What makes a membership site “successful”? Is it the member count? Revenue? Retention rates? How do you build a successful membership business? Today, I’m thrilled to share 13 real-world case studies of membership sites that have achieved remarkable success, along with the specific strategies that set them apart.
Let’s dive into these real-world examples and uncover the secrets behind their success!
13 Successful Membership Sites Examples
1. Peloton
Type: Fitness & Wellness
Key Stats:
- 3 million connected fitness membership subscribers
- 718,000 digital-only subscribers
- 1.7 billion U.S. dollars in subscription revenue in 2024
- 92% annual retention rate
Peloton is a fitness company that offers connected exercise equipment and a digital membership platform featuring thousands of live and on-demand workout classes across cycling, running, strength, yoga, and more. While their connected fitness subscribers (those who own Peloton equipment) form their core base, their digital-only membership (without having to purchase Peloton equipment) has become a massive success in its own right.
Why It’s Successful:
Diverse content selection
What makes Peloton’s digital membership stand out is its content production machine. They have over 10,000 on-demand classes and around 48 live classes every day. This huge library of content keeps members actively engaged and wanting to come back for more.
Extensive community features
Furthermore, they have impressive community features in their apps. Some of them include things like high-fives, leaderboards, and hashtag communities, adding friends & followers, which all contribute to a strong and thriving community.
The Peloton Instructors
Another fascinating aspect of Peloton’s success is their instructor strategy. They turn fitness trainers into celebrities with passionate followings. These instructors make the classes fun and engaging. This is part of the reason why their members can never leave Peloton, because it makes them feel like breaking up with their favorite instructor!
2. MasterClass
Type: Online Education
Key Stats:
- 200+ classes across 13 categories
- Estimated annual revenue: $148.1 M per year
- Over 2 million subscribers, 1.4 million monthly unique visitors on average
- Celebrity instructors, including Gordon Ramsay, Mark Cuban, and Stephen Curry
MasterClass is an online education platform that has revolutionized the online education space with their cinematic-quality courses taught by genuine celebrities and world-class experts. What’s particularly interesting about their model is how they’ve positioned themselves between entertainment and education.
Why It’s Successful:
Shift to a membership model
The genius of their business model lies in their shift from individual course purchases to an all-access membership in 2018. It used to be $90 per class, but now members have access to all classes for $180 a year. This eliminated the worry of potential disappointment after purchase and has dramatically increased their lifetime customer value while simplifying their marketing message. Their annual-only pricing strategy (no monthly option) also significantly reduced the churn rate by locking in members for a full year.
Learn from the best
Their instructors also play an indispensable role in their success. They are probably what attract most people to sign up for their classes in the first place. Learning from the best in the world is significantly more captivating than learning from a guru you just heard about on social media. However, this strategy is difficult to implement in your business, as you can imagine that the expense will be high.
Cinematic-Quality Content
I will not forget to mention that what sets MasterClass apart is its production quality. The content they create feels more like Netflix documentaries than typical online courses. This premium feel justifies their premium pricing and creates a clear distinction from competitors.
3. The New York Times
Type: News & Media
Key Stats:
- Over 11 million digital subscribers (at the end of 2024)
- Digital subscription revenue: $2.6 billion in 2024
- 3-5% average monthly churn rate (data from 2023)
- Multiple subscription tiers, including Cooking, Games, and All Access
The New York Times is a legacy news organization that offers digital and home delivery subscriptions, providing access to their award-winning journalism, plus specialized content verticals including Games, Cooking, and product recommendation site Wirecutter. What makes their approach particularly interesting is how they’ve expanded beyond traditional news reporting to create multiple subscription products.
Why It’s Successful:
Diverse Content
It offers a variety of content categories. Their Games section, featuring the famous crossword puzzle, has become a tremendous success. According to internal data they’ve shared, subscribers who engage with both news and games have a higher retention rate compared to those who don’t. Similarly, their Cooking section has attracted a dedicated audience willing to pay for premium recipes and cooking guides.
