Source: Digiday
Publishers are deliberately shrinking their addressable audiences while growing subscription revenue—a reversal of legacy media's scale-obsessed playbook. The midterms become a stress test: can publishers convert transactional election interest into durable subscriptions, or will the audience churn once the news cycle cools? The constraint in digital publishing isn't reach anymore. It's whether publishers can abandon the ad-supported growth treadmill for the harder work of building recurring revenue from people who value their specific editorial voice.