Industry News
SELECTED ITEMS OF INTEREST TO THE MEDIA COMMUNITY
Subscription sea change: As acquisition slows, retention management drives the business
For years, it seemed that many subscription marketers were aggressively spending to acquire net-new users at “any cost.” However, in considering Recurly's recent 2026 State of Subscriptions report, this behavior is over.
The industry-wide subscription acquisition rate has dropped from 4.1% in 2024 to ~ 2.3% in 2025. Because finding new customers has become more difficult and expensive, revenue is now being driven by a focus on keeping and winning back the customers the companies already had.
Resurly's report highlights two behaviors:
- "Win-Back" subscriptions now account for 25% of all new sign-ups, up from 20% just a year ago. The report stresses that “churn” is no longer a permanent end to the relationship, but rather a part of a "cycling" behavior where consumers move in and out of services based on their current needs.
- "Pause" not cancellation. A dramatic shift in consumer behavior this year is giving subs a chance to stop the service not just by "cancellation" but a more temporary sounding “pause.” This gives users a way to step away without cutting all the data and comms ties. The "Pause" feature has seen an astronomical 337% year-over-year increase.
Read the entire 2026 State of Subscriptions report from Recurly. #managementconsulting #subscriptions #subscriptionmarketing
Why your YouTube Strategy Is now your AI strategy: the surprising metric predicting GEO
New research from SaaS marketing company Ahrefs explored how brands show up in AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode. After analyzing millions of AI responses, Ahrefs found that the top factor is YouTube mentions. “‘YouTube mentions’ refer to any time a brand name crops up in a YouTube video title, transcript, or description.”
Key Takeaways:
- YouTube presence is currently the strongest predictor of AI visibility
- “YouTube data is so heavily baked into both the input and output of AI assistants…YouTube correlations become less surprising and more inevitable.”
- Meanwhile, traditional metrics like Domain Rating (DR) show a much weaker correlation
- Content volume—specifically the number of site pages—shows almost no relationship to AI visibility.
It appears that “brand discovery” is increasingly tied to where the brand is being discussed…on camera.
Read the full story: Ahrefs Brand Visibility Study
#managementconsulting #AImarketing #GEO
How CBS’s Bari Weiss can avoid getting an ulcer
People vs. Algorithms with Troy Young and Brain Morrissey is a weekly podcast of wide-ranging, deeply insider conversations about all things media. These consultant-commentators released a recent show consisting primarily of what they called a “big picture diatribe.”
Two of the core ideas in this episode explain why free-standing media companies can make livings, but rarely create businesses.
- Horizontal vs. Individual products. “Horizontal products like YouTube always beat…the individual efforts of media companies” because “crazy sophisticated ad systems” are needed to succeed in making money for individual media companies
- “Glue factory” observation. They believe “every media entity gets sold, rationalized or reinterpreted as some kind of harvestable IP.”
And this leads to practical advice from Young and Morrisey for the Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.
“The funny thing is that [at] CBS News…Bari Weiss ultimately gets an ulcer trying to fix an irrelevant franchise in CBS News. [Instead] her focus should be on 60 Minutes extending across channels and formats to reach new generations because it does show up in the feed a lot on YouTube and it's a format that can work.”
Listen to the full episode.
#managementconsulting #mediadistribution #mediaconsolidation