Metered Paywall
The Times uses a metered paywall strategy that gives readers access to 10 free articles monthly. This approach is similar to freemium, creating a low-friction way for casual readers to experience their content before hitting the subscription wall. Once users reach their limit, they’re shown targeted subscription offers based on their reading habits and encouraged to subscribe. The annual plan discount also incentivizes a full year’s commitment.
Bundling
Another smart strategy is their bundling approach. While they offer standalone subscriptions to specific verticals (Games, Cooking, etc.), their All Access bundle provides a compelling value proposition that encourages subscribers to explore content they might not otherwise discover. It also includes a discount for the annual plan to incentivize people to commit for a whole year.
4. Patreon
Type: Content Creator Monetization Platform
Key Stats:
- 8+ million monthly active patrons
- Over 300,000 creators
- Average patron supports 7 creators
- Creators have generated more than $8 billion in revenue year to date
Many people have probably heard of or made a purchase on Patreon. Patreon is a platform that allows content creators (podcasters, artists, writers, and musicians) to receive direct financial support from their audience through recurring monthly payments in exchange for exclusive content and perks. Their platform hosts thousands of successful membership communities across diverse niches.
Why Patreon is Successful:
Low barrier to entry
Building a membership site often requires a membership website builder, which may require significant technical expertise or expensive software (depending on your choice). However, Patreon eliminated these barriers, allowing creators to focus on content rather than technology and start selling digital products for free.
Why Patreon Creators Are Successful:
Patreon’s creators effectively leveraged the tiered membership model. Setting up different tiers allows creators to offer additional value to those who are willing to pay for it and optimize their revenue.
One of the most successful Patreon creators is True Crime Obsessed, a podcast with over 49,000 patrons. They use a brilliant content strategy where their main podcast episodes are free, but they offer patron-exclusive episodes and bonus content.
Another standout example is fantasy author N.K. Jemisin, who used Patreon to finance her writing full-time. Her membership community allowed her to leave her day job and focus exclusively on writing novels.
5. LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com)
Type: Professional Development
Key Stats:
- Over 23,000+ courses in 24 languages
- Over 27 million users
LinkedIn Learning, formerly known as Lynda.com, is an educational platform offering video courses taught by industry experts in business, creative, and technology fields. It was acquired by LinkedIn for $1.5 billion in 2015, and they then integrated the learning platform into their professional network, creating powerful synergies.
Why It’s Successful:
High-quality courses
One main factor that contributes to their success is their content. They’ve developed a streamlined process for working with industry experts to create consistently high-quality courses across business, creative, and technology categories. To be a LinkedIn Learning Instructor is not an easy task; there are strict requirements around instructor expertise, content development, and technical proficiency in recording. That’s how they maintain the creation of high-quality courses.
Certification system
Their certification system is another key to their success. When you complete a course on LinkedIn Learning, you can add the skill or certification to your LinkedIn profile right away to show off your achievements. This credential aspect significantly increases course completion rates compared to other learning platforms.
Team subscriptions
LinkedIn Learning offers user-tiered subscriptions where companies can purchase team subscriptions and give their employees access to the entire course library. This strategy has become a huge revenue driver for LinkedIn Learning.
6. Calm
Type: Mental Wellness App
Key Stats:
- Over 4.5 million paying subscribers
- Revenue of 596.4M in 2024
- Calm app has 2 million downloads worldwide as of 2024
Calm is a mental wellness app offering guided meditations, sleep stories (often narrated by celebrities), relaxing music, and breathing exercises designed to reduce stress and improve sleep. The market valuation has reached $2 billion in 2024.
Why It’s Successful:
Fulfilling a market demand
Calm is providing a solution to a problem many face in this stressful era. Their Sleep Stories feature, often narrated by celebrities like Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba, has become their most popular content type due to the increasing number of individuals seeking help with sleep.
Content strategy
Their daily content strategy is simple yet effective. The “Daily Calm” is a 10-minute meditation released every day, creating a habit-forming ritual for users. This consistent content release schedule gives subscribers a reason to open the app daily, significantly increasing retention.
