehti, Finland’s top business daily.

Their search led them to Mather Economics and its AI-powered dynamic paywall solution, Sophi.

“After meeting quite many vendors, we decided to have a partnership with Mather,” Strandholm said. “I think their AI-powered dynamic paywall was a very good solution — the one that fit all our needs at this moment.”

Beyond the subscription bump, Sophi brought new visibility into what types of stories drive value. Some findings were intuitive; others, surprising.

“Long articles aren’t necessarily more valuable than the short ones,” Strandholm. “Our newsroom tends to lock up the long stories, but sometimes shorter ones perform better.”

Sophi also revealed that niche coverage can hold hidden value: “We have found a lot of value in the edges of our core content. They are small topics that don’t drive huge reach, but can be very valuable to a small part of our audience.”

In other words, micro-optimisation through AI is uncovering micro-audiences that static paywalls miss.

Stuttgarter Zeitung focuses on markets, audiences

Over the past two years, Stuttgarter Zeitung in Germany has developed its new audience strategy, which consists of five parts. One of these parts focuses on the playing field — markets served and penetration, what target groups to reach, and the size of those groups.

“As we started this, it’s all about focus,” Carsten Groß, chief executive officer at Stuttgarter Zeitung parent Medienholding Süd, said. “We had a big discussion about what is the branch [to focus on]. In the end, we said we have limited resources, we want to have a real impact. If we do everything, we do nothing.”

Therefore, the team decided to focus on local audiences. They did a lot of research behind this audience to know the size of the population, what cars they drive, the average income, even who they vote for.

For the horizontal teams they created special target audiences such as employees in the automotive industry — an important audience in this area of Germany where many major car manufacturers are based. Other target audiences were fans of the local football club in Stuttgart, and parents of children 11 years or younger.

An important aspect was to quantify these audiences. In addition to the size of each target audience, the team needed to identify how many people were active in each local region on a daily basis.

“If we cover something important we want to have a positive impact for the community,” Groß said. “We need to reach much more people that are connected to our business strategy.”

With the introduction of a new KPI, Daily Visits on Team Content, the goal moved from conversions to increasing reach, engaging more fly-bys, syncing with the ecosystem, and creating more content formats. With the focus on reaching 20% of each local audience through these initiatives, the company would reach its 2032 goals.

Mediahuis Ireland surpasses its subscription goal

Mediahuis Ireland went from zero digital subscribers in 2020 to 100,000 by June 2025. How did they do it? Paul Dunny, head of customer value, said the digital subscription initiative was built on four pillars:

1. Vision: target of how many pay-for-content subscribers to acquire by what date.
2. Collective responsibility: cross-departmental work to create engaging content that converts and retains.
3. People: team members with the right mindset and willingness to do something new.
4. Data: know how the company is performing and the data that underpins everything.

The second layer was the development of new features, getting customer feedback, and refining the model from there.

“You keep going around that flywheel, you get things better and better,” Dunny said. “It’s important to never stop; there’s always improvements to make.”

The North Star Goal was to reach 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2025. To achieve this, the team worked with the Financial Times strategist team to develop a framework to ensure cross-departmental efforts focused on that single goal.

From there, they created a structured process to design experiments:

Idea → Hypothesis → Experiment → Evaluation → Implement → Refine

This resulted in 70 cross-departmental experiments completed between 2020 and 2025. This success allowed the team to develop Phase Two to work towards 200,000 subscribers as the next goal.

“We’re well over 100,000 now, and we’re looking to get to 200,000 by 2030,” Dunny said.

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