Most media and publishing businesses can tell you their pageviews or open rates. Most can tell you their subscriber count. Almost none can tell you their audience revenue per user across all monetization streams, which acquisition channels produce subscribers that actually engage, or what engagement signals in the first 90 days predict whether a reader becomes a paying subscriber, a sponsor-worthy impression, or just a bounce.
These are the 10 Growth Intelligence metrics we aim to build for every media and publisher client — though in practice, most organizations aren’t mature enough in their people, processes, and tools to achieve all ten on day one. They’re organized into four clusters: Acquisition Economics, Activation Economics, Expansion & Retention, and Efficiency. The services page shows the top 5. This is the full framework.
What makes media different: audience attention drives monetization across multiple streams — sponsorships, programmatic advertising, paid subscriptions, events, and first-party data licensing. A single audience member might generate value through newsletter opens (sponsorship impressions), site visits (programmatic revenue), event attendance, and eventually a paid subscription. The metrics must capture this full economic footprint.
This framework applies across the media spectrum: newsletter-first publishers monetizing through sponsorship and paid tiers, content companies running programmatic and direct-sold advertising, events and membership businesses selling access and community, and hybrid models blending all of the above.
The Series
We’ve broken the full framework into four deep-dives — one per cluster — each covering all media archetypes (newsletter, ad-supported, paid subscription, and membership) with detailed benchmarks and interactive visualizations.
Part 1: Acquisition Economics
Multi-stream audience value cohorts and CAC payback by channel: the acquisition economics most publishers have never measured. Why a single audience member generates value across multiple revenue streams.
Part 2: Activation Economics
Audience activation, AQL scoring, and touchpoint attribution — the four metrics that predict which readers become subscribers, sponsors, and champions. Every model has an activation moment.
Part 3: Expansion & Retention
Expansion signals and engagement decay: detecting who will upgrade and who will leave 30–90 days before it shows in revenue. NRR impact and the intervention window.
Part 4: Efficiency Metrics
Monetization velocity and growth efficiency score: how fast your audience flywheel spins and how sustainably you convert investment into revenue. Plus engagement scoring architecture and the implementation roadmap.
These are the metrics we build during every media and membership engagement. The Sprint assesses which ones your data can already support and which gaps we need to close. Book a Sprint.