Calm for business
Calm’s B2B channel has become a major growth driver. They’ve partnered with hundreds of organizations to offer Calm as an employee benefit. These enterprise deals provide stable revenue and introduce the app to millions of potential users.
Lifetime membership
Calm offers a lifetime membership option for those who want to use Calm for life. This is an interesting and compelling offer that few subscription businesses attempt. This option creates cash flow and potentially higher LTV. It also serves as an anchor pricing strategy that makes their annual subscription seem more reasonable by comparison.
7. Atlas Obscura
Type: Travel & Experience Community
Key Stats:
- $66/year membership fee
- Over 29,200 unique places in their destination database
- Community-driven content model
Atlas Obscura is a travel media company and community focused on discovering unusual, obscure, and remarkable places worldwide. It offers a database of unique destinations plus member-exclusive tours, events, and perks.
Why It’s Successful:
Incredible member perks
Their membership offering combines digital benefits (access to their full destination database) with in-person components (priority access and discounts on their guided trips and local events), a $100 trip discount, and VIP access to their new products. All of these are just for $66 a year.
Members’ contribution
Members can contribute destination listings, photos, and reviews; this not only creates a continuously expanding resource but is also an emotional investment in the platform. This strategy increases member entgagement and fosters a sense of belonging that helps build a strong.
Editorial strategy
Their editorial strategy complements their destination database perfectly. They publish fascinating stories about unusual places, mysterious histories, and cultural phenomena. This content serves both as entertainment for current members and as search-optimized acquisition content for new members.
8. Glo (formerly YogaGlo)
Type: Fitness & Wellness
Key Stats:
- Over 2 million people have used Glo
- 9,000+ on-demand classes
- Multiple wellness disciplines, including yoga, meditation, pilates, and fitness
Glo is another fitness and wellness platform that provides online yoga, meditation, and pilates, featuring thousands of classes from renowned instructors. They have sophisticated search features to find sessions based on style, duration, focus area, difficulty level, and intensity.
Why It’s Successful:
Celebrity Instructors
Similar to Peloton, Glo has built their business around celebrated yoga teachers with established followings. They’ve attracted renowned instructors like Jason Crandell and Elena Brower. This strategy creates strong customer loyalty.
Powerful content management
Classes are tagged and carefully categorized by style, level, duration, intensity, and teacher. This allows members to find exactly what they need for their practice that day with ease. This searchability significantly improves member experience.
High-Quality Classes
While Glo regularly adds new content, they still focus on thoughtfully designed classes rather than just focusing on quantity. Their production quality is exceptional, with beautiful filming locations and crystal-clear instructions. They have received good reviews not just for the quality of their instructors but also for their courses.
9. Skillshare
Type: Creative Education
Key Stats:
- Over 12 million registered users
- 500,000+ paying subscribers
- Estimated annual revenue of $141.7M
- 35,000 classes across creative disciplines
Skillshare is an online learning platform and community that offers thousands of classes in creative skills, including illustration, design, photography, and writing, taught by professionals. It has over 12 million registered users, and it’s continuing to grow.
Why It’s Successful:
Hybrid learning platform
Skillshare is not just a learning platform but also a community platform. It built a thriving membership community focused on creative skills and productivity. Their Class + Project model allows users to test their new skill set and receive feedback from other users, which significantly boosts engagement and increases interactions between users.
Open teaching model
Different from MasterClass, Skillshare uses an open teaching model that allows anyone who is approved by Skillshare to teach, which helps in scaling their content library dramatically without significant production costs. They’ve also implemented robust discovery systems to help users discover the best content. Their top teachers can earn significant income, some generating $100,000+ a year from their courses.
Clever pricing strategy
Their subscription pricing strategy is particularly effective. Members can choose to pay monthly for $29 a month or annually for just $99! The price is affordable, and the difference between the monthly and annual subscriptions makes the latter extremely compelling!
Class+ project
Their project-based learning approach is one thing that sets them apart from many educational platforms. Students can share their completed projects with other users in the class community. That way, students not only learn from their teachers but also their peers, and posting their project in the community can also create a sense of engagement and belonging.
