Most Americans have at least one “forever subscription” — a subscription-based product that they don’t plan to cancel in the near future — according to a new consumer report released by Bango this week.
The report, called “Bundling: The next wave of subscriptions,” found the most-common subscription service in American homes remains streaming video, followed by retail memberships like Amazon Prime and Walmart Plus, then streaming music — but other types of subscriptions are gaining ground as well.
More than one out of four Americans now subscribe to some kind of gaming subscription like Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus, Bango found, while 17 percent of Americans subscribe to one of three different products — a home or tech subscription, a newspaper or magazine and a social media-based premium membership.
As American consumers sign up for subscription-based services to meet their entertainment and lifestyle needs, Bango says there are opportunities to combine different subscriptions into bundles that meet consumers at low price points and give them greater convenience in managing the services they pay for.
“The smart money is on collaboration and bundling with the apps subscribers already love,” Bango said in the report. “Pair a news subscription with a fitness tracker, or tuck a budgeting tool inside a retail membership, and suddenly each service can amplify the other.”
There is some data that indicates these types of bundles would do well: 83 percent of smart-home users and 81 percent of fitness fans said they’d prefer to pick and mix their own services into custom-created bundles, rather than have rigid, pre-built deals. Four out of five students said the same.
“By showing up together on the same bill or inside the same content hub, you can provide that flexibility, cutting friction and supercharging stickiness,” Bango said.
Doing so will also create more “forever subscriptions” — but to do that, “providers must show up where customers already pay and make it effortless to stay, whether that means plugging into a content hub or bundling complementary partners straight into their own app,” Bango said.
Perhaps no one encapsulates this idea better than Amazon: Shoppers who pay $15 per month for a Prime membership don’t just get perks like free one-day and two-day shipping on millions of items, they also get access to Amazon Music and Prime Video, the latter of which also includes a marketplace for adding third-party subscriptions like Paramount Plus, AMC Plus, Max and Starz.
Bango’s report pairs nicely with a recent study released by Hub Entertainment Research, which found Prime Video’s marketplace, called Prime Video Channels, increased the perception of value among streamers who used it to sign up for at least one third-party subscription.
Nearly two-thirds of streamers who purchased a subscription through Prime Video Channels rated streaming TV as “essential” or “very important,” according to Hub, compared to just 47 percent of streamers who only watched content available from Prime Video’s own library.
That is good news for smaller and niche streaming services who may lack the marketing muscle to get their video apps in front of prospective customers: A study from Antenna last year found Prime Video Channels drove 58 percent of new subscription sales among those services.
