When we talk about reaching younger audiences, we can’t avoid talking about pricing structure, too. One legacy title just took a bold new path — a subscription that isn’t simply a discount but a new product.

The Economist recently quietly launched something that deserves some attention. It’s called Economist Play: a US$15/month subscription, about US$10 cheaper than the full Economist, piloting in Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It bundles games, podcasts, daily audio briefings, short-form video and subscriber-only newsletters. Existing Podcasts+ subscribers get moved into it automatically, no price change.

No long-form journalism, no prestige. Just the formats that already work with younger, lighter audiences, repackaged as something you’d actually pay for.

Why this is the story, not the footnote

I’ve had a version of this conversation with my colleague Greg Piechota, INMA’s researcher-in-residence and lead of the Readers First Initiative, more than once recently. Almost every other industry has figured out that “one product, one price” doesn’t work anymore. 

Streaming has ad-supported tiers, fitness apps have “lite” versions. Software has freemium ladders with five steps, not two. News publishers, by and large, still offer one thing: the full subscription or nothing. Often with one big fear in the back of their mind: We do not want to cannibalise our product. 

The Economist just went in a different direction, and I can’t wait to see where they land with it. 

That matters for young audiences specifically, because the “nothing” option is exactly where most of them currently sit. Not because they don’t value journalism, but because the entry price has always been the full price. Play is a bet that a lot of people who’d never buy the flagship subscription will pay something for a lighter, more social-native bundle.

Whether that bet pays off financially is still open. But the structural move — building a tier instead of a discount — is the part worth stealing. 

The Economist’s other bet: bring the platform home

This isn’t the first time The Economist has made a bet like this. 

A few months ago, I sat down with Liv Moloney, head of social video at The Economist, for the very first episode of my podcast No One’s Reading This. The topic then was vertical video and the bold call the newsroom made to bring that platform-native format into their subscriber app without dumbing it down. 

Liv told me they refused to talk down to their audience: “We did not want to patronise our subscribers.” 

The content got richer, not shorter, when it moved from social to owned platform. And it worked in both directions: The denser version performed better on social, too, and subscribers engaged more with the social-native storytelling once it lived inside the app.

Play looks like the next chapter of that same instinct: Take the format, the tone, the habits that work on platforms you don’t own, and give them a reason to exist on the one you do. First it was video. Now it’s a whole tier.

If you missed the original conversation, it’s worth revisiting.

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