News publishers have spent a decade refining what to put behind paywalls and whom to stop. In the era of fragmented news funnels, what you give away and to whom matters just as much as what you protect.

For subscription leaders, free content is not leftover inventory. 

In last week’s Stratechery podcast, CEO Meredith Kopit Levien described The New York Times’ “four Ds” or, in other words, strategic obsessions: daily habit, direct relationships, destination, and deliberate drive-bys.

She explained: “We exist in an ecosystem shaped by tech platforms, and we have to have a wide free layer for our work. Otherwise, you can’t bring in the next subscribers.” 

And more importantly: “We need to get you to sample our stuff and fall in love with it ... so that ultimately you subscribe.”

The “deliberate drive-bys” are new. Most publishers have tightened their paywalls over the past six years. Across 317 news brands benchmarking with INMA, median paywall stop rate has tripled to 31%. 

The more mature the paywall, the tighter it gets. Those launched before 2019 now stop 50% users and pay the price with roughly half the Web site penetration of looser models.

The link between reach and subscription growth

INMA Benchmarks confirm what many felt intuitively: The brands that grew digital subscriptions and revenue the fastest in 2025 had healthier funnels. 

Despite disruption from AI search or social platforms, these publishers held or even grew the total audience. That reach translated into more demand, more paywall stops without tighter walls, and ultimately more conversions.

Hannah Poferl, formerly of The Times and now at Universal Music Group, shared an inconvenient truth in March at the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit: “Audience growth is the biggest general predictor of subscription growth.”

She warned: “You can’t grow your audience by marketing your paywalls ... . Deep engagement and the deeply engaged are the right priorities. But overcorrecting away from reach is a risk ... . Reach drives awareness among your prospects, not just the masses.”

Off-platform reach works if you design for it

The challenge, of course, is that discovery increasingly happens off-platform, where behaviour is hard to observe or measure. 

Platforms prioritise native formats such as video and increasingly limit referrals. Much of audience engagement with news happens in environments publishers do not control.

Does that reach matter? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as astronomer Carl Sagan and others once wrote. 

At The Times, the answer was yes, but it required a different way of measuring. Rather than relying on in-session conversions, the team used surveys and longitudinal analysis to establish a relationship between off-platform exposure and eventual subscription.

As Poferl noted, the signal is there, but you have to design to capture it.

The Athletic offers a practical example. The sports brand grows a network of more than 400 journalists, many with large personal followings. Distribution increasingly happens through individuals, not just institutional channels.

But exposure is not the end goal. Off-platform content must create pathways back to a relationship: following a journalist on Instagram or X, joining a Reddit discussion, subscribing to a team-focused WhatsApp channel, and signing up for a newsletter.

Reach with identity becomes a funnel

This is where free content plays the strategic role.

Consider The Athletic’s flagship newsletter, The Pulse, reaching around five million readers. It deliberately includes links labeled as free. 

As Claudio Cabrera, vice president of newsroom strategy and audience, explained in at our Media Subscriptions Summit in Toronto: “People don’t even click if they expect to hit a paywall.” 

Free access removes that friction. It allows users to experience the product, understand its value, and take the next step. 

Existing subscribers extend this further. They can gift free articles to friends, effectively acting as distribution nodes. The referred users arrive with higher intent, convert better, and retain longer. 

(It is no coincidence the proportion of subscribers who share content became a favourite internal metric.)

Many of these touchpoints — from gifted articles to TikTok videos to WhatsApp channels — are free by design. Their role is not immediate conversion but relationship building.

Free access brings people in, lets assess value, creates future demand, forms a habit, and gives a reason to register directly on the Athletic’s Web site or app.

Registration, in turn, unlocks everything that matters for marketers: identity, more engagement surfaces (e-mail, push, pop-ups), better paywall targeting, and higher conversion probability.

Free and paid access as a system, not a trade-off

User journeys no longer resemble straight funnels. They look more like engagement loops before and after the conversion.

Discovery happens across multiple channels. Engagement is partial and repeated. Users enter and re-enter from different points. Conversion is delayed and non-linear. Retention is no longer continuous — users drift in and out.

What makes this system work is not a rigid paywall but the quality of handoffs between these loops:

• Free access enables entry, re-entry, following, sampling, and habit formation. 

• Paid access delivers depth and breadth that justifies commitment: Guaranteed quality and recurring utility allow integrating a subscription in life, human connection, and trust shift the relationship from behavioural to attitudinal loyalty. 

This dynamic is visible across industries. A recent review of more than 1,000 CRM studies found a focus shifting from behavioural to attitudinal loyalty as a reinforcer.

Brands create networks where customers connect not only with the product but with each other and develop a sense of belonging. In practice, this shows up, for example, as gifting articles, sharing subscriptions, participation in discussions, games, or events. 

From the growth perspective, visibility of participation is key. Academic research showed a behaviour spreads when it is observable.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

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