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Increase your app revenue with these subscription tactics

We highlight the best tactics for increasing subscription revenue in your app from RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps report.

22nd March 2025

A new report highlights the growing gap between the subscription performance between the best and the rest of apps. Photo by Daria Nepriakhina, from Unsplash

Subscriptions have become the foundation for publishers’ revenue resilience, and they have usually leveraged apps to retain their most loyal, highly engaged and valuable subscribers.

When publishers first rolled out subscriptions, publishers broke down into two camps – metered and hard paywall advocates, but The State of Subscription Apps report from RevenueCat report shows how sophisticated revenue operations have become with metered/freemium offerings, trials and discounts.

The report provides a wealth of benchmarks, insights and advice on how publishers can maximise subs revenue in the context of other app revenue streams such as advertising.

The vast majority (80%) of trial and subscription conversions happen on the first day after download, so optimising day one activities is essential.
In line with publishing industry data, trial periods are growing longer, making engagement efforts during trial periods even more important than in the past.
While more publishers and even broadcasters such as CNN have made subscriptions key to their revenue mix, the report highlights the importance of diversified revenue streams in maximising income for app publishers.

The data shows the wide gap between the best and the rest and provides ways publishers can improve their performance by optimising various steps in the subscription journey.

Strategies for optimising app revenue in the context of other revenue streams is one of the topics we discuss in our community, Mobile Matters. In addition to a Slack community and strategic guides on our Community Hub, we also hold workshops allowing you to hear from your peers about tactics that work. You can sign up to join here.

The subscription performance gap

By Kevin Anderson

The competition for subscription revenue has intensified, leading to a doubling between the best-performing subscription apps and the bottom 25%, the report found.

The State of Subscription Apps report covers a wide range of verticals including gaming, health and fitness, business, travel, shopping and productivity, but it echoes the “winner take most” dynamics amongst news publishers that both the Reuters Institute of Journalism has identified in its research.

Before diving too much more deeply into the data, there is an important caveat about the report. RevenueCat lumps together news and magazine publishers with music and entertainment app publishers in its Media & Entertainment category. This means they are benchmarking video streamers such as Netflix and Disney+ and music apps like Spotify with newspaper and magazine publishers. However, the report in the context of other industry data and research highlights lessons for news and magazine publishers.

However, with this dramatic difference between the highest and lower performers, even within vertical, the report outlines how publishers can improve their performance and deliver the best results.

Conversion and retention

The first day after a user downloads an app is critical. For those apps using trial subscriptions, 82% started the trial the same day they downloaded the app, Phil Carter, founder and CEO of Elemental Growth, said. Consistent with the data we have highlighted before, paywall visibility is important.

He also recommended using a social sign-in option using Apple, Google or Facebook. He also recommended “personalizing the new user experience using a brief onboarding quiz”.

Offer type is also important. Across all app types, most users converted the day they downloaded an app whether the publisher used a freemium model or a hard paywall. The hard paywall conversion rate was higher because users were “forced to decide upfront”.

It showed the importance of subscription purchase onboarding to communicate the value of the app and the value of the subscription immediately. Once they have downloaded the app, make the onboarding screens actionable with buttons that encourage them to opt into push notifications, sign up for newsletters and personalise the app.

However, the freemium model also demonstrated a significant increase in conversions six weeks or more later, indicating that publishers must have a clear engagement strategy, which often includes an extended onboarding communication series to foster habits.

This is in line with INMA research that showed larger, national publishers were using a cyclone strategy, where they focused on conversion first and then leaned into engagement efforts to retain these newly acquired subscribers.

Of course, focusing on conversion can cause churn to spike. Marcus Burke, with Meta Ads and an app growth consultant, said that even quick cancellations can deliver insights. There is a cohort of users who cancel a trial minutes after starting it, which tracks with audiences who take out a trial subscription only to read a single article. However, by gathering data on this cohort, publishers can begin to understand the “quality of a cohort”, Marcus said, which can help inform where to focus their acquisition efforts.

Retention and subscription duration

Media & Entertainment apps had some of the highest levels of retention, with the highest performing apps – those in the 90th percentile – having an astounding 69.8% retention rate amongst subscribers on annual plans after one year. However, even the best-performing apps in the category only had a 35.9% retention rate after a year for subscribers on a monthly plan.

It is another data point showing that annual plans are much better at retaining subscribers than monthly plans. INMA’s subscription benchmarks found annual subscribers were retained at twice the rate (70%) than monthly subscribers (34%) after year one, and that gap expanded to almost three times by year three. By year three, publishers saw a 60% positive difference in the lifetime value of annual subscribers versus those on monthly plans.

Bundling and targeted upsells

Bundling has become a popular strategy for publishers to increase their average revenue per user, with the New York Times promoting a super bundle of cooking, puzzles and reviews to news subscribers. Their recent app redesign nudges users to buy the super bundle, with tabs to the left and right of their core daily news offering highlighting these other products.

This is part of a trend of app publishers to educate users about paid and premium features. If you’ve got a premium membership tier in your app, how are you communicating with users about the value and benefits of joining? “Show users what they’re missing to increase the perceived value of paid tiers,” Brandon Gador said in the report.

Just as offers can be personalised, he also recommends “thoughtful timing and targeting” highlighting bundles or tiers. “Segment users by behaviour and trigger upsells when they’re most likely to convert,” he added.

As a New York Times news subscriber, I am seeing more emails from its Cooking service during holidays when I might want to try a new recipe, and push notifications are a powerful way to identify people’s interests outside of the core product and identify by opens who might be most interested in bundled products or premium tier offerings.

The report is packed with data and advice, and while it draws on app strategies from industries outside of publishing, it is full of ideas worth adopting to drive subscription success and revenue growth for your app.

Industry News

Here are some of the most important headlines about the business of news and publishing as well as strategies and tactics in product management, analytics and audience engagement.