In the summer of 2012, Liz Cadman knew she had a problem. She was addicted to subscription boxes, and she wanted more. She couldn't find the information she wanted online, however, to make smart buying decisions, so she started a blog to talk about subscription boxes. The blog grew into My Subscription Addiction, a full-fledged website dedicated to the discussion of subscription boxes. In four years, the site has exploded in popularity, and she has added additional features including swaps, a discussion forum and more. Learn how My Subscription Addiction started and grew into what it is today.

How can you combine a wholesale book business and a passion for children's literacy to get more books in the hands of kids? With the subscription box model. That's how founder Eric Shmuely made his dream become a reality -- by creating a subscription book service for children.

Last year the publishing industry was abuzz with the news that the Winnipeg Free Press was experimenting with a Read Now Pay Later micropayment platform, where readers pay $0.27 (Canadian) per article they have read. Dana Neuts explores how well the first seven months of the strategy has gone.

At just three years old, Readly has experienced rapid growth and is defining success in the digital magazine publishing space. Now offering nearly 1,100 magazines and more than 17,000 issues in 49 countries, learn more about Readly in this exclusive INSIDER Case Study.

Wherever you live, we hope you are staying cool this August! As we enjoy our air-conditioned offices, we bring you this week’s edition of Five on Friday: Drip explains the four steps of the consumer decision journey, LinkedIn brings us top subscription jobs, #besomebody shares five tips for increasing your website’s conversion rate, Texas Monthly fights ad blockers with an experiment, and DoorDash helps customers avoid delivery fees with a new monthly subscription service.

It is hard to believe it is August already! Before you leave the office for the weekend, we’ve got some great tips for attracting and retaining subscription customers along with other helpful tidbits. In this week’s Five on Friday, MarTech Series explains why opt-in video advertising is so hot right now, PYMNTS predicts that the car subscription market will grow by 71 percent in the next four years, Cratejoy shares ways to attract more subscribers, Impact offers top tips for improving your site’s Google rankings with SEO, and Shopify recommends these five tips to drive sales.

While many successful data publishers obsess about continually adding new features and functionality to their data products, there are lots of good reasons to be regularly evaluating your data as well. Features and functionality matter, but a single new and well-chosen data element can add tremendous value, while simultaneously providing a competitive advantage and product differentiation.

In this week’s edition of Five on Friday, The Drum explores why brands like Amazon use the membership model, Associations Now shares new reports that question how recurring fees could create subscription fatigue, Search Engine Watch discusses factors that influence a website’s credibility, and Equifax struggles with regaining the trust of customers and investors after a massive data breach.

Credit cards are a blessing and a curse for subscription publishers and monthly box merchants. Yes, auto-pay on a regular basis is sweet indeed, but it comes with the peril of card default. Cards expire or max out, customers dispute charges, and more ... but there are ways to minimize the detrimental effects of credit card declines and chargebacks on your subscription business.

Credit card transactions have topped three and a third TRILLION dollars. With that volume, even a tiny percent of misfires create problems on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. Companies that depend on card transactions, especially those who depend on recurring payments, need to be proactive in preparing for pitfalls.

Understanding how payments work is a key foundation to selecting the right vendors for your subscription or membership business. This guide will help you understand the mechanics of a payment, key terms, and the key players involved from the moment your customer submits a payment to your business, to when the money for that customer’s subscription gets into your bank account.

The idea of influencers is not a new one. In fact, they’ve been around for decades, often times in the form of a celebrities as company spokespeople. Remember Brooke Shields and her Calvins? O.J. Simpson for Hertz? William Shatner for Priceline.com? Joe Dimaggio and his Mr. Coffee? Those are all examples of influencers. The marketing world has evolved since then, but instead of having spokespeople, brands, including subscription companies, are now using (paid) influencers to promote and share their products and services. It is a subtler, but more meaningful approach. Let’s take a closer look.

Yesterday, MoviePass raised its rates from $9.95 to $14.95 per month per subscriber, just two weeks after running out of money and securing a $5 million emergency loan from a hedge fund. This is one of about a half dozen pricing changes – we’ve lost count – over the last year or so, causing concern that MoviePass doesn’t have a good handle on its business model. Running out of operating funds wasn’t MoviePass’s only recent mistake, however. The site experienced an outage the weekend Marvel’s Ant-man was released, frustrating moviegoing subscribers.

The wait is almost over. Nintendo of America announced last week that it will finally launch its much-awaited online subscription service in the second half of September. After the launch, a subscription will be needed to play multiplayer games like Splatoon 2, ARMS, Mario Tennis Aces and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe online, reports Newsweek. Single player and local multiplayer games will continue to operate as they do now. Nintendo has also revealed pricing for the new subscription service:

Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP) ended last week on a high note, releasing its fiscal 2018 full year and fourth quarter results on Friday. For the fourth quarter, Meredith reported total revenue from continuing operations of $788 million, a 77 percent increase year-over-year. Earnings from continuing operations were $17 million, down from $43 million for the same period last year. However, adjusted EBITDA was $160 million, a 76 percent increase year-over-year.

