Redefining what people pay for in a subscription
My role
As Head of Product Strategy, I owned what subscribers pay for: the total value Yandex Plus gives them, how it is priced and packaged. I reported to the CEO of Yandex Plus.
My team
I had two direct reports. The rest was a matrix team from the service teams, CRM, marketing and distribution, who worked on Plus alongside their own roadmaps.
The problem
In 2022 Yandex Plus was mostly a subscription to films and music. Then foreign studios and labels left Russia, and much of the premium content people paid for left with them. Overnight, the subscription lost a large part of its value.
Plus had around 15M subscribers. Our challenge was to give them a reason to stay. We also had to deliver the subscription growth plan rather than just hold the base.
The idea
Turn Plus from a content subscription into an ecosystem membership: one subscription that makes everyday life better across taxi rides, food, shopping, travel and entertainment.
And let each subscriber shape their own plan: a base subscription plus paid options for what they use most.
A bundle of films and music, with cashback on top.
People saw it as savings and convenience.
Value people can’t get anywhere else.
- Benefits made only for subscribers
- Perks at partner services
- A wide choice of content
People should feel it as the enjoyment of life, not a discount.
What I did
I built a strategy that turned Plus from a bundle of content into value people can’t get anywhere else. That value comes from the whole Yandex ecosystem, not from films and music alone.
Subscribers get perks across Yandex services and partners at no extra cost. The services gain too: Plus brings them new customers and keeps the old ones coming back. On top of the base plan, we built paid options around people’s interests, such as travel, kids or driving, each covering a whole part of life rather than one partner’s offer.
A map of value
I broke the subscription into its parts: benefits, options, tariffs and packages. Each benefit got a score for how often people use it, who it serves and how far it can spread across the base.
A way to measure value
Together with ML analysts, we built a happiness index. It shows how much each benefit adds to subscriber satisfaction and their decision to stay.
A funnel for new ideas
With the strategy team, we narrowed 350+ subscription perks from around the world down to 16 ideas that fit Plus. More than 600 people on a research panel rated each one. An idea moved forward only if it could reach 5% of paying subscribers and pay for itself at scale.
non‑membersPlus value,
members
Each idea rated on nine criteria. Illustrative, not the real data.
The proof: a subscription for travellers
To prove the model works, I launched a paid option for one specific interest: travel. It sits on top of the base subscription and serves the people who care about trips the most.
A Yandex Plus option
Plus for Travellers
- Plus points and S7 miles for flights
- Free seat choice on S7
- Up to 20% back on hotels
- Up to 10% off a hotel every month
- Miles for orders across Yandex
- Closed sales
- More with Yandex Pay
Why travel
Plus subscribers travel more and spend more on trips than other people, and they already made most bookings on Yandex Travel. Our research showed that travel perks were among the ones they wanted most and were ready to pay for.
From separate perks to 360° value
Plus already had an S7 option for flights and a separate hotel cashback from Yandex Travel. We joined them into one option that covers the whole trip: flights, hotels, excursions with Tripster and saving up with Yandex Pay.
A win-win with partners
The main value of the option, such as miles, was paid for by S7. Plus brought the audience, the brand and the billing. In return, S7 got new customers, a reason for them to fly with S7 more often and a subscription model it could not build alone.
Results
- 30.4M
- Plus subscribers
by the end of 2023 - +58%
- subscribers
in 2023 - −25% → +4%
- EBITDA margin of Plus
and Entertainment in a year - 2M+
- subscribers
of the travel option
Takeouts
Working on Plus taught us that people pay for a subscription about as much as they pay for its biggest part. For Plus that part was content, so films and music set the ceiling on its price. To lift the ceiling, the value had to come from the rest of life: travel, kids, driving. That is why options grew around interests, not around partners.
We also learned that more features do not mean more value. A product stands on the few things people really use, and every extra perk can blur them. So each new idea had to prove that it reached enough subscribers and paid for itself before it joined the subscription.
And we saw that in a subscription, trust is part of the product. A loss feels about twice as strong as an unexpected gift, so one hidden price rise can undo a year of new perks. That is why we wrote down what Plus never does and kept to it, even when it cost us subscribers.