INMA Subscription Benchmarking Service

Updates

  • 2026.05.13 Added new data for 1Q 2026. Current total number of brands included in the report: 317 (72 companies in 38 countries).
  • 2026.03.04 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented the tradeoffs in subscription management, modelling outcomes of the best-performing paywalls, and new content economics through bundling. We also took a look at benchmarking reports of other companies vs INMA Benchmarks.
  • 2026.02.11 Added new data for 4Q 2025. Current total number of brands included in the report: 317 (72 companies in 38 countries).
  • 2025.12.02 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented the latest trends, the analysis of the fastest-growing brands in 2025 and on the best-performing paywall models.
  • 2025.11.12 Added new data for 3Q 2025. Current total number of brands included in the report: 289 (71 companies in 38 countries).
  • 2025.09.17 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented the latest trends, new data on subscriber engagement. We drew a behavioral portrait of digital subscribers. We then presented proven tactics for growing subscriber engagement. Finally, we showed what impact AI search has on traffic to news sites.
  • 2025.08.13 Added new data for 2Q 2025. Current total number of brands included in the report: 288 (70 companies in 38 countries).
  • 2025.06.03 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented how retention becomes the main driver of long-term sustainability by modelling how, with win-backs, churn can be a growth driver. We also analyzed how quickly the brands with a newly launched paywall grow. Finally, we discussed key takeaways from the Subscriptions Seminar at INMA's World Congress of News Media in New York.
  • 2025.05.15 Added new data for 1Q 2025. Current total number of brands included in the report: 274 (70 companies in 38 countries). Welcome to new participants in Canada and the United States.
  • 2025.03.14 Uploaded the presentation deck of our in-person meet-up alongside the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Amsterdam. We discussed characteristics of the fastest growing brands in 2024 in the subscription volume and revenue, implementations of smart paywalls, and ways to size subscription markets.
  • 2025.03.04 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented the latest trends in digital media engagement and subscriptions. We also benchmarked the INMA Benchmarks against other benchmarking reports available for news media companies.
  • 2025.02.12 Added new data for 4Q 2024. Current total number of brands included in the report: 264 (69 companies in 38 countries). Welcome to new participants in: Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Switzerland.
  • 2024.11.26 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented the best performing paywall types. We also discussed whether we see a second Trump bump and identified the risks posed by early adopters.
  • 2024.11.15 Added new data for 3Q 2024. Current total number of brands included in the report: 255 (66 firms in 36 countries).
  • 2024.10.01 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We presented the best practices in registering and engaging registered readers. Our guest speaker, Lamar Graham, Vice President, Content Strategy (Digital Consumer Revenue) of Advance Local, revealed how Advance Local's brands are leveraging sports to deliver high market penetration.
  • 2024.08.14 Added new data for 2Q 2024. Current total number of brands included in the report: 243 (65 companies in 36 countries).
  • 2024.06.01 Uploaded the recording and presentation deck of the online meet-up. We demonstrated how to review the state of the digital subscription business using the INMA Benchmarking dashboards. We also showed how to make reports quickly and easily with automated INMA Benchmarks decks. We also presented a recent trend of bundling news subscriptions products to scale subscriptions beyond 1%.
  • 2024.05.15 Added new data for 1Q 2024. Current total number of brands included in the report: 238 (62 companies in 35 countries).

New: Subscriber engagement & contribution metrics

We are introducing subscribers-only engagement profiling for the first time. Currently, 114 of 288 participating news brands have provided this new data, with more expected next quarter.

You will now find two new pages in the Subscriptions section:

  • • NEW: Subs engagement
  • • NEW: Subs contribution

What's new on Subscribers' engagement page:

  • • Trend indices: Overall engagement trends of paying digital subscribers
  • • Core ratios: Standard engagement metrics applied to digital subscribers only
  • • Segmentation: Engagement tiers, including two new indicators:
  • ◦ Sleeper ratio: Subscribers with zero sessions in a month
  • ◦ At-risk ratio: Subscribers with fewer than two sessions in a month
  • • All metrics are based on unique digital subscribers (people), not subscriptions (products).

What's new on Subscribers' contribution page:

  • • Contribution ratios: Subscribers' share of overall engagement
  • • Subscriber premiums: Comparison of subscriber engagement vs. all users
  • • All these are calculated across users, sessions, page views, and time spent.

Engagement and subscription performance rankings.

We have introduced new section of the dashboard showing where your brand stands in your peer cohort: globally, or only in your world region, or similarly sized brands.

Currently, we present your brand's key performance indicators as compared to the distribution of values in our samples. Performance rankings are different because they present your brand's KPIs percentile rank as compared to the distribution of brands in the samples.

For example, an 80th percentile rank means your brand's KPI is higher than 80% of brands in the cohort, and smaller than 20% of brands.

The performance rankings have already been launched in the presentation decks we have distributed every quarter since last year.

Publishers reported in our survey that they found them informative and useful. Some publishers asked whether they could use those rankings in their public communications ("Our brand has higher engagement measured by sessions than 80% of brands in the world"). This inspired us to add the performance rankings to the dashboard.

New in 4Q 2024: New metrics on acquisition, engagement, and retention

After a review of our benchmarked metrics system, we identified three new metrics we could derive from the existing data:

1. Digital-only subscription acquisition rate measures the effectiveness of the publisher's subscription acquisition efforts. We calculate a ratio of digital-only paid subscriptions that were started in a given month to digital-only paid subscriptions at the end of that month. See the sections: Subscription cohorts and Scorecard.

2. Casual users rate measures the size of the segment of online users who did between 2 and 9 sessions in a month. We calculate this based on the total number of online users in a month, subtracting users who did 1 and at least 10 sessions in a month. See the sections: Engagement cohorts and Scorecard.

3. Digital-only subscription lifetime measures the estimated length of an average relationship in months. We model this value using monthly churn rates. See the sections: Subscriptions: Lifetime value and Funnel cohorts.

All three of these are available also in tables in: Performance overview.

Definitions were added to: Glossary

New in 3Q 2024: Regional cohorts in selected geographies

An increased number of participating companies helped us to grow the total sample size to 255 brands across the world.

This unlocked an opportunity to introduce new benchmarks for smaller regional cohorts — in North America, the Nordics and DACH counties.

The narrower cohorts will provide more relevant benchmarks for markets with similar characteristics.

The new North American cohort includes 54 brands based in U.S. and Canada. The Nordic cohort includes 69 brands in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The DACH cohort includes 49 brands in Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.

Members from firms based in those countries will now see an additional segmentation in their dashboards: in all Scorecards, all Funnel sections, and the Lifetime value section.

These will be available in both dashboards for individual brands, and group dashboards available to some members participating with more than 5 brands.

All members will continue to view benchmarks for broader regions: North/ South America, Europe/ Middle East/ Africa, and Asia/ Pacific. As our sample size increases, we will introduce more granular cohorts in the future.

New in 2Q 2024: Presentation decks with results for your brands

In addition to online dashboards, you will receive access to Power Point presentation decks with benchmarks for all your individual news brands.

Our research found a common use case for INMA Benchmarks: quarterly reports for executives summarising the trends in the news industry and comparing individual performance to peers.

We studied presentations shared by member publishers and used them as a base for a new feature: automated Power Point presentations that are based on the data in online dashboards.

The goal is to save you time and help you distribute benchmarks and insights with your teams, and increase the value of benchmarking.

Initially, we will distribute these presentations by e-mail. In the future, they will be also downloadable from your account page at INMA.org. Your action is not required.