10:00 a.m. - 10:10 a.m.
(New York time)
Introduction: State of news subscriptions in 2025
We open the Town Hall with a fast-paced tour of the top subscription trends and breakthroughs in 2025: AI-resilient growth strategies, smart paywalls, bundling, and win-backs.
This end-of-year review sets the stage for the hall meeting, in which the news subscription leaders share their biggest lessons and advice to peer publishers.
Greg Piechota, Researcher-in-Residence and Readers First Initiative Lead, INMA, United Kingdom
In this interview, Louis Dreyfus shares how Le Monde transformed from a legacy print title into one of the world’s leading subscription news brands, proving that investing in journalism and independence can power growth. Over 15 years, Le Monde doubled circulation to 534,000 copies a day, grew digital subscribers profitably, and expects by 2026 to fund its newsroom entirely from digital reader revenues. Dreyfus explains how the group expanded its newsroom, launched an English-language edition, embraced AI partnerships with OpenAI and Perplexity, and built a governance model that locks in editorial independence through a foundation and employee veto rights. Earlier this year, in the INMA series Subscription Masters, we interviewed executives of the Financial Times, the Guardian, El Pais, Substack, and the Wall Street Journal.
Erja Yläjärvi leads Finland’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat to subscribers-first era. Her initiatives include reorganising large desks into agile, goal-driven teams and redefining coverage to attract new, and also younger subscribers. In this fireside chat, editor-to-editor, she reflects on leading through news fatigue and AI disruption, emphasising authenticity, focus, and trust as guiding principles. She believes that creativity and humanity have become central to modern newsroom leadership, and key to connecting with subscribers.
While studying at City University of New York, Paulo Celso Pereira, executive editor of O Globo (Brazil), embarked on a global journey to uncover how leading publishers build sustainable subscription businesses. Through in-depth conversations with The New York Times, Financial Times, El País, Clarín, and United Daily News Group, he discovered that success depends less on copying models and more on clarity of purpose. In this presentation, Paulo shares the five principles he distilled from that journey: from creating journalism worth paying for to focusing on core audiences, aligning teams around shared goals, and experimenting relentlessly in pursuit of long-term sustainability.
In a time of softer traffic and changing discovery patterns, Darya Ushakova, Chief Marketing Officer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, reveals how her team drives sustainable subscription growth through a disciplined, data-informed funnel strategy. From engaging audiences at the top to optimising conversion flows and retargeting cart abandoners, Darya shares what really works, including one proven offer strategy, smarter monetisation of valuable journalism, and frictionless checkout experiences. This presentation delivers actionable ideas and examples on how to engage, convert, and nurture subscribers in a fast-changing market.
What if the next paying reader isn’t a person, but their AI assistant? Cosmin Ene, CEO of Supertab (formerly LaterPay), and Poonacha Machaiah, the CEO of Cyberhuman AI, explore how new payment models — from ad walls, to registration walls, and frictionless pay-per-article systems – are redefining how publishers can monetise the 98% of users who don't subscribe. They share lessons from Supertab’s partnership with Google, real-world revenue results, and a forward-looking vision of agent-to-agent transactions where humans and AI bots seamlessly negotiate and pay for access to journalism.