Audience growth, churn mitigation among key data to scale digital subscriptions

By Peter Doucette Senior Managing Director Mather Economics Boston, Massachusetts, USA Connect Mather works with hundreds of local news publishers around the world with regard to digital transformation. As part of this advisory work, I am almost always asked some combination of the following questions:We are trying to scale digital subscriptions. What are the most important metrics we should be focused on?How does our digital subscription performance compare with other publishers? Are we doing better or worse?Are we where we should be based on our digital subscription maturity?How do metrics like conversion and churn work in combination with each other? Is there a way to balance competing metrics?Mather has created the subscription proficiency index (SPI) to answer these and other related questions, and to help publishers scale their digital subscriptions and revenue.What is it?SPI is a scoring system that evaluates a publisher's digital subscription performance across key growth levers, providing clear, data-driven insights.How SPI helps publishersThe SPI helps teams prioritise resources, enhance subscription strategies, and fine-tune their business model for long-term, sustainable growth by pinpointing performance gaps and highlighting improvement opportunities.The SPI comprises six key variables representing the potential growth levers:Audience growth (AG).Audience engagement (AE).Conversion effectiveness (CE).Churn mitigation (CM).Average revenue per user (AR).Subscriber penetration (SP).The SPI formulaEach variable is scored based on its performance against a competitive benchmark and weighted according to its relative importance in the local news digital subscription business model. All weights add up to 100%.Mather presented a case study of how The Philadelphia Inquirer improved its SPI at the 2025 INMA Media Subscriptions Summit.Let's explore each of these variables in more depth, highlighting the Inquirer's success and some opportunities for publishers to improve their relative performance.Audience growth (AG)Top-of-funnel growth is the lifeline for publishers to continue to grow their audience and expand the reach and impact of their journalism. It is the fuel driving the engine.Opportunities to improve AG: Content strategy, content verticals, new products, partnerships, and off-platform distribution.Metric(s): Monthly average users year-over-year growth.Audience engagement (AE)While total audience reach is important, building an engaged audience is even more critical to long-term success. High levels of engagement are excellent predictors for subscriber acquisition and retention.Opportunities to improve AE: Personalisation, habit-building items like games and puzzles, newsletters, e-mail alerts, and push notifications.Metric(s): Visits per visitor, visit duration.Conversion effectiveness (CE)To be a top-performing publisher with digital subscriptions, you need to be excellent at converting your visitors into subscribers. While in absolute terms only a small percentage of users convert to subscribers, improving performance here allows publishers to scale digital subscription volumes.Opportunities to improve CE: Dynamic paywalls, optimising the checkout process, improved user experiences, and personalised subscription offers.Metric(s): Conversions per million users.Churn mitigation (CM)Once you acquire a subscriber, you have to keep them. Also, the more successful publishers are at acquiring subscribers, the more downstream strain is placed on subscriber retention. And, as publishers increase their maturity, churn mitigation becomes a greater focus.Opportunities to improve CM: Involuntary churn, improving engagement, churn modeling, and stop/save offer management.Metric(s): Monthly churn rate.Average revenue per user (AR)Average revenue per user (or subscriber) is perhaps the biggest lever local publishers have in their toolkit to scale digital subscription revenue. As sub-scale businesses, having a higher ARPU is a much more realistic path to sustainability than scaling subscriber volume.Opportunities to improve AR: Dynamic digital pricing, pricing tiers, product bundling, and optimised offers.Metric(s): Average revenue per user.Subscriber penetration (SP)Subscriber penetration weighs the publisher's historical activity in converting a percentage of its audience into digital subscribers. This relative metric also allows for comparisons across peers and markets.Opportunities to improve SP: Excelling at the other five metrics, clear strategic focus on scaling digital subscriptions, and a bias for action to move quickly.Metric(s): Subscriber penetration (total subscribers divided by monthly average users).Mather calculates the publisher's performance on each of these six variables into a weighted subscription proficiency index. Here, you can see how the Inquirer scored a 71 (out of 100) in their recent SPI evaluation, which is up significantly from two years ago and places them in the top-performing segment.The question we hear most often is: What is the most important metric to grow our digital subscription business?Our answer: your SPI score.The SPI provides a holistic, data-driven view of your performance. It reveals where you're excelling, where you're falling short, and how to strategically evolve your digital subscription model. 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About Peter Doucette Peter Doucette is senior managing director at Mather Economics in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Peter can be reached at pdoucette@mathereconomics.com or @pmdoucette. Related Articles Reuters Institute research details the new rules of the news ec... 2 July 2025 Paula Felps Globe and Mail leans into specificity, in-house strengths to pr... 4 June 2025 Kiran Rana Aftonbladet's Election Buddies chatbots made political news mor... 5 May 2025 Martin Schori Baseline audience reports contextualise current environment, pr... 1 May 2025 Stefan ten Teij... 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