Transforming digital subscriptions: How Daily Mail doubled subscribers in 100 days with Glide CMS

As Daily Mail set out to build a new all-encompassing digital subscription, Glide CMS was chosen to sit at the heart of the web of complex legacy systems to speed the launch and maximise future flexibility.

Published: 17:28, 18 September 2025

Balancing digital subscriptions innovation with legacy system limits

Precision and adaptability are difficult concepts to marry, yet publishers thriving in the digital media landscape need to do both to an exceptional standard. 

With one of the biggest and best-known news websites in the world, and a market-leading paid-for daily newspaper in the UK, the Daily Mail's global audience and reach is vast. 

To stay at the forefront of its markets, the title never stops building on its product offering with constant innovation and improvement - especially when it comes to the technologies that underpin online content excellence.

With plans to transition an iPad-based digital newspaper edition to a new all-platform digital subscription product, known today as Mail+ Editions, complexities on all sides of the title’s legacy bespoke print and digital technologies slowed plans for new products and updates despite a good audience fit and clear commercial appeal. 

“What we’re looking to do is create more value for subscribers - something more than just a newspaper,” said Daily Mail product director, Simon Regan-Edwards of the new subscription offering, which provides more content, services, and features to enhance the newspaper experience for digital audiences.  

With ambitious plans and an aggressive launch timeline, the Mail technology and product team decided the support of a third-party CMS could help them bring Mail+ Editions to life much faster and more cost-effectively than trying to rework internal systems while building a new product as well.

For the publishing and editorial teams, key requirements of the solution included the ability to: 

• Manage the needs of a large editorial team working in shifts to create multiple distinct digital editions each day. 

• Combine with multiple in-house print and Identity and Account Management Service systems, a newsletter email platform, a paywall, and multiple other content platforms including video, audio, and a quiz engine.

• Allow for the build and testing of new ideas quickly by a small, nimble team, and move successes rapidly to production without fear of scalability. 

From concept to live in under three months with Glide CMS

The team behind Glide Publishing Platform had worked with the Daily Mail since 2015, providing specialist development and support services for its complex print-derived digital products across devices like iPad, desktop and mobile, Kindle readers, and audio devices.

As a new all-encompassing digital subscription product was conceived, Glide CMS was chosen to sit at the heart of the web of complex legacy systems to speed the launch, maximise future flexibility, and remove the need to customise those other numerous systems.

Alongside Daily Mail experts, we helped architect an estate in which Glide CMS could both take control of content streams and be a conduit to other systems and combine print-originated content with additional content for digital subscribers.

The new product went from first concepts to live in under three months, with the build phase taking less than eight weeks using just three core developers and Glide Professional Services support of the initial configuration to speed knowledge transfer. 

To accelerate development, the Glide Deliver front-end application was chosen to power the new web-based product. 

Being new, the focus was on building a broad offering which leaned on many integrations across a workflow, including articles drawn from print and digital CMS, national and regional content, video and audio channels, interactive puzzles and league tables, profile management, a points-based loyalty program, several newsletters, and finally a paywall connected to a bespoke in-house identity management system. 

Because of Glide CMS’s advanced widget configuration functionality and ability to connect and control other integrated platforms, all these workflows were combined without need to customise the Glide platform a key concept of its appeal as a low-code/no-code SaaS platform. 

To give Daily Mail complete freedom to scale and optimise for its audience needs, Glide deployed the key CMS infrastructure and front-end to a Private Cloud - our standard approach to give customers complete assurance over robustness, availability, and the ability to configure infrastructure as they wish.

One notable feature Mail+ Editions leans on heavily is the use of Glide CMS’s Collections feature, which in this case is used by Daily Mail’s content teams to curate and publish entire digital editions for delivery at set times, creating viewing habits around which readers soon congregated. 

Agile product evolution drives Mail+ Editions's ongoing success

The new product doubled pre-existing subscriber numbers in under 100 days and exceeded one million unique users from a standing start, with continued growth of over 400+% at this time. 

A key growth lever for the Daily Mail is the ability to test and iterate the product and content, while eliminating development costs and time. This has allowed a lean development and product team to redesign and iterate the new product multiple times since launch in response to audience response and preferences, highlighting the agility of Glide CMS.

“The process of building out the product goes back to why we chose Glide,” said Regan-Edwards. “We knew they had a strong team. We were looking to build features and play with ideas that they could also lean into.”

Since its launch, the Mail+ Editions product has evolved into a strong offering alongside its print and other website property, forming the basis for a wider push into digital subscriptions while creating its own committed audience.

As Regan-Edwards notes, "If you’re not constantly developing, you’re moving backwards. You have to constantly change and follow the audience."

Glide CMS makes that possible.

Following the launch of Mail+ Editions, the publisher has continued to identify new ways to leverage Glide CMS to support its digital offerings outside of the initial product, including as an early adopter of Glide’s native Live Reporting toolset and of the AI-powered toolset, GAIA, implementing the GAIA Voice “Listen to Article” audience feature.

Today, journalists from across the title and portfolio products work within Glide CMS. 

To learn more about Glide CMS and to see what Glide can do for you, connect with a Glide product specialist.