Subscription works for a small, loyal share of any audience. Most media companies then spend more and more to hold that number, while locking out everyone else. There is a simpler way to grow.
Most successful subscription businesses follow the same curve.
Early growth is quick, as the readers most aligned with the brand sign up. Then growth slows, and eventually it levels off. In our experience, that plateau typically comes at between 2 and 5 per cent of the total audience at best. Industry benchmarks suggest it is often lower still: the median news brand converts under 1 per cent of its monthly visitors.
None of that is a failure. It is the natural shape of a product that asks people to commit to paying for everything, all of the time.
Holding the number comes at a price
The headline subscriber number is usually the metric that gets celebrated. Keeping it there gets harder:
More subscribers are on promotional or retention deals, which masks a steady decline in margin.
Acquisition costs rise, as the pool of people who will ever subscribe is used up.
Churn grows and lifetime value falls, as subscribers learn how attractive retention offers are, and fewer trialists convert.
You can see this at the very top of the market. Taking just one example, in September 2026, The New York Times was offering its All Access subscription to UK readers at £0.50 a week for the first year, billed as £2 every four weeks, before it rises to £12. That is around 83 per cent off the full price.
[Image to add] The New York Times Anniversary Sale, UK, September 2026.
Even with offers like this, the number paying for the core news product stays small.
At the end of 2025, 1.47 million people subscribed only to The New York Times’ digital news product, down from 1.93 million a year earlier. That is a small fraction of its audience: Comscore counted 63 million unique visitors to the NYT in the US alone in August 2026.
Its subscriber growth has come mainly from bundling news with Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic. In 2025, bundle and multiproduct subscribers rose by more than a million, while news-only subscribers fell by 460,000.
The pattern is familiar across UK media. Some more examples, from 2023:
[Image to add] The Times and The Sunday Times, 2023: £1 for three months.
[Image to add] The Grocer, 2023: 12 weeks for £12, auto-renewing at £100 every three months.
[Image to add] The Daily Telegraph, 2023: one month free, then two months for £1, then £14.99 a month.
Discounting also flatters the headline number.
The Telegraph’s reported total for mid-2023 included more than 180,000 subscriptions that were bundled free with other packs or still on a free trial.
[Image to add] Telegraph Media Group, period ended 2 July 2023: 974,709 subscriptions, including 118,215 bonus digital subscriptions and 62,330 on a free trial.
We’ve all seen many offers like this before - and when we go to cancel, we’re typically presented with a similar deal to stay. How many people take up these offers without really knowing the product, and how many will stay on full-price knowing an even better offer is likely waiting just around the corner?
The customers you have locked out
Every cycle of trials and cancellations leaves people behind: lapsed subscribers and trialists who did not stay. They liked you enough to pay once. Now they are locked out.
Over time this group grows steadily. INMA analysed 136 news brands and found the median had lost 1.7 times as many subscriptions as it currently has active, and a quarter had lost nearly three times as many.
That is the size of the pool, not a forecast of how many will pay.
Beyond it sits the rest of the audience, which has never been offered anything but a monthly commitment. Many of those readers are likely to value your brand, yet almost none of them pay you directly.
Imagine a shop that locked out almost all of its customers, while the loyal few had to pay for everything, all of the time. That is roughly how most media companies sell today.
Step one: take the “ex” out of ex-customers
The first step is the easiest: introduce casual payments by offering pay-as-you-go (PAYG) access to every lapsed subscriber, and to every trialist who did not convert.
They can come back and pay for what they read, when they want to, from a single wallet. Once they’ve signed up, just once, to any title that has Axate installed, they’ll never have to register again.
A subscription cancellation then stops being the end of the relationship. Not every ex-customer will come back, but those who do are customers you keep rather than lose, and the customer base grows.
Step two: open PAYG to everyone
Then offer PAYG access to the whole audience, and promote the subscription as the benefit for frequent readers: the better deal for people who come back often.
Your full-price subscription stays exactly as it is, and becomes the natural next step for your most engaged casual customers.
When occasional readers can pay, three things improve at once:
Subscription revenue is protected, because there is no longer a reason to discount it to reach reluctant readers.
Advertising can be sustained, with a more engaged audience and less pressure to chase volume.
Casual visitors become customers, earning you revenue from the part of the audience that currently pays nothing.
Why the value compounds
Subscription earns revenue partly from breakage: people paying for access they do not use. One Medill study of 45 news outlets found that 20 per cent of digital-only subscribers did not visit the site they paid for even once a month.
Casual payment is an engagement model: the more someone comes back, the more they spend. We believe that over time a frequent casual customer can be worth more than a subscriber, because the value grows on three fronts: more customers, spending more, more often.
What Axate is for
Axate helps media companies earn direct revenue from their whole audience, through a blend of subscription and casual, pay-as-you-go payment. Readers register, pay as they go, contribute or subscribe through a single wallet and sign-on.
Media companies keep total control of pricing, content and business model.
Our vision is a market where casual payment sits alongside advertising and subscription as an ordinary way to pay for media, and media companies are paid in line with the value they create.
Shared infrastructure, and from it, network effects, mean less dependence on the technology platforms that control media companies’ routes to market today. Payments are the starting point.
Subscriptions work for the few. Axate lets everyone else become a customer too.
Start with your own numbers
How much of your audience could be paying you, and on what terms?
Our reader revenue assessment gives an indicative answer from just three numbers. Or talk it through with us directly.
[Book a call] · [Try the assessment]