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.

In this week’s Five on Friday, Digiday explains how the direct-to-consumer membership model can improve retention, Forbes tells us how much the average person is spending on media annually, FeedStuffs explores the future of meal kits, the American Press Institute provides guidance for news sites on how to improve subscription registration and payments, and Media Post shares how The New York Times is using Google Cloud to expand its ad campaign.

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend! In this week’s Five on Friday, PYMTS reports that consumers are fighting "subscription friction" as retailers like Adore Me use deceptive practices to sign up subscribers, CNBC explores how media outlets are getting people to pay for news, Quip raises another $40 billion for subscription dental services, Google considers shutting down Google News in the EU to avoid being taxed on links and, as YouTube waffles on whether or not it should have subscriptions, it offers student deals on YouTube and YouTube Music.

In Five on Friday this week, college textbooks are becoming more accessible, thanks to the subscription model, Microsoft’s Windows 10 mail client tries an ad-supported freemium model, Facebook is making changes to its subscription messaging chatbot permissions, malicious ads are being embedded in ad images, and the traditional publishing model isn’t working.

In this week’s Five on Friday, we’ve got some great subscription articles for you. We’ll give you new information on the popularity of subscription video apps, NBA Careers shares an exciting direct-to-consumer retention and engagement job opportunity, Shopify gives great tips on home page design, the Hollywood Reporter explains that Americans think cable TV is too expensive, and New York Magazine’s sites are going behind a paywall.

As those of you looking at your budgets for 2019 you should factor in the cost of documenting your data collection policies and reviewing your current business models in the context of what you may need to do to comply with the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). CCPA goes into effect in 2020 but its sweeping nature will require companies to use this lead time to effect changes in order to achieve compliance. 

How much would you pay for a list of leads who are demonstrably interested in your subscription service, are proven subscription purchasers, and are familiar with your subscription brand? Hint: You already own that list. Through careful testing, it is possible to craft effective, targeted messaging that can bring lapsed subscribers back into the fold.

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) concept has been around forever. What’s changed recently is increasingly easy access to a wide variety of input datasets (a/k/a/ “signals”) that work to increase the precision of these scores. CLV scores are increasingly used by companies to determine how they will interact with their customers. Russell Perkins explains.

Behavioral data is the capture of interaction, click, engagement, movement through a website, actions taken via email marketing across the buyer journey and user movement through digital content. The evolution and growth of digital and technology have given businesses and organizations a great opportunity to record, collect and gain a higher level of intelligence from behavioral data. Are you using it effectively to drive subscriptions? Kevin Novak, explains.

In the subscription headlines this week, Lyft beats Uber to filing for an IPO, Camunda raises $28 million to grow its workflow automation platform, and Amazon Video Channels is estimated to raise about $1.7 billion by year end. Also this week, streaming subscription service Hulu is the first such service to accept Venmo as a form of payment, the value of Verizon Media Group (Oath) is drastically reduced, and Facebook emails reveal that insiders knew personal data was in danger and needed to be protected.

DocuSign reported strong growth in its third quarter of fiscal year 2019, despite reporting a GAAP net loss of $0.31 per basic and diluted share. The eSignature solution provider had $178.4 million in total revenue for the quarter ended October 31, 2018, representing a 37 percent increase year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $169.4 million, a 38 percent increase over the same period last year, and professional services and other revenue of $9.0 million, a 17 percent increase year-over-year. Subscription revenue represents 95 percent of DocuSign’s total revenue.

This is a tough time to be a tech giant if this week’s headlines are any indication. On Monday, Google revealed in a blog post that Google Plus users had been attacked again last month when a software update contained a bug that affected a Google Plus API. Though Google found and fixed the bug within a week of its introduction, it had still impacted approximately 52.5 million users. Google said its is still investigating the exact impact, and it has started notifying consumer users of Google Plus as well as enterprise customers who were impacted.

Last Wednesday, Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), a San Francisco-based identity software provider, reported record revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2019 for the period ended October 31, 2018. Okta reported total revenue of $105.6 million, a 58 percent increase over the same period last year. Subscription revenue was $97.7 million, also a 58 percent increase year-over-year. Subscription revenue currently represents 92.5 percent of total revenue for the SaaS company. Professional services and other make up the remaining $7.9 million of revenue, or 7.5 percent.

How do you minimize the financial impact of subscriber complaints, refund requests, and chargebacks while keeping your subscribers happy? In this briefing, we will answer that question and also explore:

What is Friendly Fraud? How Do Chargebacks Impact Your Subscription Business? What Is Best Practice For Managing? What are the New Rules for Managing? With a recurring revenue business (especially with card-not-present transactions for monthly and annual subscriptions) getting complaints, refund requests, and chargeback is part of what you need to manage.

Anyone (successful) in the world of subscriptions understands the many unique details we need to stay on top of in order to grow and scale our businesses. For subscription businesses, a key detail is the promise of recurring value, that we must achieve is every part of our subscriber's experience with our brand. In other words, it requires delivering a delightful subscription experience.

In this on-demand member briefing, we look at the latest changes in subscription commerce revenue recognition and taxation. Learn what you need to do, today, to determine if these changes affect your business and the most important things you need focus on if they do.

Subscriber retention is a cornerstone of successful subscription commerce. However, credit card declines and failed payments can lead to churn and lost revenue. In this on-demand webinar, we will take an in-depth look at the latest subscription industry benchmarks based on a sample set of 1,200 subscription businesses. Understand what is working in payment decline management and get your all your subscriber retention questions answered.

This Subscription Insider STATPACK provides statistical information about trends in marketing technology and its implementation. Understand adoption trends, platforms, M&A activity, budgets & spending, salaries & positions related to marketing technology, use and effectiveness, and even the use of AI within platforms.

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 is editable 84-page PowerPoint deck with 37 charts with three embedded Excel charts.

In the third quarter of 2018, over a million subscribers cut the cord and ended their subscriptions to pay TV. How did cable TV providers fail their subscribers so remarkably, and what are they doing to stem the losses?

Will Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) growth flatten out by 2020? Will Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) grow? Our data says, yes. Stay on top of market trends with our Subscription Insider STATPACK focused on digital video in the United States, including revenue and user and projections through 2022. It is 40 pages, editable, with 16 detailed charts.

Apple is pushing hard toward subscriptions both in its app store and with its latest cloud and hardware offerings. But the personal computer giant is not blazing a trail with software as a service for consumers: Microsoft and Adobe got there first.

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.