10. Going (Formely Scott’s Cheap Flights)
Type: Travel Deals Membership
Key Stats:
- 2+ million free subscribers
- Estimated $7.5M revenue per year
- $49/year Premium, $199/year Elite subscription tiers
Going, formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights, is a subscription service that alerts members to exceptionally low flight tickets and mistake fares, often saving subscribers hundreds or thousands of dollars on US domestic and international travel.
Why It’s Successful:
It all started with a newsletter
Sometimes you don’t need a website to start your membership business; you can simply build a newsletter, and that’s how Scott started. Scott helped his friends to get cheap flights with his obsession and realized that it could be a viable business idea, so he started an email list and gradually grew into this business empire today!
Word of mouth
Scott has emphasized how important word of mouth was to his business. Recommendations from friends and family hold significantly more weight than any advertisement. If your service or digital product provides true value and you are giving excellent customer service, people will help spread the word about your business naturally.
Freemium
Once again, the value of freemium cannot be overstated. Scoot didn’t sell his membership right from the start; he offered a freemium email list to attract subscribers and gradually turned them into paying members once they saw the value of his newsletter. By providing value without asking for anything in return, build trust and loyalty.
Clear upgrade strategy
Freemium does come with its flaws, which is the freeloader issue we mentioned in the other post. Some people may never choose to upgrade to a paid membership. You need to clearly define and help your free users understand the value of your premium membership plans. The way Scott’s partner did it was to offer a one-month premium trial to let the users know what they’re missing, and that worked.
Tiered membership strategy
Scott also uses tiered membership on top of freemium. Their Premium tier ($49/year) offers all economy deals, while their Elite tier ($199/year) adds business and first-class deals. The value of different tiers is clearly defined, and they capture different segments of the travel market.
All the credit goes to Scott himself; read the Reddit post where he shared how he built his membership business here.
11. Stratechery
Type: Technology Analysis
Key Stats:
- Estimated 40,000+ subscribers
- $12/month or $120/year subscription
- One-person operation (Ben Thompson)
- Focused on strategic analysis of technology businesses
Stratechery represents perhaps the purest example of a successful solo membership business. Founded by Ben Thompson, the site offers strategic analysis of technology companies and trends through weekly articles and additional subscriber-only updates.
Why It’s Successful:
Minimal Structure
Unlike most membership businesses that offer various content types and community features, Stratechery focuses exclusively on Thompson’s written analysis. This simplicity keeps costs low while maintaining high perceived value, and that’s probably how Ben Thompson can manage the membership business on his own.
Consistent content release
Ben Thompson has a consistent publishing schedule: one free article each week (serving as marketing) and three to four subscriber-only updates. Consistency is important in membership business, especially if content is the main focus of the membership, because it creates reader habits and expectations and leads to higher retention rates.
Specialized expertise
Thompson developed a distinctive analytical framework for understanding technology businesses, which he applies consistently across his analysis. This framework, which he calls “Aggregation Theory,” has become influential in how many technology investors and executives think about strategy. Apart from that, his analysis has been recommended by The New York Times, quoted, “one of the most interesting sources of analysis on any subject”.
12. The Mark Manson Premium Subscription
Type: Personal Brand Community & Education
Key Stats:
- 1 million subscribers on MarkManson.net
- 9,500+ paying members
- $9.99/month
- Focus on psychology, philosophy, and personal development
Mark Manson has successfully leveraged his popularity as the author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” into a thriving membership community. Known for his no-nonsense, research-backed approach to self-improvement, Mark’s website provides most content for free but offers “transformative and life-changing content” for premium subscribers for just $9.99/month.
Why It’s Successful:
Bestseller-Fueled Growth
Although Mark Manson started his blog way back in 2007 and generated moderate income from his blog over the years, his blog didn’t get such huge traction until the release of his book. The success of his blog and book was likely driven by his unique writing style and commitment to only speaking the truth. If you have read his book, you will understand what I am talking about.
