While traffic could be accidental, audience loyalty is about being chosen every time in a competitive landscape. Every audience has a certain pattern, and publishers who are successful in retaining their audience know how to tap into this pattern, become a part of their daily routine, shape their habits, and provide exclusive experiences that make it worth returning to.
Publishers are not just chasing clicks, competing for short-term attention, creating overpersonalised content, and optimising customer journeys based on preferences. They have shifted their focus to discovering high-value subscribers and creating sustainable relationships with them. While getting initial engagement from the audience, such as likes or views, seems easily attainable, it doesn’t always translate to loyalty. Retention is not just about preventing churn rates. It is about going deeper, identifying the reasons that make the audience leave, addressing the gaps carefully, reaching out to the right people with the right content at the right time, and providing them stronger to stay back. This is where prioritising consistency and quality over volume, habit formation, creating broader engagement channels, price sensitivity, moving beyond fixed content segments, creating the best impression at an early stage, and adding value through exclusive content come into play.
It’s time to shift the conversation and focus on things that truly matter. To help publishers cut through the noise and understand the fundamentals of long-term engagement, State of Digital Publishing spoke with Aimie Rigas, the Director of Audience Growth for Nine Publishing. She brings years of experience in the digital publishing landscape and her ideas will help publishers address the common gaps between strategy and growth and navigate the complexity of audience retention with clarity.
What’s the biggest misconception publishers have about audience retention in 2026?
Publishers often think that retention is something you engineer exclusively through product. There’s a tendency to keep layering on features – more personalisation, more surfaces, more reasons to come back. While a good product experience matters, it’s not the key reason people pay.
The quality of journalism is what makes a difference. When the content is genuinely distinctive, whether that’s original reporting, a clear point of view, or a sharp local lens, audience retention is possible. Publishers often focus on over-indexing on personalisation, and this is where they need to refine their approach. If a visitor subscribes because of a sports article, it’s tempting just to show them similar content because that’s what the data dictates about their preference.
On the contrary, the more broadly a subscriber engages across news, politics, lifestyle and finance, the more likely they are to stick around. Someone reading across four or more topics, even just once a week, tends to show long-term engagement and low attrition rates, compared to a reader going deep in a single category.
As publishers, our role isn’t just to reflect people’s existing interests, it’s to expand them, and help them understand what else is worth their time.
I think the publishers who hold on to that practice tend to build stronger retention than those trying to behave like platforms. We’re not TikTok, we shouldn’t try to be.
How has your approach to retention metrics evolved beyond traditional engagement measurements like page views and time on site?
We still look at page views and time on site at a newsroom level. While they are useful directional signals, we don’t just focus on them for audience retention anymore. The key shift for us has been toward habits.
We define a habit quite simply: engaging with something at least once a week, consistently over a month. From there, we look at depth – once a week is a low-frequency habit, two times is medium, three or more is high. Interestingly, the biggest step change isn’t between medium and high, it’s getting someone from no habit to even that first weekly behaviour. That shift has a big impact on retention.
Then, we look at the combinations of habits that correlate most strongly with someone sticking around – things like regularly opening a newsletter, using the app and engaging with diverse content areas, or lighter-touch behaviours like puzzles. The way you respond to that becomes an actionable area. We don’t try to force everyone into the same behaviour. Instead, we look for early signals and build from there.
The other shift has been in how we define engagement itself. Not every piece of content is designed to hold someone for five minutes, sometimes the job is simply to keep them informed quickly.
So we benchmark engagement relative to the format, and layer that with qualitative signals from customer feedback to understand what’s actually working.
What retention signals do you track that most publishers overlook or undervalue?
We talk a lot about habits, but the other side of that is how people respond to price. One of the more undervalued retention signals is what happens when someone moves from an introductory offer to full price. That moment tells you very quickly whether you’ve actually built enough value, or whether someone was just passing through.
A lot of publishers, including us, treat intro offers quite rigidly: three months at a discount, then a full-price rollover. But the reality is that not everyone is ready at the same point.
