Research shows 3 design features predict subscription bundle success
Readers First Initiative Blog | 04 February 2025
Bundling is not about throwing a bunch of products together and hoping for the best. Three key elements determine the bundle’s success: product mix, subscriber experience, and content discovery.
The list is based on academic research on digital goods economics and my analysis of multi-product bundles offered by the world’s leading publishers such as Agora, Amedia, Bonnier, DPG Media, Dow Jones, Mediahuis, New York Times, Ringier Axel Springer, and Schibsted:
Product mix, or what you bundle, aims at increasing the perceived value of a subscription and adding reasons to engage with the brand more.
Subscriber experience, or how you buy and access the bundle, drives adoption.
Content discovery, or how you navigate around the bundle, drives actual usage and retention.
Let’s analyse these three one by one.

Product mix
Assume I value general news content more than sports, and you value sports more than other news. The larger the difference between our willingness to pay, the bigger trouble publishers have in pricing the two verticals to maximise customers and revenue.
Economists found bundling might reduce the differences in willingness to pay across consumers, allowing companies to sell the two products to us both with just one price.
Studies also showed the more products in a package and the more dispersed demand for them, the stronger the benefit of bundling for consumers and companies.
The big question is: How do you assemble the right mix of complementary products?
Build around user needs, as The New York Times did — bundling news for staying informed, with games for entertainment, and cooking recipes for lifestyle.
Build around geography, as Norway’s Amedia did — bundling the news from where you live, with news from where you work, and news from where you grew up.
Build around communities, as both companies did — featuring passion-driven sports products aimed at fans, such as the Athletic and Direktesport.
The next big question is: How do you grow the bundle?
You can build: Developing products in-house, like The Times did with Games and Cooking, offers control but requires significant time, investment, and effort.
You can buy: Acquiring existing products, such as The Times’ purchase of The Athletic, can accelerate growth but comes with a hefty price tag.
You can borrow: Partnering with other publishers allows for expansion with less financial risk and faster time to market.
The Times’ collaborations with Corriere della Sera in Italy or Politiken in Denmark and its exploration of bundling with smaller U.S. publishers like The Ankler highlight the last path forward.
Similar initiatives are gaining traction in Germany, with the “Alles.Plus” collaboration between national and regional brands such as Der Spiegel and Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
An experimental study in Germany showed the strongest potential demand for comprehensive, all-you-can-eat bundles. Packages of one national and one local brand came second.
Market simulations suggested the introduction of a comprehensive bundle would potentially grow the total number of digital subscriptions in Germany by 41% and the digital revenue of publishers by 10%.
A comprehensive bundle was found most appealing to otherwise hard to reach consumer segments, such as people younger than 30, or people living in rural areas, or those who distrust the media.
Subscriber experience
A great product mix can be undermined by a clunky user experience at checkout or login. This is hard to fix when dealing with external partners who usually have different sign-on, subscription management, and payment systems:
Vouchers: The Times and some German publishers have used vouchers to grant access or discounts to partner products. Claiming vouchers and using separate logins can be cumbersome for readers. But it is cheap and fast for publishers, and it helps partners maintain brand autonomy and each owns their part of the customer relationship.
Single sign-on: A more seamless solution is a single sign-on system, which allows users to access multiple products with one login. This is easier for large media groups like Bonnier, Mediahuis, and Schibsted, which bundled their own portfolios only. Executives told INMA the integrated tech stack was key to make bundling work seamlessly.
Alliances and vendors: Initiatives like OneLog in Switzerland, a collaborative single sign-on platform developed by Swiss media firms, inspire a potential pathway for frictionless cross-publisher bundles. If not alliances, subscription software vendors may also solve this for multiple customers, as they have already started adding support for bundles.

Content discovery
The financial success of a bundle depends on sustained engagement across separate products and improved retention.
Both Amedia and The Times recognised this early, investing in content discovery tools and interfaces. They chose different paths: Amedia built a new aggregation app, while The Times added aggregation to its hero app:
Amedia’s stand-alone aggregator: In 2023, Amedia launched a separate app Alt specifically designed to help subscribers discover content across 100+ local news brands. The app, Web site widgets, and newsletters resulted in 60% of all bundle subscribers discovering content outside their core product weekly.
The Times’ integrated aggregator: In 2024, the Times invested heavily in its app to improve content discovery across its various verticals, available now with an easy swipe. Together with other channels, the app secured a 10 to 20 percentage point higher weekly usage by bundle subscribers as compared to news-only customers.
The missing piece: Unfortunately, many publishers with bundles lack a cohesive strategy for content discovery, hindering the impact of bundling on subscriber engagement, retention and revenue.
A multi-product discovery programme may include new metrics and goals (e.g., breadth of engagement), new product features (e.g., redesigned home pages), and new marketing tools (e.g., multi-product onboarding).
For cross-publisher bundles, content discovery is the toughest nut to crack, so it is often skipped. Practitioners from the video and music streaming sector, such as Globoplay in Brazil, Netflix, and Spotify told INMA that a single interface, aggregated library and personalised recommendations were key to their bundles’ success.
Design matters
Creating a successful subscription bundle is more than just a pricing strategy; it’s a design challenge.
Whether you’re building new products, buying existing brands, or partnering with others, make sure you have a plan for how customers buy, log in, and discover all that your bundle offers.
The evidence from market leaders suggests getting these three elements right is required for the bundle economics to play out.
Hungry for bundling insights? INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Amsterdam in March features case studies of Condé Nast, Dow Jones, DPG Media, Mediahuis, Newsquest, The Pioneer, Schibsted, and Der Spiegel.
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.