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Since retooling its newsletter strategy in 2019, the Vox Media title New York Magazine has seen its email readership—as Succession’s Kendall Roy might say—go supersonic.
The publisher, which topped 1 million subscribers across its 30 email products in December, has achieved its growth through a multifaceted strategy: one that blends traditional newsletters with five subscriber-only pop-ups. These pop-ups include its popular new offering, Succession Club, a weekly analysis of the most recent episode of Succession, featuring writers from across the New York Magazine ecosystem.
Combined, the investment in newsletters has yielded both a boost in list size—up from roughly 500,000 in 2019—as well as a 10% improvement in annual digital subscription retention in 2022, according to Priyanka Arya, the senior vice president of consumer revenue at Vox Media.
The publisher declined to provide its specific retention rate or its total number of digital subscriptions.
The uptick in retention and total email readership comes as publishers are placing more emphasis on subscriber loyalty, seeking to improve the lifetime value of their readers by reducing turnover. Amid the backdrop of a depressed advertising climate, recurring revenues have become increasingly critical to media companies.
“Part of the value of a subscription business for a company like Vox Media is that it is counter-cyclical, in that it can buffer a bad advertising period,” said editor in chief David Haskell. “That was part of the bet that Vox made on New York Magazine when it acquired us, and it has paid off.”
Boosting retention by juicing engagement
With its pop-up, subscriber-only newsletters, New York Magazine has placed its focus on subscriber retention and engagement, rather than acquisition, according to Haskell.
The publisher is actively exploring possibilities surrounding sponsorship and advertising with the pop-ups, but it currently monetizes them through programmatic advertising, a passive means of generating a small amount of ad revenue on a product it planned to send regardless.
To determine which subjects could thrive as pop-ups, the newsletter team at New York Magazine, which consists of three full-time editors and one full-time writer, uses a blend of audience data and intuition.
The editors use site traffic, comment volume and social media interaction as proxies for interest, then spin up newsletters that offer fervent audiences a vehicle to go deeper on subjects they love.