Editor’s note: we are publishing David Tvrdon’s traditional overview of the past year in various sections of the media industry. You can also read summaries of 2020 and 2021 in subscriptions and memberships, as well as 2022 in podcasting and 2022 in social media. Subscribe to The Fix’s weekly newsletter to follow the series.

There has been a lot of talk of peak paid newsletter, peak subscriptions and recurring revenue in general due to the global economic uncertainty in 2022.

Most of the trend reports for 2023 predict a similar outcome, warning publishers should focus on diversifying their income streams.

January 2022

Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published his annual report “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2022”. Senior media leaders globally confirmed subscription or membership strategies are top priority, but almost a half of them said they worried that subscription models may be pushing journalism towards super-serving richer and more educated audiences and leaving others behind.

Piano, the data and subscription platform, announced it had acquired SocialFlow, a social distribution and marketing platform for media companies. SocialFlow listed at the time clients such as The Associated Press, the BBC, CNN, Condé Nast, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

The Atlantic spent two years studying its readers’ & listeners’ needs and found how it affected the ways they distribute their journalism. The team was then able to use the insights in planning recent marketing emails to prospective subscribers.

George Montagu, the subscriptions strategy lead at FT Strategies, published his top three predictions for the news publishing industry in 2022 writing that digital subscriber growth will slow down.

The New York Times bought Wordle, in a move to help increase its Games subscriptions.

February 2022

Jodi Harrison, Vice President of Education Sales for Wall Street Journal, described for INMA how WSJ builds relationships with students to drive future growth. In 2017 they reformed their approach and created the student membership programme. That is designed to provide partnering universities, their students, and faculty with access to The Wall Street Journal.

March 2022

The Atlantic wrote that we’ve reached “peak subscription”.

Financial Times reached one million digital subscribers. The FT first introduced a paywall in 2002. It pioneered a “metered” access model in 2007 before moving in 2015 to paid trials as its primary model.

The Economist quietly relaunched its subscription mobile app Espresso with a new design, more personalised content, additional features and a higher price tag ($7.99 or £7.99 a month). The app offers a global news briefing round-up and five briefing-style articles a day, as well as a daily fact, chart, quote, quiz and an excerpt from an Economist podcast episode.

The Financial Times launched FT Edit, a streamlined app with a curated, daily selection of eight articles at 8:00 each weekday for £4.99 a month (99p a month for the first six months). At weekends, subscribers see a “best of the week” selection. The FT’s aim was to tap into the 26 million people who follow the outlet on social media, few of whom currently have a paid subscription.

TV streaming service CNN+ has launched. It promised three types of content: live, on-demand and interactive programming, including a whole new way to engage with CNN’s world class journalism and storytelling.

April 2022

Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in 10 years and started openly talking about introducing a cheaper ad-supported tier. The streaming giant blamed factors including increased competition, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the number of people who share their logins.

Almost half of the largest news subscription brands offered deeply discounted and extra-long trials this year, an INMA study found. 68%, or 34 of the 50 news brands, offered a trial and 23 of the 34 brands with trials offered introductory prices for longer than three months. The average trial length was 7.5 months, and the median was 9.25 months. Greg Piechota pointed out this was another sign of a shift in news subscription pricing towards extra long and deeply discounted trials.

The Guardian announced it would test a paywall on its news app in an attempt to orient its business more firmly around reader revenue. Its website would remain open to all, although it has tightened its registration wall.

Toolkits dived deep on pros and cons of weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual subscription terms. Some publishers attempted to push subscribers towards four-week terms rather than monthly or annual ones to maximise revenue by allowing for 13 billing cycles per year.

Le Monde launched a new English language digital edition. It consists of translated versions of a diverse selection of articles produced by the editorial team. Press Gazette wrote Le Monde targets one million subscribers by 2025.

Warner Bros. Discovery, the newly-combined company that includes CNN parent WarnerMedia and Discovery, shut down CNN+. The subscription streaming service ceased operations on April 30.

Substack announced they were getting serious about podcasting. “The same way we made it simple to start a paid newsletter, we’re making it just as easy to produce a paid, subscription-based podcast on Substack,” the platform wrote on its blog.

CNBC reported that due to increased inflation Americans were cutting costs, with 36% saying in a poll that they would consider cancelling a monthly subscription in the wake of higher prices.

