Audience-first companies are not choosing between growth and revenue. They are building models where both reinforce each other.

Five days of intense learning, case studies from more than 50 speakers, networking with 223 colleagues from 23 countries. Were you there? Or did you miss out the best-rated INMA Media Subscriptions Summit ever? 

(I was a curator, so forgive me for boasting. I loved every minute of it with all my heart, and the survey showed the attendees loved it back.)

The recent summit showed the subscription world is ditching straight funnels and building systems:

• Systems where reach feeds engagement, engagement feeds retention, retention drives revenue.

• Systems where products, pricing, and organisation are co-designed.

• Systems where strategy only matters if it changes daily behaviour.

Here are my personal top three takeaways from Toronto:

1. Reinventing the funnel: from linear journeys to distributed systems

The traditional funnel is fragmenting. Discovery is now distributed across platforms, formats, and increasingly machines (apparently, 51% of last year’s Web site traffic were bots). 

Conversion is no longer a single moment of truth; it is the outcome of reach, habit, and repeated exposure.

INMA benchmarking highlighted this shift clearly: Last year’s fastest-growing publishers were not those extracting more value per user but those expanding reach and engagement. 

Across sessions, a few patterns emerged:

• Reach is back at the top of the funnel, even in subscription-first companies.

• Engagement is the real conversion engine — not pricing or paywall tweaks.

• Retention drives revenue more than ARPU optimisation.

And underneath it all sits a more uncomfortable truth: A small group of super users drives disproportionate value. In some cases, 1% of users generate the majority of revenue across both subscriptions and advertising. 

This reframes the funnel entirely. It is not about pushing everyone through but about identifying, developing, and retaining high-value users.

Our industry also needs to tell better stories of self. News branding is shifting to journalism and journalists to rebuild trust, as publishers can no longer rely on assumed credibility. In a fragmented, AI-driven environment, brands must actively explain their value.

2. Challenging assumptions: products, pricing, and organisational taboos

If the funnel is changing, so are the assumptions behind it.

Many of the most interesting case studies were not incremental improvements but deliberate challenges to long-held beliefs: breaking taboos (“Editors always know best what readers need”) and self-imposed constraints (“We don’t do that here”).

Across the summit, from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to Vocento and from Bloomberg to Mediahuis and to The Washington Post, we heard over and over:

• Editorial is not separate from subscriptions anymore.

• Algorithms can shape decisions once owned by editors.

• Products can be rebuilt and not only optimised.

• Bundling is driving value through habit and not price.

In one of the most discussed sessions, publishers described reorganisations that move subscription responsibility into the newsroom, integrate consumer marketing into editorial workflows, or give algorithms a stronger role in shaping offers and distribution.

At The New Zealand Herald, for example, subscription and brand marketing functions were brought into the newsroom (sic!) to align editorial decisions with conversion and retention outcomes.

We heard extreme cases in business transformation from companies that redefined what they are: for example, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Guardian, Immediate, Ringier Axel Springer, and TVN Warner Bros. Discovery. 

They moved beyond legacy formats and identities. Printed newspapers or magazines or mass-market portals or broadcasters all converged into audience-led, digital- and subscription-first businesses. 

Norway’s local news power house Amedia gave us a master class in such a transformation:

• From decline and losses to growth and profits.

• From free to paid news.

• From intuition to data-informed editorial decisions.

• From standalone titles to a bundle across 100+ brands.

The result: 850,000 subscribers in a country of five million, with 65% of revenue from digital subscriptions. Have you heard about local news deserts? Not in Norway.

3. Bridging strategy and execution: making data actionable in the newsroom

If there is one gap the industry is still struggling with, it is this:

• We have a strategy.

• We have data.

• But we often fail to connect it to daily decisions.

The best examples at the summit focused not on data hoarding and “dashboarding” but on organising for acting on the data.

Across companies, such as The Athletic, The Boston Globe, and Le Devoir, we saw:

• Audience teams embedded in newsrooms.

• Shared metrics across editorial, product, and marketing.

• Real-time dashboards and recommendations tied to actions not just reporting.

• Increased use of agentic AI in workflows.

The Globe and Mail’s and The Toronto Star’s study tour reinforced the same principle: Align journalism, product, marketing, and data around reader revenue.

This is not only about tools from industry partners present at the summit, such as Darwin CX, Marfeel, Mather, Piano, and others who offered in-depth seminars. It is more about operating systems: 

• From data as reporting to data as decision infrastructure.

• From strategy decks to daily workflows.

• From functional silos to cross-functional ownership of growth.

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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