7 myths and perceptions holding publishers back from going all-in on subscriptions

Is your “cash cow” killing your future? See why Netflix and NYT succeeded by cannibalising their own revenue and why other publishers are afraid to follow suit.

In the Reuters Institute’s 2026 media trends survey, 76% of nearly 300 industry leaders from some of the biggest news publishing houses said subscriptions were a key focus for the year. This was well ahead of display advertising at 68%, and even native advertising at 64%.

INMA’s Financial Benchmarking Service found that 2025 revenue for news media business units (across hundreds of participating news brands globally) was composed of 60% reader revenue, 29% advertising, and 11% from other sources.

Data, trends, and real publisher experiences point to the same destination: direct audience revenue is the future.

Yet most publishers haven’t actually gone all in. The stories we read about media success and the data presented in these studies mostly focus on leading publishers. The one percenters of the media industry, if you will. Still, it’s important data that points the way towards sustainability, growth, and even profit.

The New York Times Company’s operating profit increased 22.9% year over year to $431.6 million in 2025. To put that in perspective, The New York Times earns so much revenue from subscriptions that almost all of its advertising revenue, including print (!), is basically profit (in reality, the advertising revenue was $566 million in 2025).

On the other hand, most publishers still derive the bulk of their cash from advertising. Most haven’t aligned their newsroom, product, marketing, and sales teams behind a single reader-revenue funnel.

What’s even more striking are the publishers who have put the same people in charge of advertising and subscription revenue. In principle, it shouldn’t be a problem. In reality, especially if you are a legacy publisher, advertising is huge and dwarfs the income from subscriptions. Also, the metrics you should focus on are different. So are the incentives for your newsroom.

Netflix famously sabotaged its own dominant DVD-by-mail empire to pivot toward a then-unproven streaming future, weathering a massive stock collapse and public outcry to do so.

By aggressively cannibalising their primary revenue source before competitors could, they proved that true innovation often requires destroying your current “cash cow” to own the next era of the market. This “creative destruction” transformed a logistics company into a global content powerhouse, turning a short-term crisis into a multi-billion dollar legacy.

Netflix was the leader of this change and won, and so was The New York Times. But unlike Netflix, there is already a clear, proven path for publishers of all sizes.

So what is holding them back? Here are a few reasons that come up regularly.

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1. The willingness-to-pay ceiling is real, and very uneven

The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report puts the share of people paying for any online news at 18% across 20 richer countries, almost unchanged since 2022.

The range across markets is brutal: Norway 42%, Sweden 31%, the US 20%, the UK 10%, Japan 10%, Germany 13%, Greece and Serbia both 7%, Croatia 6%.

Across all 20 markets, 71% of non-payers told researchers that none of the flexible payment options they were shown would persuade them to start paying.

For publishers operating in low willingness-to-pay markets, which is much of Central and Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and large parts of Asia, this isn’t primarily a marketing problem. It’s a structural ceiling.

INMA’s Greg Piechota has argued the opposite case, pointing out that even Norway has room to grow and that historical print penetration suggests no theoretical limit has been hit.

In practice, publishers in lower-trust, lower-income markets are converting from a much smaller pool of likely payers than the global benchmarks imply. And that’s scary for many.

But time and again, news publishers, even in these countries, are defying the odds and building thriving businesses with subscriptions central. One such story is Croatia’s Telegram.hr, which managed to build a successful audience revenue business in a country with one of the lowest willingness to pay for news.

2. Advertising still pays this month’s salaries

Even publishers whose long-term plans hinge on subscriptions still run ad-funded businesses in 2026. UK Association of Online Publishers data, analysed by the Press Gazette, shows digital subscription revenue still hasn’t overtaken advertising as the primary income source for large UK publishers.

Le Monde, one of Europe’s most successful reader-revenue transitions, only recently announced that digital subscriber revenue will be sufficient to cover the entire newsroom within two years. That’s a target, not a current state, at one of the strongest subscription stories on the continent.

Tightening the paywall to push more readers into paid means tightening current ad inventory. Imtiaz Patel, writing in Editor and Publisher, frames the trade-off plainly: publishers typically have 10–20% unsold ad inventory at any time, so tightening the wall up to that point is roughly free. What comes after that might sound painful, but it’s necessary for audience revenue growth.

Think of it as a chicken-and-egg problem. Unless you pour more resources into building your subscription or membership pipelines and invest in quality journalism, your audience revenue will not grow. Of course, resources are finite, and you have to decide. Looking at the business model of the most successful news operations in the world might give you a hint, and it is not ads they are most obsessed with.

3. Paywalls make people leave

Researchers at Georgia Tech and Notre Dame studied paywall responses and found that 57% of readers who hit a wall leave the site entirely. Only 0.21% of paywall stops resulted in subscriptions. Piechota points out that, according to the INMA benchmarking service, this conversion rate was 50 times higher than the rate among visitors who hadn’t seen the paywall at all.