G/O Media announced that it had acquired the business publisher Quartz, and the publication later pivoted away from subscriptions.

May 2022

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, presented a pitch deck to investors outlining his plans for Twitter and its financial targets. The New York Times obtained the presentation. He wanted to cut Twitter’s reliance on advertising to less than 50 percent of revenue and have almost half of the revenue made from subscriptions and the rest from data licensing.

INMA profiled Bild’s evolution of its subscription offer strategy, going from several tiers of subscriptions and ending up with a single offer for all.

Simon Owens covered the rise of The Charlotte Ledger in his newsletter titled How local newsletters can thrive on Substack. It focuses primarily on the city’s business sector and managing to build a sustainable publication.

June 2022

Toolkits examined the 50 largest U.S. publisher sites selling digital subscription products on either a 4-week or a monthly basis and found that 20% opt for four-week billing periods and 80% use calendar months. Publishers using four-week billing terms typically present them to new subscribers in the context of promotional offers, and alongside language that breaks down pricing on a per-week basis promising access for “$1 per week”, “$4 for 4 weeks” or similar. It’s a tactic being used by major news publishers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times and NY Daily News, among others.

Toolkits also examined the 100 most popular subscription sites among US audiences and found that 75% offered either discounted or free trials to new subscribers.

The 2022 Digital News Report also covered the state of subscription and how many people in Europe are paying for single-writer paid newsletter publications (spoiler alert: very very few). Despite increases in the proportion paying for online news in a small number of richer countries (Australia, Germany, and Sweden), there were signs that overall growth may be levelling off. Across a basket of 20 countries where payment is widespread, 17% paid for any online news – the same figure as last year. Persuading young people to pay remains a critical issue for industry, with the average age of a digital news subscriber being almost 50.

July 2022

Piano released its 2022 Subscription Performance Benchmark Report. It found that 65% of digital audiences engage on a mobile device. Though paid offer click rates vary from 1.46% on mobile to 1.53% on desktop, 42.4% of paid offers are completed on desktop vs. 19.7% on mobile, highlighting the importance of minimising checkout friction for a great user experience. The best-performing sites use registration as a step toward paid conversion, as the conversion rate for known users is 9.88%, compared to just 0.22% for anonymous visitors – a 45x difference.

August 2022

Activist investor ValueAct took a stake in The New York Times. The investor, which has taken positions in Adobe, Citigroup and Nintendo, pushed The Times to sell bundled subscriptions to readers more aggressively.

Peter Kafka writes for Vox that the newsletter boom is over and the path forward is to move beyond a one-person operation to become regular publishing companies.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery published a long interview with The New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. “Subscription” is mentioned in it at least 40 times.

September 2022

Newsletter platform Beehiiv, the Substack alternative with a similar business model, secured funding of $1.6 million to expand headcount and accelerate product development. The Beehiiv team is offering the masses those same tools and experiences used to grow Morning Brew, through Beehiiv.

BeReal, the new social media platform, considers subscriptions instead of ads as the main revenue driver.

October 2022

Apple raised subscription prices to almost all of its services, with some hikes as high as 40%.

November 2022

Insider restructured its newsroom to bring more content in front of its paywall. About 60 paywalled writers had their work moved in front of the publication’s paywall. The moves were part of a broader effort to get ahead of any economic turmoil in the months ahead, pointed out Sarah Fischer for Axios.

The City University of New York J-School put together six case studies in which experienced creators offer guidance on how to overcome challenges to build sustainable projects.

December 2022

The New Yorker covered the American media startup Puck News which is aiming to build a business by covering power and wealth from the inside. In a manifesto, Jon Kelly, its editor-in-chief and co-founder, laid out Puck’s editorial strategy and business model, which aimed to place its writers at the heart of the project, as owners of the company. Puck sought to capitalise on the same idea driving the newsletter company Substack – that certain writers, with dedicated followings, can be their own profit centres, wrote the New Yorker. Puck’s writers are featured in their own newsletters (or “private e-mails,” as Kelly likes to say), but also enjoy the scaffolding of copy-editing and story meetings. Puck has acquired more than 30,000 subscribers.

Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published a report titled “How publishers are learning to create and distribute news on TikTok”. He found some subscription publishers are interested in TikTok because it offers the opportunity to build a relationship with younger audiences that they hope will pay off later.

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