The International News Media Association (INMA) on 17 March 2022 announced the launch of a new digital subscription performance benchmarking service for news media companies following a successful six-month pilot.

INMA’s Subscription Benchmarking Service is designed as an international peer-to-peer exchange, promising an active benchmarking community and featuring data-rich dashboards with actionable insights and personalized subscription best practices.

The paid-for service is available to INMA’s corporate members who publish at least one online news service. Publishers are not locked into any hardware, software, or consulting agreements, and may submit several brands at no additional charge.

The pilot was conducted with 102 national and regional news brands from 30 companies in 19 countries. The 'Subscription Benchmarking Service' is part of INMA’s readers first initiative and led by Greg Piechota, the association’s researcher-in-residence.

As part of the service every quarter, INMA confidentially collects 20 points of data on performance, calculates 34 KPIs, and then slices them by cohorts, including geography, maturity, target market, type of paywall, and more.

The data is aggregated, anonymised, and shared with participants in an online dashboard featuring more than 150 charts and tables across 10 interactive tabs.

Each brand has personalised scorecards on digital reader engagement, registration, and subscriptions, allowing comparisons to cohorts of similar brands and the top performers in each KPI.

During exclusive webinars led by Piechota, INMA presents in-depth analyses of trends, striking differences between cohorts, and inspiring correlations. The best performers are also invited to share best practices with the larger benchmarking community.

The service also connects publishers for one-to-one meetings to exchange ideas and experiences. During individual briefings and ask-me-anything sessions, INMA analysts demonstrate how to use the benchmarks for gap and opportunity analyses, strategy and budget, and for planning new initiatives.

“We kept hearing from our members that running a business without benchmarking was like driving with your eyes closed,” said Piechota, who leads INMA’s readers first initiative. “So, we created the 'Subscription Benchmarking Service' to provide our members access to reliable and trusted information about how their performance compares to their peers, and to assist them in improving that performance with evidence-based insights and best practices.”

INMA partnered with Laboratorium EE, a Polish-Lithuanian research and software development company, to build the online report and assist in data collection, verification, and analysis.