People leave, but they come back. They keep coming back for the journalism. Without the journalism, they wouldn’t come back, and that is what makes them become subscribers in the future.

The same researchers also found that paywall evaders accessed opinion articles more than other content. That’s a good thing. You know which content to focus on; it is in high demand, and people will keep coming back to read what the prevailing opinion is on current events.

If you are crying over lost ad revenue, do the math.

A study by The Lenfest Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Centre found that an article that attracts one new digital subscriber will, on average, generate as much revenue for the company as an article that generates 16,000 pageviews monetized through direct-sold advertising, or an article that generates 48,000 pageviews monetized through programmatic advertising.

4. The easy subscribers are already converted

Most publishers running paywalls for five-plus years have signed up the readers most predisposed to paying: politically engaged heavy users, professional readers, loyal print converters. The next cohort is harder to reach, harder to convert, and harder to keep.

The Reuters Institute reported that 41% of digital news subscribers are on discounted deals, meaning the headline subscriber number disguises significant ARPU pressure.

Recurly’s 2024 subscription benchmarks show free-trial-to-paid conversion fell from 46.4% in 2021 to 33.7% in 2024.

INMA’s subscription benchmarks put the median monthly churn rate for national news brands at 4.6% in Q4 2024. That means a typical publisher loses the equivalent of its entire subscriber base roughly every 22 months.

The good news is that the next step is not impossible, just harder. You need to work more with your audience data, find the content that attracts your most loyal non-subscribers, and use that as leverage, together with tactics like introductory offers.

The point being, this is not an audience problem; it is an infrastructure and technology challenge, and with the right approach, the sky is the limit.

5. The operational stack is heavier than it looks

Going all-in on reader revenue means running a real subscription business: CRM, single sign-on, behavioural analytics, dynamic paywall logic, dunning and recovery flows, segmentation engines, onboarding journeys, win-back campaigns, churn-prediction models, pricing experiments.

Publishers like El Mundo and Times Internet have publicly described the data and machine learning investment required to make dynamic paywalls work. El Mundo reported a 60.4% lift in subscription conversions and 50.7% revenue growth from its dynamic paywall, but only after building the underlying analytics, governance, and team buy-in.

Most regional and mid-market publishers don’t have that stack. They run a CMS, a basic paywall plugin, a separate ESP, a separate analytics tool, and a finance system that doesn’t talk to any of them.

The technical gap is one of the quietest but most decisive reasons “all-in” stays a slide rather than a roadmap. Going all-in on reader revenue without that infrastructure isn’t a strategy; it’s wishful thinking.

REMP is an example of a complete top-to-bottom subscription and CRM platform built by a news publisher for other publishers. It’s open source, you own your data and your technology.

6. Newsroom, product, and sales aren’t aligned

Reader-revenue strategies need editorial to think about loyalty and habit, product to think about onboarding, marketing to think about lifecycle, and sales to accept that some inventory is being deliberately suppressed.

In practice, those teams sit under different bosses, report against different KPIs, and operate on different time horizons.

What if it wasn’t like that?

The change is hard, of course, but well-aligned teams can operate next to each other, even complement each other.

For example, smart publishers have used the fact that they know their registered and paying users much better than anonymous users to create a special offer for advertisers to target these groups based on their interests. And they would charge higher fees for reaching them with advertiser messages.

7. The economy is just not in favour of investing in audience revenue

The market conditions for committing fully to reader revenue have gotten harder, not easier.

Dotdash Meredith blamed flat Q1 2025 results partly on AI search eroding traffic. GroupM forecasts that professionally created media’s share of content-driven ad spend will fall below 50% in 2026, down from 72% in 2019. WARC reports that global newsbrand ad spend has declined 33% since 2019.

News avoidance adds to the problem in exactly the markets where subscription willingness is already low.

Cost-of-living pressures across Europe make subscription pitches harder in 2026 than they were in 2019.

We had COVID. The messaging was the same.

Before AI, social platform changes overnight made large traffic sources disappear. All was doom and gloom for the publishers.

And the catastrophes could continue endlessly. Yet most news publishers survived. Many even started new media ventures in recent years. And many of them had audience revenue as their central business thesis.

The point is that waiting for everything to get better will cost you valuable time; others will pull ahead, and later can just be too late.

What this actually means

The publishers who have committed, like Denník N, Le Monde, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Mediahuis titles, and many more across regions, are demonstrably more resilient than peers who haven’t.

The case for reducing ad dependency is stronger now than it was five years ago.

But “going all-in” isn’t a switch. The publishers furthest along combine subscriptions, advertising, events, book publishing, bundling, and other opportunities.

Yes, it’s a gradual process. Yes, it’s hard and arguably only gets harder. But it is the best recipe news publishers worldwide have found.