Exclusive events and meet-ups
Who wouldn’t want to meet someone who has been helping you in your business and your life and receive personal advice and tips? In Mark Manson’s premium subscription, one of the benefits members get is the opportunity to meet up with Mark Manson himself on his book tours after the show. It may not be an attractive offer to you, but it certainly is for his members.
Affordable yet valuable offer
Mark Manson doesn’t charge a ridiculous fee for his membership subscription despite the popularity he gained from his books. He still provides content for free, and for only $9.99/month, you can enjoy exclusive content. The membership can be cancelled at any time, and he offers a 60-day money-back guarantee; the members have nothing to lose if they find out that they don’t like it.
13. Pat Flynn’s SPI Community
Type: Personal Brand Community & Education
Key Stats:
- Over 100,000 newsletter subscribers
- Built by a podcaster/entrepreneur with 16+ years in online business
- Focus on ethical entrepreneurship and online business development
Pat Flynn represents a textbook case of evolving a personal brand into a robust membership community. Known primarily for his “Smart Passive Income” podcast and transparent income reports (only until 2016), Pat launched the SPI online community to create a more intimate space for serious entrepreneurs seeking connection and growth
Why It’s Successful:
Choosing the right membership site platform
Choosing the right membership site platform is important if you want to build a successful membership site. SPI community infrastructure uses Circle as its primary platform, one of the best membership platforms currently on the market. It’s perfect for a membership site where the focus is on building a thriving community. The platform allows SPI to create spaces for different business stages and topics, including content marketing, product launches, affiliate strategies, and audience building.
You can watch this 1-hour-long YouTube video to learn how Pat Flynn creates his communities.
Multiple Content Funnels
Pat Flynn uses multiple content funnels to attract and convert his audience into engaged community members. He has different distribution channels, such as podcasts and YouTube, delivering content covering basic entrepreneurship, practical tips, and steps for business owners to start and grow their businesses. This strategy effectively led to the growth of his personal brand and his successful online community.
Engagement Strategies and Tactics
SPI uses different engagement strategies and tactics to keep members involved and build a sense of belonging. Such as acknowledging members and making them feel heard, having a mental health chat to allow members to share their experience as an entrepreneur, creating a safe and supportive space, and hosting monthly networking events. Furthermore, they also use metrics such as engagement scores to track member engagement and find solutions to improve it.
Key Success Factors Across These Membership Sites
After analyzing these 13 successful membership sites, we can identify several recurring success elements:
1. Clear value proposition
Each successful site articulates clearly what members receive and why it matters. Whether it’s saving money on travel (Scott’s Cheap Flights), improving wellness (Calm), or receiving support from an online community (SPI), members understand precisely what they’re paying for.
2. Tiered membership options
Most successful sites offer different membership levels to accommodate individuals with various needs and commitment levels. These tiers typically increase overall revenue while allowing entry points for different customer segments.
3. Consistent content delivery
Consistency is crucial for retention. Whether it’s daily meditations (Calm), weekly analyses (Stratechery), or regular class additions (Skillshare), successful membership sites maintain predictable content schedules that members can count on, cultivate habits, and make them stay on the membership.
4. Community components
Many successful membership sites provide more than just content. They include a community where their members can interact with each other and build meaningful and long-lasting relationships. Whether through events, discussion forums, or collaborative features, these community elements significantly boost engagement and retention.
5. Clear upgrade path
Providing freemium or free content is a good strategy to attract an audience to their sites. However, the most successful membership sites have excellent strategies to convince their free users to upgrade to their premium membership by answering the critical question, “Why should members pay for this when so much content is available for free?”
Conclusion
If you had doubts about why anyone would pay for your membership or how you could make your membership site work, I am sure these successful membership stories have shown you the way forward. By carefully studying these 13 case studies, you will be able to identify strategies that will work for your own membership business!
Choose your membership platform carefully! Different membership site platforms have different strengths and weaknesses, so you want to pick the one that suits your membership business the most. Check out the 6 best membership site platforms and find the perfect one for your business!