What we’re focusing on more is whether a habit has formed by the time the price change becomes effective. If someone is engaging consistently, even just once a week, they’re much more likely to adjust to the rising prices. If they’re not, that price jump can feel abrupt, and that’s where we experience churn.
So we’re starting to treat price as something that should be adjusted based on behaviour. If someone hasn’t formed a habit yet, instead of forcing them straight onto full price, we might extend a lower rate or step them down proactively. It gives us more time to build engagement and demonstrate value, rather than losing them at the point where it matters most.
You might give up some short-term revenue in doing that, but the long-term value of people who actually form a habit is materially higher.
At what point in the user journey does retention actually begin, and what are publishers getting wrong about that timing?
Retention starts before conversion. It’s not a process that comes into effect after someone subscribes – it’s the entire experience, from the very first interaction with your brand.
That could be the first article they read, the first time they hit a paywall, a customer service interaction or even a moment where you choose to drop the paywall. All of those moments shape their impression long before they’re thinking about staying or leaving. Where publishers get it wrong is in treating retention as a post-purchase problem. By that point, a lot of the perception has already been formed.
We’ve also been thinking more about what it means to welcome someone back rather than just win them back. If someone unsubscribes, how much of their experience do we preserve?
It’s counterintuitive, and I know we get a lot of concerned looks when we raise it in meetings, but the team has done a lot of research into it, and the easier we make it to leave, the more likely someone is to come back. It signals confidence in the product and respect for the user. This is something we’re looking to focus on more, especially over the next 12-18 months.
How do you balance content frequency with quality when both impact retention differently?
I’ve got quite a strong view on this, which comes from my time working directly inside the newsroom. At one point, we saw that the vast majority of subscriber engagement was mostly concentrated in a relatively small portion of content. This is not the case any more. When I started at the Herald and The Age, 40% of content made up 87% of what subscribers read online and 92% of what our non-paying audience read online.
That meant 60% of the content was failing to find an audience. We needed to identify the reason so that we could improve it. We had never approached this, as we needed more content. If anything, the focus has been on doing less, but making it better.
One important aspect of having the discipline is to know what not to cover. If something is already widely available for free elsewhere, you have to be clear on what you’re adding – whether that’s a sharper angle, a different lens, or a level of reporting that justifies someone paying for it.
You see that most clearly in brands like the AFR, where there’s real clarity on who it is designed for and who it is not fit for. That filter shapes not just how stories are told, but which ones are told at all.
If a journalist or editor thinks a story is important to tell, it’s our job to make it interesting and help it find an audience. In order for the work to have its intended impact, people need to engage with it.
Beyond which stories to tell, we also need to consider how to deliver that content at two different speeds. Not all audience members interact with us the same amount throughout the day. At the same time, different platforms serve different needs. There’s a high-frequency layer, like newsletters, push alerts, and verticals, where you can serve more content to people who want it fast.
Then there’s the core experience, our homepage or app, where curation matters. That’s where you back your best stories and focus on what matters most.
The job isn’t to maximise volume, it’s to be deliberate about what we produce and how we deliver it.
How do you approach retention differently for casual readers versus subscription-intent users?
We don’t think about this as two completely separate strategies; it’s more of a continuum based on access.
For casual readers, the job is to give them enough of the experience to understand the value, while starting to build some level of habit. That might mean balancing sampling with encouraging more intentional behaviour. For example, coming direct, returning during key moments, or seeking out your perspective rather than stumbling across it.
Once someone becomes a subscriber, the dynamic changes. We know more about them, they have full access, and we can be more deliberate in how we deepen their engagement – whether that’s onboarding, encouraging habits, or building a more regular relationship through owned channels.
So it’s less about treating them as two separate categories of audiences, and more about recognising where they are on the journey, and how much signal you have to work with.
What’s one retention tactic that worked at scale for Nine that other publishers could adapt, regardless of their size?
This is going to sound basic, but the most effective tactic for us has been building repeatable habits. The simplest habit we’ve been able to build at scale has been newsletters.
They’re relatively easy to spin up, they meet people where they already are, and they create a consistent touchpoint with your brand. But they are only effective if your value proposition is clear and you know which topics will engage your audience.
