Reflections on the INMA World Congress 2023

The INMA World Congress, a couple of weeks ago in New York, was really lovely. Great to be back in New York for the first time since before the pandemic, great to catch up with old friends, fascinating to hear the presentations and insights and, of course, an opportunity to meet people for the first time.  

In my conversations I kept hearing the same remarks: for sites big and small, subscription growth is plateauing, or even going into reverse. It’s something I wrote about for INMA in a few weeks before the congress, and I can see I struck a chord. 

Many of the publishers I spoke to sense that the pool of potential subscribers is shrinking. As one of them put it to me, they think they might have found all the needles in the subscription haystack. 

Subscribers are, of course, hugely valuable – especially when they’re paying full price. Less so when they’re paying promotional rates, which can be as low as 2% of the full price. Managing and mitigating churn has now become an expensive and losing battle for many. 

It might sound strange, but that is good news. For many publishers, only around 1-2% of digital readers will become subscribers. The task of finding them is complete; now it’s time to turn attention to the other 98%.  

The 98% are the customers Axate was created to serve and deliver for publishers. They offer a rich opportunity – starting with former subscribers who would love not to be locked out of a title they liked enough to subscribe for a while. But there are plenty more beyond that; countless readers who would happily, spontaneously and occasionally pay but won’t make the leap to monthly payments.  

Acquiring and retaining these users can be done at a fraction of the cost of finding the ever-elusive next subscriber. They can be more valuable as well: every time they come back, they spend a little more. If you give them more reasons to come back, and more opportunities to spend money, there’s no upper limit to how much they might be worth.  

We have a diverse, vibrant, competitive media sector; most readers want the option to read whatever they want, whenever they want to. Denying them that chance, in pursuit of high-value and committed subscribers, may have made sense while that market was growing. We were saving the next opportunity up. Now is the time to unlock the 98%.