The Athletic drives millions in recovered revenue with Butter

The Athletic is among the fastest-growing sports media brands in the world. As the company grew, they recognized an opportunity to maximize recurring revenue and optimize their customer experience by reducing involuntary churn due to failed payments.  

“Anything you can do to reduce churn is always high on the list of things to tackle,” said The Athletic CFO Sid Tiwari. “As you scale from a few thousand subscribers to hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers, you start seeing how meaningful controlling or managing churn can be for the business.”

At first, The Athletic implemented a legacy recovery tool that batched payment retries. This approach—also known as a “woodpecker” strategy—uses pre-scheduled retries and the same retry strategy for all failed payments, including instances of fraud. It’s been shown to be inefficient, increase chargebacks, and lower top-of-funnel authorization rates.

“Our volume of payments was increasing, and we needed more targeted strategies for combating payment failures,” Sid said.

The solution? The Athletic elected to migrate to a new recovery solution that leveraged machine learning to design bespoke recovery strategies for their customers.

The Athletic partners with Butter to boost revenue

The Athletic’s search for a new payment recovery solution led them to Butter. What set Butter above other payment recovery solutions was the company’s:

• Turnkey integration with Stripe that enables brands to launch in days—not weeks or months.
• Expertise in global payments that bolsters expansion into other markets.
• Data-driven, machine-learning approach, and self-optimization capabilities.
• Company-wide payment expertise.

Turnkey integration with Stripe

Butter easily integrates with leading payment service processors like Stripe and Braintree, allowing subscription brands to devote resources to other revenue-generating activities and core business competencies. 

“The Butter team was amazing and made it a very low lift for our team,” Sid said. “Anytime you touch the checkout or payment infrastructure, you hold your breath a little, but Butter—from the exec team on down—was hands-on and responsive.” 

Enhanced global impact

A few years after launching, The Athletic expanded to cover global teams and sports events. This expanded coverage brought new payment challenges, as each region and country has unique regulations and payment infrastructure. 

“Going international made our involuntary churn problem worse than it was before,” Sid said.

Butter adapts retry strategies to local norms, maximizing cross-border authorizations.

Data-driven approach to payment retries

Butter’s patented machine-learning technology goes beyond typical recovery solutions. The platform analyzes payment transaction data to determine the most effective retry strategy for each failed payment category. This data-driven approach allows Butter to continually self-optimize recovery, translating to more recovered payments with fewer retries.

Company-wide expertise

Butter’s team has extensive expertise in payment and subscriptions. Many team members built payment solutions from the ground up and in-house before joining Butter. In fact, 82% of Butter employees are technical, and 35% are machine-learning engineers or data scientists.

“When you talk to Butter, you can get the right answers and the help you need quickly, which is not always the case with bigger companies,” Sid said.

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