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.

We are less than a week away from Subscription Payment Boot Camp, but we are still churning out exclusive, quality content to help you grow your subscription business. In this week’s Five on Friday, Chargify makes suggestions for successfully selling subscriptions to millennials, Search Engine Watch offers tips on writing search engine-friendly headlines, Adweek explains Google’s new filters that allows publishers to weed out racy or sensational ads, Real Simple gives us five ways to rein in our unwieldly email inboxes, and PYMNTS and Recurly team up to share subscription conversion data for Q3 2017.

Yes, it’s finally Friday. We survived talk of the island in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water, big water, ocean water, and we are ready for the weekend. (Sorry, I could not resist.) Before you head out, check out this week’s Five on Friday. In this week’s edition, Ad Exchanger reports that CPT advertisers are cutting their digital ad dollars and Amazon is reaping the benefits, Digital TV Research forecasts the future of online TV and video, Hubspot shares five sales tips, Zuora talks about the subscription economy in the U.K., and The Muse offers productivity tips to help us get more done.

In this week’s Five on Friday, IAB UK warns publishers and advertisers that native content works, but you must disclose the nature and origin of the content, and the Columbia Journalism Review tells us that free content is still king for newspaper websites. Also this week, the streaming music industry is growing with more than 30 million paying subscribers, GoCardless raises $22.5 million in new funding, and LinkedIn shares top subscription jobs from big name companies.

One key dynamic of the data business is that the strongest businesses serve single, tightly-defined markets, typically a single vertical market. The problem for data publishers attempting to build products with horizontal coverage across multiple markets, or who want to play in large consumer markets, comes down to a very simple reality: it’s hard to be everything to everybody. Russell Perkins, Subscription Insider Guide to Data Publishing Strategy and Managing Director of InfoCommerce Group, explains.

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.

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 this week’s subscription news, The New York Times botches a promo, giving away a Google home for $17 but subscribers could quit after receiving it. Also this week, Roku offers new TV sets that combine streaming TV with linear TV, Equifax’s CEO ‘retires’ after the company's massive data breach, and Uber’s new CEO apologizes after the company loses its license in London. Also this week, we share stories about Blue Apron, Facebook, Google, YouTube and the Chernin Group.

Time Inc. (NYSE: TIME) is the latest publisher to add paid membership programs to its offerings in the hopes of generating additional revenue. On September 27, the company announced the launch of People Perks, a membership program for People magazine readers, for $60 a year or $5.99 a month after a 30-day free trial. Members who pay annually also receive a free welcome kit, and all members receive exclusive discounts on entertainment, style, food, beauty, pets, home and shopping products and access to unique celebrity and red carpet experiences.

Last week Adblock Plus announced higher fees and a new fee structure for micropayment platform Flattr. Both are owned by parent company Eyeo. Eyeo acquired Flattr in April. The fee will now be broken down into two parts. Content creators and publishers, who receive micropayments from readers via Flattr, will be charged a monthly fee of 7.5 percent to cover Flattr’s operating costs. Also, when they first sign up, content creators and publishers will be charged a fee of 9 percent to cover payment processing.

Google has finally ditched its ‘first click free’ program in favor of a publisher-friendly tool the company is calling ‘flexible sampling,’ reports The New York Times. With ‘first click free,’ readers can access paywalled content by searching for a particular headline or relevant keywords through Google Search or Google News, a frustrating workaround for publishers with metered or hard paywalls. ‘While research has shown that people are becoming more accustomed to paying for news, the sometimes painful process of signing up for a subscription can be a turn off...'

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 future is bright for e-books. Market penetration is rising. Young people are embracing the medium. Indie publishers are embracing digital business models. But there are challenges that the industry has yet to resolve, and as a result, growth has stopped as the industry has reached a plateau.

Technology has overturned business models and revolutionized the way we enjoy music maybe more than it has any other form of entertainment. That revolution continues to shake up music makers and distributors. But the universal human yearning to listen means that opportunity will be there, somehow. The recording industry seems to be finding that opportunity in anywhere-anytime music, especially on a subscription basis.

The top complaints about email: Too much, too aggressive, too irrelevant, too repetitive, too busy. Here are data-based tips to tackle these problems and retain subscribers.

Consumers say they opt-in to email newsletters, promotions, and lists because they want discounts and promotions. Or because they want an offered incentive. Or to support a brand or cause they love. Or to get exclusive content. Our latest trend report takes a close, research-based look at these and other factors that make subscribers smile to see your email.

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.