Day 2 of Piano Academy 2026
Day two of Piano Academy 2026 in Amsterdam covered AI-era pricing, privacy rules, data foundations, zero-click search, and local relevance. Here's what seven sessions shared.
Scott Woody: the future of monetization, from subscriptions to agentic commerce
Scott Woody, co-founder and CEO of Metronome (now part of Stripe), leads product for Stripe's revenue suite. He started with Stripe data: payment volume across the top 100 AI companies grew 145% year over year in Q2 2025 and 195% in Q2 2026.
He saw four patterns behind that growth:
Sell globally by default. In 2025, the top AI companies sold into a median of 42 foreign countries in their first year on Stripe and 120 by year three. Top SaaS companies reached 25 and 51. Showing prices in local currency brought 17.8% higher cross-border revenue, and offering local payment methods brought a 7.4% conversion uplift.
Adapt to agents as buyers. 50% of US adults have used an AI agent, and 25% use one daily (Pew). Shopping journeys that begin with an agent grew 200% (Salesforce).
Price for the AI economy. 67% of hyper-growth companies changed their pricing three or more times in two years, versus 22% of low-growth companies. Hybrid pricing is on the rise, and 61% of companies that don't use it yet are considering it. One example he showed: Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl, an agent-readable paywall that runs alongside a subscription paywall.
Monitor fraud risk early and often. 1 in 6 sign-ups at AI companies involves multi-account abuse.
His checklists boil down to four moves: audit your international traffic for payment friction, make your products, prices, and checkout readable to agents, run controlled pricing experiments, and audit your free trial and promo offers for abuse.
An audience with Max Schrems: the next big thing in data privacy
Marie Fenner, Global SVP Analytics at Piano, hosted Max Schrems, whose court cases (Schrems I and II) led the EU's top court to strike down the Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield data transfer agreements. The session covered what's changing in data privacy and how to build a business grounded in trust.
Three developments to watch:
EU-US data transfers. The current EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF), adopted in 2023, survived a first court challenge in September 2025. An appeal is now pending, which the session flagged as a possible "Schrems III." On June 30, 2026, a day after a US Supreme Court ruling made FTC commissioners removable at will, noyb asked the European Commission to withdraw the DPF and announced a new court challenge.
Cookie rules. The Commission's November 2025 Digital Omnibus proposal would move cookie rules into the GDPR. Consent stays the default, but aggregated audience measurement for a site's own use would be exempt. It would also require a one-click "reject" and block repeat consent requests for six months after a refusal. This part is still under negotiation.
What counts as personal data. The same proposal would make it relative: information isn't personal data for an organization that can't reasonably identify the person. The EDPB and EDPS say that wording goes beyond case law.
Piano Analytics is the first digital analytics solution certified under Europrivacy, a GDPR certification scheme validated by the EDPB. It also measures visitors who refuse or ignore the cookie banner, within strict limits, under a consent exemption recognized by France's CNIL. That exemption mirrors the one proposed in the Omnibus.
The session's outlook for the next 12 months:
Treat the DPF as fragile. Know which vendors rely on it and what your fallback is: SCCs, BCRs, or EU hosting.
Build now for first-party audience measurement without consent, which may move from national guidance into the GDPR itself.
Plan for the strict reading of personal data until the text is final.
John Lovett: building a solid data foundation
John Lovett, VP Analytics at Seer Interactive, argued that analytics, AI, and better decisions all start with data you can trust. As he put it, "Data Foundations aren't a step you finish. They make trust possible."
A foundation has three parts: strategy (know what the business needs to know), implementation (the data layer, tagging, and naming), and literacy. On literacy, he was direct: "Data cannot drive itself."
Before he trusts a model to forecast, he checks that it can explain what already happened. In his words, "Prove you understand today, before you forecast tomorrow." One client applied this to an attribution model that couldn't keep up with its growing media spend. Months later, the team found a tracking bug that counted real marketing traffic as Direct. After the fix:
Attribution visibility rose from 50% to 90%.
More than 50% of Direct traffic was reattributed to the channels that earned it.
The client cleared its 11:1 ROAS goal.
Trusted data also opens up access. A marketplace client connected Microsoft Copilot to its live data through MCP, and ad hoc questions went from 3-4 hours to 3 minutes. With one query, a marketer with no SQL background found two peak-traffic days missing from the team's campaign timing.
His warning: "Access without trust doesn't democratize insight. It just makes bad answers faster." So the order matters: build the foundation first, then earn trust, then open up access.
Lennart Schneider: what publishers can learn from other subscription industries
Lennart Schneider, author of Subscribe Now, pointed out that publishers pioneered subscriptions (one of the first was for John Milton's Paradise Lost in 1688), but other industries have since caught up. His lessons from them:
Focus on revenue, not vanity metrics. Subscriber counts treat a €4.99 basic subscriber in their first year the same as a €29.99 premium subscriber in their third, even though one pays 6x more. Revenue churn and net revenue retention show the value you actually lose and keep.
Build a referral program like NeoTaste. The restaurant-deals app, with 2.5 million users, gives both the subscriber and the friend they refer a free month. Making the program visible at the top level of the app raised usage 8x, and adding a currency symbol made it perform 3.3x better.
