For two decades, the media industry viewed its digital future primarily as a shift from print to the web. Mobile came later. After all, apps only became part of our everyday lives in the 2010s, when smartphones truly went mainstream.

But what if someone scrolling through the news every morning on their phone is just as engaged as the loyal reader who used to stop by the newsstand every day?

To better understand this quiet shift in media consumption, we spoke with Fabien Mulot, Head of Customer Marketing at L'Équipe, one of France's most widely consumed news brands.

His conclusion is simple: if you want to build a lasting relationship with your audience, nothing beats a well-designed mobile app.

The real question is: how far can a media company personalize the experience without losing what makes its editorial identity unique?

The interview

When you look at the L'Équipe app today, do you still see a traditional media outlet, or a digital product?

It's absolutely a digital product. Editorial content remains at the heart of everything we do. Everything you'll find in the print edition is also available on the website, the mobile website, and the app.

But today, the user experience, customer journeys, personalization, notifications, and subscriptions are just as important as the content itself in shaping the relationship we have with our readers.

How does the app coexist with the newspaper and the website?

The most visible reminder of our heritage is probably what we call "the PDF," the digital version of the printed newspaper that many of our subscribers still read every morning.

Beyond that continuity, the website and the app are now designed as digital products that mirror one another. The mission hasn't changed: showcase the work of our journalists while delivering the smoothest and most relevant experience possible.

The arrival of our new CEO, Rolf Heinz, in 2024 also marked an important turning point. He introduced our Vision 2030 roadmap, with ambitious goals: reaching 20 million monthly unique visitors and 500,000 digital subscribers by 2030.

More importantly, that vision aligned every team around a shared objective: continuing to grow our digital products while strengthening our relationship with our users.

What role does the app play in L'Équipe's business today?

It's become a strategic channel. Today, nearly one out of every two direct subscribers joins through the mobile app.

For years, growth in our subscriber base was driven primarily by the web. But we realized that web growth alone wouldn't be enough to achieve our Vision 2030 objectives.

Why double down on the app when the website was still growing?

Since 2023, we've required every new app user to create an account before accessing the experience. That strategy allowed us to build a massive base of logged-in users, better understand their behavior, and most importantly, develop a direct relationship with them.

Yet despite that growth in authenticated users, we weren't seeing the same momentum in mobile subscriptions that we were seeing on the web. There was a real disconnect.

We had built an incredibly valuable audience inside the app, but we weren't converting that value into subscriber growth. That's when we started asking ourselves how we could unlock more of that potential.

What convinced you it was time to accelerate your mobile strategy?

Two simple observations. First, a user with a L'Équipe account is 18 times more likely to subscribe than an anonymous visitor. Second, more than 90% of our app users are logged in. The opportunity was obvious: we needed to convert this newly built audience into subscribers.

Why has the app become so central to your strategy?

We know that whenever someone moves from the web to the app, their engagement increases. They visit more often, interact more, and become much more likely to build lasting habits.

That's why we see the app as the ideal destination for our users. It's the platform where we try to guide our most engaged readers because it's by far our strongest lever for increasing engagement and building daily habits.

How do you encourage people to make that transition?

Today, our onboarding strategy revolves much more around the app because it gives us access to engagement features that simply don't exist anywhere else. For example, during our onboarding journeys, we regularly invite web visitors to download the app.

What makes engagement inside the app so much stronger?

Push notifications are probably the best example. Users can choose exactly what they want to follow: a sport, a team, a competition, or even an individual athlete. I can subscribe to every update about Victor Wembanyama or receive alerts whenever my favorite soccer team is in the news.

More importantly, the app is always with you. It's available everywhere, at any time, accompanying users throughout their day like a daily companion. That's why mobile has become the center of the experience.

You mentioned that app users are much more engaged than web users. What does that actually look like?

The difference is striking. Our app users are among our most engaged readers. They visit incredibly frequently and consume much more content every time they open the app. Our largest user cohort opens the app more than twenty days every month.

On the web, the audience is much more fluid. Many people arrive through Google Search, social media, or shared links. They're more occasional visitors and naturally less connected to the brand.

How do you know when a habit is actually forming?

At L'Équipe, we rely on an engagement score based on Recency, Frequency, and Volume, or RFV. The principle is simple: the more often someone comes back and the more content they consume, the stronger their relationship with us becomes.

That helps us identify not only our most engaged readers, but also the people who might be starting to drift away. We've found that users with strong RFV scores are twice as likely to subscribe as those with lower engagement.

What prevented you from taking full advantage of that opportunity?

