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.

Understanding, identifying and ultimately choosing the right technology for your business is a significant challenge. The ever-expanding Universe of platforms, options, applications, features, and functions can indeed make your head spin.

To help you figure out what you need to know to succeed in the subscription world, we’ve got some great tips and insights for you. In this week’s Five on Friday, Insead offers advice on how to thrive in the subscription economy, Forbes shares a marketing technology cheat sheet, Marketing Tech News gives its take on the state of mobile ad-blocking, Editor & Publisher explains seven ways to make digital audiences pay for news, and Tubefilter offers insights from a mobile video ad spend vs. computer ad spend study.

Russell Perkins, Subscription Insider's Guide to Data Publishing Strategy and Managing Director of InfoCommerce Group, has discussed before how data providers can leverage their central, neutral market positions. But there is a level above this enviable market position. It’s when data actually starts to drive commercial transactions.

In this week’s edition of Five on Friday, Small Biz Trends tells us how to start a subscription box business in 10 easy steps, Search Engine Land shares statistics on the growing popularity of purchases made from voice-controlled devices, PYMNTS reports that Wells Fargo is working on a mobile app to help bank customers cancel subscriptions, Shopify offers four marketing trends to watch in 2017, and Kayako recommends five support metrics for SaaS companies.

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.

Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part six of Organic Search for Publishers, he explains and demonstrates the tools every editorial, marketing, and audience development team should use when determining what keywords will be used as part of their organic search strategy.

Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part five of Organic Search for Publishers, he discusses the big mistake publishers make in their metadata, walks through how to choose the right long- and short-tail keywords for your business, shows examples of how a publisher should use keyword discovery tools and his favorite keyword discovery tools that publishers should use.

In part four of Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak begins his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. He discusses the one big thing content publishers miss when optimizing their content for organic search: Contextualization. It’s not enough to publish an article, provide some metadata and links. TODAY content publishers need to provide contextualization for that article. That is, what will a reader achieve or get by acting with the content?

Walmart (NYSE: WMT) has met with beauty box subscription company Birchbox, Recode reported last week. Sources told Recode that Birchbox co-founder and CEO Katia Beauchamp met with Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce chief Marc Lore, but it is not known specifically what was discussed or if Walmart is looking to acquire Birchbox. If so, it would be the latest in a string of recent acquisitions for Walmart that will help strengthen Walmart’s position in online retail.

Eager to compete with social video platforms like YouTube and Snapchat, Facebook announced the launch of Watch last week, a new platform for original shows. Soon to be available on mobile devices, through TV apps and on desktops and laptops, Watch shows are made up of episodes that are either live or recorded and that follow a theme or story. Facebook says each user’s experience will be personalized, helping them discover new shows that their friends and communities are watching.

This has been a rough year for Uber. After a series of scandals including allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and stealing technology and trade secrets, CEO Travis Kalanick was asked by investors to resign from the company he co-founded. Kalanick reluctantly stepped down in June, but remained on the board, but his seat may not be warm for long. Last week one of Uber’s largest investors, Benchmark, is suing Kalanick to try to boot him off the board of directors, reports the New York Times.

This has been a huge news week in the subscription world with Netflix’s acquisition of comic book publisher and producer Millarworld and Google’s offer to buy Snapchat for $30 billion. Also in the headlines this week, FX will offer an ad-free subscription service, the Financial Times returns to the App Store after a six-year break, and the new Time Warner chief says CNN is not for sale. We’re also reading about antitrust concerns over Amazon, Microsoft pushing hardware sales with a device subscription model, and how the pursuit of digital readers broke the New Republic.

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.

Learn how to maximize SaaS and software retention rates. During this on-demand seminar, Adriana Iordan—expert in global eCommerce and payments and Chief Product Officer at Avangate—will teach attendees why SaaS subscription businesses face unique customer retention challenges and how to handle them. This session includes benchmark data, best practice tactics, and three separate case studies to help you learn how to overcome the unique challenges SaaS recurring businesses face.

Revenue signals go way beyond renewal and churn KPIs. In order to maximize potential revenue, you need to get under the hood of your subscription product or service to understand revenue-related data.  These “revenue signals” are in your billing, product, and customer data and they show where your subscription business is at risk for lower revenue or where you losing potential revenue opportunities.  In this on-demand seminar, you will learn what to look at in your own data and analytics, what learnings you can glean from each revenue signal, what actions your subscription business should think about taking, and most importantly, the revenue impact of acting or not acting on each signal.

Have you seen a rise in declines or a rise in chargebacks or fraud? Are your renewals taking longer to successfully process? Do you understand why? Paul Larsen, Subscription Insider Guide to Payment Processing, leading expert in card-not-present recurring payments, and Managing Partner of the Paul Larsen Group, in this on-demand version of our January 2017 online seminar, will outline key payment processing trends every subscription company should be aware of, and be on top of, for 2017.

The easy way to do retention is to blast out special offers and rewards to loyal customers, lumping all the steady subscribers, the sleeping dogs, the irregular users, and other at-risk customers into the same anti-churn program. Research shows that, compared with control groups of customers who are not targeted at all, some retention programs actually inspire existing customers to cancel. Here are some of the factors and methods to consider in avoiding that failure mode.

As consumer financial lives move from the realm of physical cash into the cloud, subscribers -- especially younger subscribers -- want to make recurring payments easier, and they are glad to use credit cards to do so. Companies, from credit card providers to online processors to retailers to publishers, are looking to help them do it. But there is the danger of a backlash.

Europeans and the European government are taking data privacy very seriously. In fact, some are saying it is the most important change in data privacy regulation in the last 20 years. In May 2018, the two-year transition period for the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) expires and the new data privacy law goes into effect. Any company doing business with European citizens, including subscription companies, will be impacted, regardless of where the company is located. Companies should start preparing now to comply with the laws and to avoid fines as large as €20 million for violation of the data privacy changes. Here’s what you need to know.

Last month Pew Research Center issued its annual newspaper fact sheet, outlining the state of newspapers in the U.S. In this report, we’ll share their results as well as examples and other research that support the overall trends. As the saying goes, we have good news and bad news. Circulation is down overall, as is advertising revenue and newsroom staff counts, but circulation revenue is up and digital readership and revenue are increasing. Let’s dive a little deeper into the numbers.

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.