Another blockbuster merger is in trouble. On Thursday morning, Tribune Media Company (NYSE: TRCO) announced that it was backing out of a $3.9 billion deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group and filing suit against the company for breach of contract. In the lawsuit filed in a Chancery, Delaware court, Tribune seeks compensation for losses incurred as a result of material breaches in the merger agreement between the two companies, including Sinclair’s promise to obtain regulatory approval as soon as possible and divesting stations in specific markets to facilitate that approval.

Looking to transition your products or services from perpetual licenses, or one-off purchases, to a recurring revenue model? In this on-demand webinar, we outline successful strategies and tactics to help your software business transform into a recurring revenue machine.

 Do you have great content (or a service or organization) and want to make more money with it online via memberships?

In this on-demand seminar, author and membership expert Rob Ristagno will teach you his "Five Forces Framework" to help you do just that.  Based on his book, A Member Is Worth a Thousand Visitors, Rob will guide you step-by-step through the five forces of creating new online revenue growth, and show you why it is…

Do you know how to achieve the "Retention Point" in your business, that moment when your members fall in love with you and become Lifers? In this on-demand seminar, we'll show you why that happens and the exact steps to make it happen more often, on purpose. With one-half of subscription revenue growth coming from retention, understanding how to achieve your own Retention Point can make a big difference in your renewals.

If you operate a subscription or membership business – regardless of subscription vertical, industry, consumer focus, or transaction volume – your revenue is impacted by payment trends and market dynamics happening right now. This on-demand online seminar will help you understand payment trends that will impact your business in 2018. it will also walk through the tactics and best-practices subscription merchants should employ to mitigate the negative impact on your profitability from these trends.

Unless your company has a monopoly on what you offer, you probably survive amid competition. One key to keeping customers happily subscribing to your product: exceptional customer service.

With a potential subscription business market size of $35-plus billion -- and with a history of solid growth that experts forecast to continue -- there’s every reason to look for success in an America filled with fitness fans.

Today, artificial intelligence generates $7.3 billion in direct revenue, and drives $1.2 billion in related business. That is only going to grow ... maybe tenfold by 2025. And while we’ve all heard about the implications for a robot apocalypse, the reality is that AI is being used right now by financial firms to decrease both fraud and customer loss through card declines.

As a mature market full of established business owners, the car wash industry has only lately moved to subscription offerings. However, as operators learn that their fears in offering unlimited service are mostly unfounded, many are embracing a new way to monetize customers.

Are you receiving more alerts notifying you of expiring cards? We have and frankly, it’s no surprise with the increase in the volume of payment cards that been reissued. Without that updated payment information, subscribers and members will not get renewed successfully. In this sample, we show you real examples of payment card update notices from three separate companies, with three very different approaches to getting their subscribers to update their payment information. Plus, a bonus, Subscription Insider’s own notice!

ABC Mouse Early Learning Academy is an award-winning, subscription-based site/mobile app that uses email promotions to acquire subscribers. In this Sample, we walk through their promotional email campaign and offers. Are they sending too many promotions? Are they effective? You be the judge.

You may not be a sports fan, per se, but everyone plays games, whether it's chess, checkers or Thursday nights down at the local bridge club. We took a look at three sports-themed businesses offering subscriptions to see how well (or not) they are converting visitors into subscribers.

Many subscription sites are using some lighthearted copy that borders on passive-aggression. Is this an effective tactic? What do you think?

Understanding the difference between your most valuable customers and those that will not renew, is like separating out the wheat seeds from all the wheat chaff at harvest time. It will take the right tools and tactics to maximize renewal rates. Subscription Insider's Retention Workbook (Excel) will help you track the retention performance by key drivers in your business, turning your data into both a summary and a detailed retention report that you can use to manage your retention.

Does your subscription management or billing platform connect you to Account Updater — a service offered by Visa, MasterCard, Discover and more recently, American Express — that provides updated payment card information to help merchants manage involuntary churn issues? With this directory of 25 subscription management and billing platforms that support account updater services, you'll be able to create a short list of vendor contenders for your subscription business based on applicable industry experience, existing customers, payment gateways and processors supported, as well as pricing.

This extremely detailed subscription & membership financial model was developed as a tool for would-be subscription businesses who either are planning a new launch or an acquisition. It may also be useful for current publishers who are doing a minimum of marketing and who want to see how their cash flow might change if they ramp up marketing and/or ancillary product offers. Its purpose is educational and inspirational rather than strictly predictive . Everyone's business is slightly different, so it was impossible for us to create an easy-to-use model that would work with enormous accuracy for all. However, if you've not modelled this type of business extensively before, you'll learn a great deal from it!

Effective monitoring of subscriber retention is the result of understanding retention opportunities and trends, tracking attrition patterns, developing a tracking methodology, and applying those metrics in order to manage your retention business more effectively. Use this excel workbook to track and manage your subscribers and members.