Grow engagement like Duolingo. After daily active users stagnated in 2018, Duolingo made its current user retention rate (CURR) its central product KPI in 2019. It now runs hundreds of experiments a year to raise it.
Build trust like Blinkist. 33% of its trial cancellations happened on day one. After Blinkist redesigned its paywall to show how the free trial works, trial sign-ups rose 23%, trial cancellations fell 4%, complaints fell 55%, and push notification opt-ins rose from 6% to 74%.
His summary: "People hate subscriptions. Lower the barrier to entry." To learn from other industries, he suggested going to their conferences, listening to their podcasts, following their leaders on LinkedIn, and studying their paywall designs on mobbin.com.
Kevin Indig: when the click disappears
Kevin Indig, growth advisor and author of the Growth Memo, looked at how publishers can grow revenue as clicks dry up. Monthly US visits to roughly 100 top news sites have fallen 25% since late 2024.
His own research (five user behavior studies with 100+ participants and 400+ recorded shopping tasks) shows how people use AI instead of clicking:
Only 23% of tasks in Google's AI Mode included a visit to an external site, versus 67% in standard search.
74% of users picked the top item in AI Mode shortlists.
64% of shopping tasks in AI Mode ended without a click, and ChatGPT shopping saw a zero-click rate above 90%.
Fewer clicks don't have to mean less revenue. In Piano benchmark data, 54% of publishers lost traffic, but 70% grew revenue. His 3R framework names the three jobs content now has:
Reach: help new people find your work and recognize you, even when they don't click through.
Relationship: give readers a reason to come back and subscribe. Direct and email traffic drive 60% of conversions from 38% of visits (Piano's Back to Basics report), and Which? gets 46,000 new paid subscriptions a year from newsletters.
Reuse and payment: make your content useful to other products on terms that pay you. Wiley's AI revenue reached $49 million in FY26.
He closed with: "Zero clicks are fine if you have a name, a list and content worth licensing." To get there, test every story with three questions: Why subscribe for this? What job does it do? What is uniquely ours?
Clemens Hammacher, Tim Greve, and Marco Barthel: identifying and targeting cross-media super users
Clemens Hammacher (General Manager Sales DACH, CEE, Benelux & Nordics, Piano), Tim Greve (Managing Director, MSP Medien Systempartner), and Marco Barthel (Team Lead, Reader Market Solutions, MSP Medien Systempartner) made the case for managing print and digital subscriptions in one system, so publishers can find and serve their most valuable readers.
Super users are a small group with outsized value. According to INMA, roughly 1% of users generated 26% of all pageviews, and at one publisher, 1% of users generated 81% of total subscription and advertising revenue. Piano benchmark data backs this up:
Highly engaged users convert 44x better than one-offs, and more than twice as well as moderately engaged users.
They bring in 75x more conversion revenue per thousand visitors than one-offs ($27.73 vs. $0.37, August 2026).
But most publishers only see their super users in digital. With easyConnect from Piano partner MSP, print subscriptions sync in real time into Piano Subscription Management, creating one record for digital, e-paper, and print readers. The setup is live in a proof of concept for a major regional daily newspaper.
With every subscriber in one system, publishers can:
Drive engagement with personalized content recommendations, home pages, and newsletters, plus community and event participation, without flooding super users with irrelevant information.
Drive monetization by targeting potential super users who don't subscribe yet, upselling family accounts (grandparents read print, grandkids read digital), making exclusive digital offers to print readers, and building premium bundles like a print weekend edition plus digital.
The first step on their checklist: know your user. Collect email addresses and encourage print and e-paper readers to log in and use your digital products.
Thomas Webel: from reach to relevance
Thomas Webel is Head of Digital Editorial at Oberpfalz Medien, a regional publisher in Bavaria with 40,000 print and 20,000+ digital subscribers. He started with a lesson from his first editor. In 2000, he turned in one long article covering every agenda item of a town council meeting. Her response: "Boy, don't be stupid!" Find the four or five topics people care about, and write a separate story for each.
Oberpfalz Medien applies that lesson in two ways:
Personalization. In a 2026 A/B test on onetz.de, the top box for non-subscribers showed either editorial picks or Piano Content Recommendations. The personalized version lifted article views 43.8% and total view time 43.9%, while average view time stayed at 1:05.
Hyperlocal newsletters. The algorithm also surfaced far more national news-agency stories, and as Thomas put it, "more clicks do not automatically mean stronger relationships." So the team built newsletters around readers' home towns, mixing professional journalism with content from local clubs and organizations. Even Theisseil, a community of 1,198 people that can go two to three weeks without an article, got its own. Across three small communities, open rates topped 100% (counting repeat opens), and click-through rates ran from about 39% to 50%.
Next, the team is using Piano Analytics to test whether product usage contributes to conversion and retention. His closing line: "The future isn't about producing more stories. It's about making and delivering more stories that matter to our readers."
Piano Academy is Piano's annual conference for customers, partners, prospects, and industry professionals. This year's fifth edition ran October 6–7 at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, built around the theme "Navigate What's Next: Driving Monetization in the Age of AI."
Missed day 1?
