What comes next for subscriptions

Thanks to House of Kaizen and Matt Cronin for sponsoring this issue of The Rebooting. We’re trying something new by matching up “House of Kaizen” insights with issues of The Rebooting focused on subscriptions. House of Kaizen collaborates with publishers worldwide to build more sustainable businesses with best practices and experimentation for better acquisition, retention and lifetime value. Here’s Matt’s insight on why subscribers are more important then just another revenue source:

Subscribers are better customers because of the length of their journey, and all the opportunities to make improvements to customer lifetime value along the way.

Sustainable net growth, adding new while retaining and renewing existing customers, is the outcome of a full journey effort to balance the subscriber experience with the lifetime value. Journey performance has a 20-30% greater impact on value and business outcomes than touchpoint performance. (Source: McKinsey Research, HBR).

Connecting subscriber journey stages with specific, optimizable aspects of the marketing and product experience can focus a teams’ effort where it will have the greatest impact on net growth over the long term, where customer value is created.

Sustainable subscription growth comes from experience optimization. House of Kaizen collaborates with publishers worldwide to build more sustainable businesses with best practices and experimentation for better acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

What comes next for subscriptions

I like to describe the publishing industry as operating a lot like an (American) children’s soccer game. When the ball goes to one part of the field, a clump of players follow en masse. It isn’t the most effective or strategic approach because it’s pure instinct to chase the ball.

The same holds true to whatever is the latest Holy Grail/silver bullet/gamechanger/bright shiny object of the moment. Over the years, I’ve seen publishers rush to shore up their businesses by pinning their future hopes on everything from ad networks to complement owned properties to programmatic advertising to “distributed publishing” to the unfortunate and thankfully short lived “platisher” frenzy to the infamous pivot to video to affiliate commerce to any number of incremental efforts that never ended up getting beyond increments.

But the biggest recent shift in digital publishing in recent times has been the move to subscriptions as a key aspect of any sustainable publishing model. From 2016 to 2022, the number of U.S. consumers who say they pay for news has risen from 9% to 19%, according to the Reuters Digital News Report. This has been, mostly, a positive development, as it has forced publishers to be more audience-centric. Many of the horrible aspects of digital media come from bad business models in which the audience is a product to be sold through adversarial business models premised on the idea that people will tolerate quite a bit of nonsense in exchange for free access.