“Tools, expertise and inspiration”: The Audiencers’ Madeleine White on the secret behind successful subscriptions

One of the rising stars of global publishing is Madeleine White who is both Editor-in-Chief of The Audiencers as well as Head of International at Poool, the subscription and membership tech platform. Madeleine will be speaking at Revenue Europe in Berlin on October 1st, and in advance of the event we asked her to introduce herself as well as garner her thoughts on current media trends.

A key speaker at Revenue Europe, taking place in Berlin on Oct 1st, will be Madeleine White, who is both Editor-in-Chief of The Audiencers as well as Head of International at Poool.

Madeleine started The Audiencers barely two years ago but the publication has risen to prominence by helping publishers make, quote, “better decisions when it comes to engaging, converting, and retaining subscribers”. 

The driving force behind The Audiencers is French subscription and membership platform, Poool, whose data has underpinned the insights and analyses published by The Audiencers – there’s nothing theoretical about it, just factual case studies and hard evidence to assist publishers in making better decisions.

At Revenue Europe, Madeleine will be giving a talk entitled, ‘The changing nature of subscription strategies: What now’ and ahead of her presentation we asked her to give a little more background about both herself and the key trends she is seeing.

Imagine our audience will meet you for the first time. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your company?

Yes! I’m Madeleine, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Audiencers, and Head of International at Poool, the Membership & Subscription Suite. 

To cut a long story short, I fell into the industry by building Poool’s blog from the ground up back in 2021, publishing articles on everything to do with digital reader revenue models. After a year, we saw a huge gap in the market for this kind of expertise – everyone in the industry was (and still is) facing the challenge of digital transformation, cultural change and monetising their audience online but without ever having learnt exactly how. Siloed teams/companies worked with print, but the opposite is true for digital. 

Because of this, so many professionals feel alone in facing these challenges. So, in Autumn 2022, we decided to take the blog a step further and launch The Audiencers, a B2B media and community for digital publishing professionals to better engage, convert and retain their audiences. 

Now, we offer publishers the tools, expertise and inspiration, because there’s no point having the tech if you don’t know what to do with it. And there’s no point having the ‘know-how’ if you don’t have the agile solution to put this into practice. 

Thanks to this work, I have the pleasure of speaking with publishing professionals from around the world each week, understanding not only their challenges but also the innovative operations and strategies to overcome them. 

When it comes to monetisation, the only way for media to survive commercially in the modern media landscape is through building diversified revenue models. Could you briefly explain to what extent you agree/disagree with that statement and why?

There are always examples of publishers succeeding with just a single revenue model, but the value in diversification is to never be dependent on just one source of revenue that could be overturned at any moment, out of your control – for example, look at what happened during COVID for those reliant on events. 

The key to remember though is that “diversification” applies to more than just revenue streams, and actually even a publisher with a single revenue stream can succeed by diversifying their acquisition channels for this single revenue source. 

I’ll give you an example – a newspaper daily which offers a free paper in the subway and monetises only from advertising. Advertising is the single revenue model, but they monetise this through both print and online. In terms of their online model, they also ask readers to register after the second article, increasing engagement (2x more time on page and 4x more PVs for registered users) and thus revenue through advertising. 

Registration is also required to comment on articles, share content, save it for later and enter competitions (which are monetised through ads too). So, although this publisher only has a single revenue stream, they have a diverse way of acquiring this revenue whilst simultaneously building engagement on-platform to better ‘own’ these audiences, despite not asking them to ever pay directly.

However, I’ll add that diversifying revenue streams is the best option for building a sustainable business model. Ultimately, up to 90% of audiences on your website will only visit once a month, maximum, and whilst less than 1% will ever subscribe, these users will be the most valuable to you. 

• This is why dynamic models are the most optimal, where you provide each reader with an experience that is best suited to their monetisation potential (whether that be from ads, subs, etc.).
• It’s also why registration is becoming increasingly valuable for digital publishers to increase both ad revenue and propensity to subscribe. From those who are yet to launch a subscription model, to the likes of The Economist and Washington Post, A2K (converting audiences from anonymous to known) is a priority for many in 2024.
• In this context, lifetime value is an essential (and arguably north star) metric to align acquisition and retention teams, and tell you about the past, present and future of your brand.

As the Editor-in-Chief of The Audiencers and Head of International at Poool, you help shape conversations about the subscriptions economy. What are some of the key conversations taking place right now?

There are so many interesting conversations at the moment, it’s an exciting time to be in the subscription space! In particular: 

• Cultural change within publishing teams – collaboration across teams, user needs, breaking silos… it’s a big topic but one that is an essential foundation for subscription success.
• Dynamic models that adapt user journeys, offers, pricing, even win-back strategies to the reader’s profile or context.
• Community building and how this can help publishers offer something that another player can’t.

Meet Madeleine and your peers tasked with monetising media at our Revenue Europe summit in Berlin on 1st October. Find more information and sign up here. We hope to see you there!