You need to be honest about what exists for free elsewhere, and what you’re doing stands out. That should show up everywhere, in the content you commission, the angles you take, the newsletters you build, and the experiences you prioritise. When that’s clear, newsletters can create sustainable engagement.
We have a small cohort of subscribers who engage through newsletters daily and rarely come back to the site, but still see real value in that product, and we are completely fine with that. For us, frequency and breadth of engagement are the strongest indicators of retention.
More broadly, knowing what a habit looks like for your audience and which ones are the most valuable and scalable, and focusing effort there, rather than trying to do everything, is important.
If you could only focus on improving one aspect of retention strategy for the next 12 months, what would it be and why?
It might sound counterintuitive, but the area I’d focus on most is cancellation and offboarding. The moment someone decides to leave is one of the clearest signals you’ll get about perceived value.
We’re spending more time there refining the cancellation experience, testing messaging and understanding what actually resonates. That includes save offers, pricing tests and understanding when it’s better to downgrade someone rather than lose them entirely.
With cost-of-living pressures and likely changes around click-to-cancel regulation, expectations are shifting. Making it difficult to leave isn’t a sustainable strategy. The opportunity is to make the process straightforward and use that moment to show that you understand what someone values.
How do you measure retention success, and how long does it take to know if a strategy is actually working?
There isn’t a single measure; it depends on what you’re trying to change and where someone is in their lifecycle. At the highest level, churn and tenure are still the ultimate signals. But they take time, so you need earlier indicators.
For us, habits are the most reliable leading signal. If someone starts engaging consistently, even just once a week, you can be confident they’re more likely to stick around.
We also look closely at the first 100 days. That’s the most fragile part of the relationship, and if we can get someone through that period with a clear habit formed, their likelihood of staying increases significantly. From there, we layer signals together, including habit formation, engagement shifts and cohort behaviour, to understand whether something is working before it shows up in churn.
How has platform algorithm volatility (social, search, and Discover) changed the way you think about owned audience retention?
It hasn’t fundamentally changed how we think about retention; if anything, it’s reinforced it. We’ve always placed a lot of value on direct audience relationships, because the behaviour is materially different. Someone who chooses to come to you is far more likely to build a habit than someone who discovers you passively.
You see that most clearly in intent. Someone coming from Search has actively chosen your brand after actively asking a question. Someone coming from Discover has been served content in an algorithm, and their behaviour on site with us reflects that difference – Search converts 6 x the rate that Discover does. If you look at our owned channels, the conversion rate is even higher. Readers who clicked on an article via a newsletter were 2.3x more likely to subscribe than those who came from social, 1.5x that of search and 15x that of Google Discover.
What has changed, off the back of the platform and algorithm volatility, is how deliberate we are about building those direct relationships.
As platform volatility increases, you can’t rely on any single channel. So we’re focused on creating multiple entry points into a direct relationship – newsletters, app usage, out-of-home marketing spend and other channels owned by Nine. Retention is much easier to build when the relationship is intentional, not incidental.
Final Thoughts
Audience retention is possible when publishers truly understand their audience and go beyond short-term engagement signals. Because these signals might be misleading. Interests keep shifting and trends keep changing. Visitors who might have subscribed to a publishing site because of their interest in a particular content category might soon experience fatigue if they aren’t exposed to diverse genres.
Retention is a strategic process that is not earned in a day. It is earned through trust, expertise, credibility, and consistent value that motivates readers to come back to the site, form a habit and develop a sense of loyalty.
Publishers who succeed in retaining their audiences don’t chase them with superficial engagement hacks, tailored content, or diverse features. They focus on improving the customer experience through every single touchpoint- from the first interaction, providing the first paywall, engaging them through various types of content, creating a justified pricing structure, to helping them build a consistent habit through newsletters, or even making their cancellation experience seamless.
At its core, audience retention is simpler than it seems. When the interaction is meaningful throughout the funnel, when the content adds value, when the areas of interest of the audience are not narrowed down, and when quality builds enduring habits, that’s when you create a community of loyal audience.
