What publishers do when the ‘easy’ digital subscriber wins are gone

For most of the last decade, the digital subscription playbook has been a growth playbook (acquire, acquire, acquire!). However, two reports published in the last six months suggest that the easy version of that playbook is finished:

The Audiencers, to their credit, have pushed back on the idea that publishers have hit a subscription “ceiling.” They are not wrong to. But the disagreement obscures a point everyone agrees on: the cost of acquiring the next subscriber keeps rising, even as the pool of willing payers shrinks.

The conversation worth having now is less about how to find that next subscriber and more about whether the ones already paying will still be there in eighteen months.

The 18.5% problem and why regularity beats reach

Here’s the issue: a sizeable share of the subscribers a publisher acquires this quarter will not be there long enough to recoup the cost of acquiring them. Indeed, INMA’s modelling using Piano client data put the median three-year survival rate of a digital subscription at 18.5%. Publishers should shift from asking “how do we convert?” to “how do we increase lifetime value?”

The ones furthest along in this thinking have stopped treating acquisition and retention as separate problems answered by separate teams. Two of this year’s INMA Award finalists can be used as examples:

• Politiken built a single Subscription Task Force pulling editorial, product, marketing and data into one unit.
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung redesigned its mobile app strategy to integrate acquisition, product, pricing and monetisation in one funnel.

If retention is the name of the game, the most useful single finding in any of this research comes from Northwestern University’s Medill Research Center: regularity of consumption is the best predictor of retention. A subscriber who reads a little every day is worth more than one who reads a lot in concentrated bursts.

Why The Telegraph put 90% of its resources into the app

If regularity is what retains a subscriber, the question becomes a simple one: where does regularity get built?

The answer is the app. The app is the place of return — the destination a subscriber comes back to repeatedly expecting to find something worth their attention. It is an environment a publisher fully controls and one in which a daily relationship can be cultivated.

The Telegraph has been the loudest about this. Speaking at the Audiencers’ Festival in Paris in September 2025, Chief Product Officer Mathias Douchet explained that the app has become the publisher’s best single predictor of subscriber retention, ahead of multi-channel engagement and newsletter signups, both of which had previously been the priority signals.

App users show 15% higher usage, eight more sessions per week, and six percentage points better 30-day retention than web users. Around 90% of The Telegraph’s product resources are now allocated to the app, and the goal is for 100% of digital subscribers to use it.

What makes The Telegraph app so successful? It is built to respond to a wide set of moments: the morning audio briefing on the commute, the push alert when a story breaks, the podcast on the walk home, the evening newsletter read, the live blog during a debate, the long read on Sunday. With several modules within the app, it is able to be the users’ one-stop-shop.

The uncomfortable part

The post-acquisition mindset is harder to sell internally than acquisition was. Acquisition is legible: a number went up this quarter. Habit is slow, and shows up in churn curves a year later. The shift that decides who does well in this next phase is not a new tactic. It is a willingness for product, marketing and editorial to share a scoreboard that is harder to celebrate at the end of the quarter.