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.

Before you slip out of the office for the weekend though, take 5 or 10 minutes to review this week’s Five on Friday. This week we’re featuring Facebook and Instagram ad advice from Business2Community, recommendations from The Next Web on keeping your e-commerce site safe from hackers, marketing tips from Salesforce on engaging email subscribers, ways to keep calm in the face of stress from Ladders, and news about Walmart’s latest restructuring.

Subscription boxes are growing faster than any other sector of the subscription economy. However, not everything comes easy for subscription box companies. Robert Skrob, Subscription Insider Guide to Membership Retention and President of Membership Services, explains these challenges and how to overcome them.

As high winds blow, floods rage and wildfires burn across the country, we’re here to distract you with some helpful advice on growing your subscription company. In this week’s Five on Friday, Business2Community shares three ways SaaS companies can increase conversions, Jon Reed for Diginomica explains why social media sharing is not an adequate content distribution strategy, Small Business Trends offers 30 alternatives to PayPal, Fierce Retail gives B2B companies lessons to learn from B2C subscription companies, and Search Engine Watch recommends top SEO influencers and resources to follow.

In this week’s Five on Friday, Business2Community recommends three SaaS applications that we should all be using, IAB releases its first ‘Podcast Playbook,’ a buyer’s guide for podcast advertising, Media Post shares highlights of a recent report from Iterable with email tactics used by subscription box companies, BuzzSumo tells us that Facebook engagement for brands and publishers is down 20 percent this year, and Moz offers five strategies for keyword research in 30 minutes or less.

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.

Membership platform Patreon announced Tuesday that it raised $60 million in Series C funding, which will allow the company to scale up its team and operations. This brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $107 million. This funding round was led by Chris Paik at Thrive Capital. Additional investors include CRV, Freestyle and Draper Fisher Jurvetson through partner Barry Schuler, according to TechCrunch. TechCrunch also said that the startup is valued at around $450 million.

Economic textbook authors Glenn Hubbard and Tony O’Brien have found a way to turn their $250 introductory economics textbook into a $90 per semester subscription, reports Quartz. Published by Pearson, the 800-page textbook isn’t just a digitized version of the hardcover textbook though. The new version of Hubbard and O’Brien’s textbook has about half the text of the original, and it includes videos and other interactive components, adapted to the way that college students learn today.

Cloud-based monetization platform Aria Systems announced last week that it raised $18 million in new capital in a funding round led by Madison Bay Capital along with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, InterWest Partners and Venrock. The new funding, which will help fuel additional growth at Aria Systems, brings the total raised to date to $150 million. In addition, the company announced that Steve Reale, managing partner of Madison Bay Capital Partners, and Drew Harman, Director of InterWest Partners, will join Aria’s board of directors.

To kick off the new school year, Spotify and Hulu have teamed up to offer a premium subscription bundle for college students. For $4.99 a month, students can listen to their favorite music on Spotify, and watch their favorite TV shows on Hulu with a single subscription. They are calling the bundle Spotify Premium for Students, now with Hulu.

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 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.

What do you call a market that has not yet served 65% of its potential customers? A market selling low-weight, easily shipped, relatively high-value merchandise? And that merchandise has broad appeal for everyone from Millennials to Seniors? The beauty box subscription market is ready for growth.

Red or white, rose or sparkling, wine is America’s new trendy drink. It is being embraced by younger drinkers, who are also those most likely to want experiment with new tastes, making them ideal potential customers for subscription wine clubs. But outdated blue laws make it hard for retailers to ship wine across state lines. Here’s how online wine merchants are satisfying the demand while working through (and around) the regulatory bottlenecks.

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.