How many free readers become paying subscribers?

What’s a “good rate” for free readers to become paying subscribers?

5-10% is what I’ve heard casually tossed out but that seems to come from a VERY SMALL DATA SET.

Substack set the bar at 10% a few years back.

> Judd Legum of Popular Information told Substack in 2021 that his rate was between 5-10%.

> Casey Newton of Platformer reported 5% free to paid conversion rate as recently as last year, and he has been consistently saying that since 2021.

> ConvertKit agrees that 5% is more common and beehiiv quotes 5-10% as the range too.

I can’t find much more data about this. We need more data on this.

I logged into Substack to check their analytics on an old paid publication of mine and confirmed it’s missing some info you’d need to actually calculate this rate (like time-to-convert from free to paid.)

I have no idea where Judd and Casey are getting their conversion rate. I’m not saying they are making it up. I’m saying that we don’t have enough information from across the news industry to know if 5-10% is actually the benchmark.

So I’m running a survey to get more data on free→paid conversion.

If you are an independent journalist or if you’re part of a newsroom, please consider sending me your data so we can compile a stronger picture of what to expect here. You can also forward this to peers. That would help us collect more of a range.

I’m primarily interested in data from the news and media space because, based on newsrooms I’ve talked to, the conversion rate is likely higher than business or hobby newsletters.

Read more below about how I’m thinking about this conversion rate and what I’m going to do with your data.

Calculating free to paid conversion rate

We need the following to be able to calculate this:

• Number of free readers (a few sample ranges)

• Number of paying subscribers (a few sample ranges)

• % of paying subscribers that are never free readers (they join and subscribe same day)

• Average days or weeks that it takes a free reader to become a paying subscriber (the conversion window)

If Reader A joins your newsletter in January and converts to a subscription in March, dividing the paid readers in March by the free readers in March doesn’t actually tell us anything about who converted when. It just tells us what percentage of your audience is paid right now.

This would theoretically be a fine proxy EXCEPT on my spring newsroom project, I calculated that roughly 30% of their new paying subscribers were not on the email list before. Those readers must’ve been spending time on the website or on social media and they became known to us for the first time when they bought their subscription.

Average days or weeks that it takes to convert is actually one of the most helpful metrics to understand here because it will help you target your upgrade messaging for readers who are in that time window.

Below is an analysis I did on this for the newsroom. It was roughly an average of 7 weeks for a free reader to become a paid reader (for the 70% of paying subscribers who were free readers first).

That’s why we targeted the “Why pay” sequence at 6 weeks after newsletter sign up (rather than in the welcome sequence which is likely too early).

Are you still with me?

How I’m collecting this data and what I’m going to do with it

I’m now aware that small newsrooms don’t have extra analytics in place so we’re keeping it pretty simple while also getting more detail than “I think it’s 5-10%”

I want to collect a sample of:

• Free readers from January-June 2024

• Paying subscribers from February-July 2024

This is one month off on purpose. I don’t know if 7 weeks is a standard conversion window yet, and it’s unlikely that, in that first month, your free readers are getting upsold that fast because they’d only hear from you a couple times (unless you send a daily newsletter in which case, please disclose that.)

With this data set, we get 6 months so readers who join Feb-Apr have a good long time to convert and readers who join May-June don’t and that gives us a pretty good cross section of reader behavior.

I’ve added some other stats I’ll find helpful in analysis like monthly averages and how often you send your newsletters.

When I present this data back to you, I will explain the data calculations in detail. There’s nothing I hate more than “I think it’s 5%” with no methodology shared on how that was determined. I invite you to challenge my method now or in the future when I share back the results. It’s going to be a work in progress.

The goal is for indie journalists and reader-supported newsrooms to get more clear on what they should expect when. I want you to be able to forecast your growth more accurately and to know how much to spend on growing your free list versus trying to convert the readers you have now.

When you know what every free reader is worth and how many convert to paid, you can make smarter marketing bets like where to place ads for quality subscribers and when to push upgrade messaging to existing readers.

Take the survey now and help us figure this data out for journalists growing their own publications.