Work

New Subscriber Paths

A newsroom metric I co-created to measure which content actually drives subscriptions — not just clicks, but the stories that move a reader to pay. It changed how the newsroom and the analytics team talk about value, and it contributed roughly a million dollars in monthly recurring revenue.

How it works

A path includes every article a reader viewed in the 30 days before they subscribed — each new subscriber has one. The metric counts how often each article shows up across all of those paths — which turns out to have a much tighter relationship with subscription conversion than session volume alone.

Once you have paths per story, articles can be tagged with levers — story archetype, topic, location, framing, discovery strategy, photos, video, galleries, content vertical — to look for patterns. The output shows a ranked view of what kinds of journalism people are actually willing to pay for, not just what they click on. Something few other newsrooms are measuring.

Paths don't measure retention, reach, engagement, or readers who can't afford to subscribe — they're a conversion signal, not a whole-picture metric. Discounted paywall offers also create noise unrelated to content, so those periods — among other features — are controlled for when reporting and modeling expected paths.

The relationship part

This wasn't only an analytics project — it reshaped how News and Analytics work together. The process was collaborative from the start: editors helped define what they wanted to know, and we built the infrastructure and analysis to answer it. The result was a shared language for talking about content value that both teams actually trusted.

The numbers are proprietary, so the chart is anonymized — the method, and how it changed the Analytics–News relationship, is the part worth sharing.

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