Challenge

Old Queen Street Media, founded in 2019, builds cutting-edge media platforms designed to foster productive public debate across its digital and print publications. To manage subscriptions and payments, the company has relied on different traditional media bureaus over the years that used third-party systems.

While the bureaus handled many operational processes for Old Queen Street Media, they lacked the agility the company needed to keep pace. The arrangements were also expensive, requiring a multiyear contract with a minimum volume commitment, as well as additional fees for setting up campaigns, changing price points, failed payments, payment recovery, and other services.
Dunning was especially inefficient. Recovering failed payments was a manual, multiweek process, and updating card details often required days of additional work, resulting in high fees and lost customers. Customers often resubscribed at lower rates, generating win-back commissions for the bureau and reducing Old Queen Street Media’s revenue and retention.

The publications also experienced reliability issues during checkout, impacting customer retention, along with time-consuming processes for adding new currencies. The company’s marketing platform also received fragmented customer data from its publications, making it difficult to track subscriber behaviour or create campaigns and offers. By 2024, high churn rates impacted the publications’ ability to meet growth goals.

Old Queen Street Media wanted to replace its manual subscription processes to simplify operations, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience. The goal was to bring subscription management in-house and adopt a more modern, automated billing system that could improve retention and support growth.

Solution

Old Queen Street Media chose Stripe to gain greater control over subscription management and improve customer retention. Because two of its publications already used Stripe Payments, the decision was straightforward.

The company partnered with Stripe’s professional services team to ensure a smooth implementation. The team analyzed Old Queen Street Media’s business and timeline goals, and created a 16-week transition plan to Stripe—helping manage all the moving parts, from technical workstreams to third-party partners. “They were always transparent,” said Sebastian Giraud, COO of Old Queen Street Media. “It was better than any support from any other partner.”

Old Queen Street Media implemented Billing to manage subscriptions in-house and eliminate bureau costs. Stripe Billing enabled the company to build a comprehensive CoEditor product offering, which leveraged Stripe to devise completely new user flows, including an improved subscription-cancellation flow, segmented retention campaigns, and dynamic pricing to reduce customer churn. The company can now create and manage its products and price points without a third-party gatekeeper.

“Previously, we had to give at least two weeks’ notice for an ad hoc campaign,” said Drew Brown, head of subscriptions for The Spectator. “Now, we have offers live within 15 minutes.”

To improve dunning, Old Queen Street Media adopted Smart Retries, which pairs AI-powered retry logic with insights from Stripe’s $1.9 trillion payment network. It also uses automatic email reminders to notify customers of failed payments.

To further reduce churn and increase authorisation rates, the company used Stripe Authorization Boost, which includes network tokens that connect to card networks to tokenise a customer’s primary account number, even if a card is lost or replaced. The company also now has better visibility into payment declines and 3D Secure failures.

Old Queen Street Media implemented Payments with Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite to increase conversion, expand payment options, and provide a localised experience. With Stripe Checkout, a prebuilt payment form optimised for conversion across all device types, the company can more easily add new payment methods across the publications, including cards, Bacs, PayPal, and digital wallets. After waiting three years for Google Pay, “I think someone just pressed a button, and it was there,” said Brown.

The company also implemented Adaptive Pricing, which automatically presents customers with localised prices and dynamically surfaces the most relevant payment methods at each transaction. Stripe eliminated the time-consuming burden of currency setup, enabling the company to launch a new offer in South African rand in just days. It also enabled Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe that securely saves and autofills the registrant’s address and payment details for quicker transactions.

Old Queen Street Media then migrated its subscriptions and set up recurring billing using Stripe’s Billing migration toolkit. “The toolkit had a spreadsheet with six columns. I could migrate hundreds of thousands of subscriptions with the right preparation,” said Brown. “It was as simple as that.”

To minimise disruption and reduce the risk of lost payments, the teams coordinated each publication’s migration, so Stripe went live the same week as the subscription transfer.

Results

Stripe professional services prevented costly rework and technical debt

Old Queen Street Media partnered with Stripe’s professional services team to follow implementation best practices and avoid costly rework. The collaboration with Stripe ensured the company could achieve its goals more effectively and efficiently. “We have a product we can stand behind and scale,” said Giraud.

Switching to Stripe is expected to deliver over £1 million annual impact

By moving to CoEditor in adopting Stripe, Old Queen Street Media brought its subscription management in-house to eliminate bureau-dependent processes and fees. Improvements to renewal journeys, checkout, and dunning have increased acquisition, conversions, and retention.

Compared with 2024, the company estimates that its move to Stripe will generate an annual impact of over £1 million through lower operating costs and projected subscriber growth. That total includes an estimated 66% reduction in operating costs alone.

Stripe automated dunning and payment recovery to optimise costs

With Billing’s automated dunning process and added features, such as Smart Retries and network tokens, Old Queen Street Media has reduced costs by eliminating bureau management fees for failed payments and card updates.

Preventing missed payments has reduced involuntary customer churn and eliminated win-back fees. As a result, the company has seen a 172% increase in recovered payments with Smart Retries.

Optimized Checkout Suite now drives customer retention and growth

Since implementing Checkout and Link in the CoEditor checkout flow, Old Queen Street Media has increased conversion by 240%. With a more reliable checkout in place, the company can now invest in marketing campaigns with greater confidence that the traffic it drives will convert. “We never knew how many people we lost at the checkout,” said Brown. “Checkout and Link have been game-changing for us.”

The company has also introduced a new cancellation workflow that increased The Spectator’s save rate by 68%—meaning more customers who started the cancellation process ultimately opted to keep their subscription.

The Spectator UK increases payments during migration

Old Queen Street Media worked with Stripe’s professional services and data migrations teams to plan a six-week migration and launch with Stripe across its five businesses.

The teams successfully avoided payment blackout periods and ensured each publication continued processing substantial payments during migration. During The Spectator’s UK migration, payment volume even increased.