‘Normalized’ churn provides a better understanding of renewal behavior

Churn is a key indicator for the health of any subscription-based business. But as publishers’ approaches to subscriptions become more sophisticated, the metrics they’re using to monitor and analyze their renewal performance are becoming increasingly nuanced, too. When calculating topline churn, most publishers use the commonly understood approach of dividing the number of cancellations in a given period by the number of subscribers who were active at the beginning of that period. That’s often calculated on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.  But as FT Strategies notes, this approach doesn’t offer much insight into how effectively a publisher actually retained subscribers in any given period. If zero subscribers come up for renewal in a given month then retention r