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.

TGIF. You made it to the end of the week! Woo hoo. Kick back, relax and take a few minutes to skim our weekly Five on Friday. In this week’s edition, we bring you top subscription jobs, Pew Research Center shares the latest research on Twitter bots, Ann Handley talks about the trend toward long-form content, Digiday reports on news publishers seeing an influx of subscriptions from an interest in local politics, and Hubspot shares top marketing design trends for 2018.

In this week’s Five on Friday, Cadillac rewards dealers for subscription referrals, the European Union’s portability rules are now in effect, Bark Box plans to avoid standard subscription model problems, Convince and Convert shares ‘must follow’ content optimization rules, and Google updates its core search engine ranking algorithm.

In this week’s Five on Friday, Entrepreneur magazine shares ways to become a standout in the subscription industry, FedTech News tells us why the Army Corps of Engineers is moving toward SaaS, Forbes explores whether the evolution of digital ads will eventually lead to better advertising, PYMNTS.com predicts that subscriptions are the future of fashion, and Tulsa Business & Legal News offers tips on how to effectively use your website as a marketing tool.

Before you settle in to watch the Final Four match-ups this weekend, take a look at this week’s Five on Friday. In today’s edition, MarTech Today offers suggestions for companies who have procrastinated their GDPR preparations, Billboard reports that the U.S. music industry has the highest revenue now than it has in a decade, thanks to subscriptions, Inc.com shares performance metrics every company should be tracking, Shopify suggests tools for managing your Instagram accounts, and last but not least, everyone’s favorite Five on Friday feature – subscription job opportunities!

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.

In the last part of our series, Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak explains how to create and scale a system for optimizing organic search across editorial, audience development, and other teams to drive readers deeper into a media property, and support revenue creation.

Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part seven of Organic Search for Publishers, he explains where and how to use the keywords and phrases that are important for your business in your content and meta information. Kevin also goes deeper and explains what structured metadata is as well as why and how you should be leveraging that in your publication to more effectively communicate and provide context about your content for search engines.

In this week’s subscription headlines, Samsung Pay adds Samsung Rewards to its payment service, another Uber breach reveals 25 million emails were hacked, and experts aren’t impressed with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica apology tour. Also this week, Digiday reveals that half of Politico Europe’s revenue comes from paid subscriptions, MarketWatch says ESPN’s new subscription service is similar to its previously-free content, and Pivotal Payments announces a new mobile payments platform.

A month after disclosing an agreement to buy digital magazine app Texture, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) announced plans to create a new premium subscription Apple News product, integrating it with Texture. According to Bloomberg, the goal behind the strategy is to generate new revenue from content and services. Apple is in the process of acquiring Texture for an undisclosed sum. The magazine app, previously called Next Issue, gives subscribers unlimited access to up to 200 magazines for $9.99 a month.

Just weeks after journalists from the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune receive separate honors from the 2017 Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) awards, parent-company Tronc announced in an employee meeting that it is laying off dozens of employees because of a change in the company’s business strategy. The layoffs include Tribune Interactive’s L.A.-based video and online content teams, which operated separately from the newspaper.

Movie and music fans can get two of their favorite forms of entertainment as part of a package for a limited time. At the 2018 Coachella Music Festival & Arts Festival last week, MoviePass and iHeartRadio announced a new, three-month promotion. Through this special deal, new subscribers to both platforms will receive access up to four 2-D movies monthly for three months via MoviePass and an extended, free three-month trial to iHeartRadio’s All Access on demand feature for $9.95 a month, billed quarterly.

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.

One mistake that many SaaS businesses make is thinking that once a subscription management system is in place, they are all set. In this on-demand seminar, we will outline the strategies and tactics that SaaS companies should employ to grow revenue, by keeping customers engaged.

When it comes to choosing a subscription management platform for your company, there are many options. Choosing the right technology can be a daunting task. Make the right decision and you are a hero. Make the wrong decision and you are faced with higher costs, mismatched features, or worse. Did you know that when buying technology for your business, 35-50% of the sales go to the vendor who responds first? Crazy? For companies that bought in this manner, they typically experience a 50% greater rate of REGRET about their purchase than companies who used a more thoughtful process

In this on-demand seminar, learn the key questions to ask potential vendors, and your team, when selecting the best subscription platform for your business. Kevin Novak, CEO of 2040 Digital and subscription technology expert and Kathy Greenler Sexton, Publisher of Subscription Insider will discuss: The subscription technology landscape, how to self-assess what your company needs, understanding budget and total cost of ownership, and mapping your budget and team to the best platform for your company.

Before you can generate new subscribers you've got to implement systems to stop your members from quitting. This on-demand seminar is focused on delivering actionable tactics to reduce subscriber churn and increase member lifetime value. Robert Skrob, our Insider Guide to Membership Retention, will walk you through 14 tactics to improve your subscriber and member retention. With all that Robert will discuss, there will be at least one strategy revealed that could be a quick, easy win for you, which could improve your renewal rate within two weeks or less.

Marketing Business-to-Business (B2B) information, data and services businesses are very different than consumer marketing. The challenge is, much of the data focused on marketing is consumer focused. Not anymore. This Subscription Insider STATPACK provides trends for B2B marketing, its leaders, plus B2B marketing strategy and effectiveness trends. Most absolutely shocking stat to us? Only 39% of B2B companies have a formal marketing plan … in 2018!

Subscription Insider STATPACKS are charts and data that you can use for your market and budget planning, creating your business plan or even competitive analysis. Download this 78-page PowerPoint with 34 charts and graphs to access our trend data and statistics focused on B2B Marketing Trends.

The Advertising Market in the U.S. is growing. Not surprisingly, digital advertising growth is leading all other advertising channels, with print and TV growth rates are lagging behind all others. This Subscription Insider STATPACK provides overall advertising industry market trends plus advertising effectiveness & response data. Perfect for understanding if you are a marketer advertising your subscription product or service or a publisher with an advertising line of revenue in addition to subscriptions. We also present statistical information and trends for TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, Out of Home, Cinema, and Digital Advertising.

Subscription Insider STATPACKS are charts and data that you can use for your market and budget planning, creating your business plan or even competitive analysis. Download the 222-page PowerPoint with 201 charts and graphs (and five embedded excel charts) to access our trend data and statistics focused on the advertising market in the U.S.

In the age of the Internet, and especially since the Great Recession of 2008, the value proposition of print advertising has faded, only partly replaced by online digital advertising, and even that seems shaky. Instead, some media companies and information publishers are looking at ways to monetize their audience directly with the option to subscribe to new, premium products that may replace or co-exist beside legacy magazines.

Millennials are expended to spend $1.4 Trillion on consumer goods in the U.S. by 2020, a staggering amount and a market opportunity for any subscription company targeting them. This Subscription Insider STATPACK provides statistical information and trends about consumer goods and general shopping behavior among Millennials in the United States including Millennial behavior focused on apparel, beauty and personal care, and online shopping behavior.

Subscription Insider STATPACKS are charts and data that you can use for your market and budget planning, creating your business plan or even competitive analysis. Download the 55-page PowerPoint with 23 charts and graphs to access our trend data and statistics focused on Millennial consumer goods and shopping behavior.

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.