On the web, launching A/B tests is relatively straightforward. We can quickly experiment with different user journeys, learn from the results, and improve.

Inside the app, it's a completely different story. Every test has to be scheduled into a product roadmap, prioritized alongside other projects, developed by engineering, and later analyzed with our data team.

The irony is that the whole philosophy behind A/B testing is that you shouldn't hesitate to experiment. You learn by testing, iterating, and gradually converging on the best possible experience.

Why did this become such an urgent issue?

Because our subscription offering was becoming much more sophisticated. We introduced new bundles like L'Équipe + Ligue 1+ and L'Équipe + Eurosport, where a subscription didn't just unlock L'Équipe's journalism anymore, it also included live competitions and premium video experiences within our ecosystem.

That immediately raised new questions. How should we promote the L'Équipe + Eurosport bundle versus our standard subscription? How should our messaging change depending on what content someone is reading?

Those are exactly the kinds of scenarios we needed to test continuously, but we simply couldn't move fast enough.

What changed after that?

We started looking for tools that would allow our Marketing and CRM teams to experiment and optimize on their own, without depending on traditional development cycles. It worked: today, we've gained a tremendous amount of autonomy.

Can you give us an example of an experiment that illustrates that shift?

One of the most interesting examples involved contextualizing our subscription offers. For years, our paywalls were fairly generic. Then we started adapting them based on what users were doing: whether they were reading an article or watching a video, what kind of content they were consuming, and even who they were.

Some of those experiments produced conversion lifts of nearly 45%, simply because the offer matched the user's intent much more closely in that specific moment.

How do you maintain that relationship over time?

The key to staying relevant as a media brand is staying relevant to each individual reader. If someone follows tennis closely, for example, we can recommend tennis alerts, news about Carlos Alcaraz, a dedicated newsletter, or the schedule of upcoming tournaments.

The goal isn't to show people more content. It's to show them the most relevant content. To achieve that, we combine two complementary forms of personalization:

The first is explicit: we ask users what sports, competitions, or teams they're interested in.

The second is behavioral: we learn from how they use the product, their reading history, subscription history, newsletters they open, and the content they engage with over time. That's actually our most powerful form of personalization.

Each interaction becomes another signal that helps us better understand what matters to that person.

What role does onboarding play in that process?

It's essential. Those first few screens help us quickly understand what users care about so we can tailor the experience from their very first visit. If we already know someone mainly follows soccer or cycling, we can immediately recommend relevant alerts and highlight the content they're most likely to enjoy.

That early stage is incredibly important because it sets the tone for everything that follows. Whenever someone reads several articles on the mobile website, for example, we regularly encourage them to continue reading in the app.

The objective is simple: gradually move our most engaged readers toward the platform that's best suited to building a long-term relationship.

Do you think the future of media depends on personalization?

Absolutely, personalization has become one of the most effective ways to communicate with our audience.

A cycling fan, a Paris Saint-Germain supporter, and a tennis enthusiast don't come to L'Équipe for exactly the same reasons. It only makes sense to recommend content, alerts, and subscriptions that reflect those different interests.

At the same time, we continue to highlight the stories we believe matter most from an editorial perspective. The challenge isn't to create a different media brand for every person. It's to make the same media brand feel personal to everyone.

Key insights

1. Mobile apps are no longer just another distribution channel for media companies. They're a strategic growth engine that directly influences engagement, retention, and subscriptions.
2. Engagement comes before conversion. At L'Équipe, the most engaged users open the app more than twenty days each month, while logged-in users are 18 times more likely to subscribe than anonymous visitors.
3. The most effective personalization comes less from what users say than from what they do. Reading history, notification preferences, newsletter engagement, and usage patterns create a far more relevant experience, without compromising editorial identity.
4. As subscription offerings become more sophisticated, experimentation becomes a strategic capability. Media companies need the ability to rapidly test user journeys, subscription offers, and messaging to understand what actually drives growth.
5. The future of media isn't about creating a different publication for every reader. It's about preserving a strong editorial voice while making the experience increasingly relevant to each individual.

From the newsstands to everyone's pockets

L'Équipe's story began in 1946, following in the footsteps of the French sports newspaper L'Auto, whose iconic yellow paper would later inspire the famous Tour de France Yellow Jersey.

Over the decades, the group expanded with publications including France Football and Vélo Magazine. Its website launched in 2000, followed by mobile apps in the early 2010s.

Today, L'Équipe publishes across multiple channels: its daily newspaper, magazines, website, TV app, and mobile app, serving more than 300,000 digital subscribers (May 2026).

Yet its mission has never changed: bringing sports to life through the work of more than 300 journalists.

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