New Subscribers is madduck’s own construct and represents users who become subscribers.
It includes new direct subscribers, subscribers arriving at the end of their trial periods without canceling and recovered users from Billing Retry.
Apple’s subscription services allow a new subscriber to come through various gates and it can be confusing to differentiate who counts as a new subscriber and who doesn’t. After evaluating different options we decided to define New Subscribers as follows:
- Direct Subscribers: Users who become subscribers directly without going through an Introductory Offer (please read our ItS article to know more about Introductory Offers).
- Indirect Subscribers: Users who become subscribers after going through an Introductory Offer. Which means that we don’t count any action towards an Introductory Offer as a subscriber. This in turn means that what is shown as “1st renewal” in some other mobile analytics platforms, counts as a new subscriber at madduck insights.
- Indirect Subscribers from Billing Retry: Users who were destined to become Indirect Subscribers, failed to do so because of a payment processing issue but were later able to pay and therefore recovered. It is possible that some members of this group were still in their Grace Periods (please read our Involuntary Churn & Grace Period articles to grasp Billing Retry).
- Lifetime Subscribers: People who prefer to pay once and subscribe for a lifetime offer. These figures are reported separately by Apple and are not taken into account while calculating subscriber numbers in Apple Reports. But since they are subscribers nonetheless, we decided that it makes more sense to report them under New Subscribers.
