From Liquid Content to Liquid Users
Publishers are racing to make their content flow. The bigger prize is making their audiences flow, from anonymous to loyal, and community is the solvent.
By: Mark Zohar
The liquid content promise
One of the media buzzwords of 2026 is liquid content: an approach to structuring, producing, and distributing content that adapts to different audiences and platforms. In their paper Demystifying AI for News Publishers: Liquid Content, FT Strategies describes it as content built primarily from datafied components, or “atomic objects” such as quotes, events, or dates, rather than information already synthesised into discrete products like an article, podcast, or video segment. The newsroom stops shipping finished objects and starts producing raw components that can be remoulded into whatever shape a reader wants, whenever they want it. Same reporting, endless forms.
Done well, this changes the economics of production and lifts engagement at the same time. Liquid content is a retention engine. It delivers a story in the format the audience actually wants, so readers stay longer, return more often, and bounce less. And the formats that travel best are not passive. FT Strategies points specifically to games, quizzes, and Q&As, the interactive, participatory experiences that are harder to produce but keep people close. Fluid content, higher engagement, new revenue.
Experience is the product
However, content flowing is only half the shift. Dina Shatner, co-author of The Age of News Experience, names the half that gets skipped. Between audience and revenue sits a layer most publishers rush past — experience: the formats, sequences, and interactions that give audiences a reason to return, stay, and trust the brand. Most publishers leap from an audience goal straight to an output. “We need younger readers” becomes “we need vertical video.” The result is a pile of fragmented products, a crossword, a briefing, a video series, that never add up to a coherent experience. Contrast this with social platforms, where experience was never bolted onto the product. Experience was the product.
Liquid content, left to itself, makes that fragmentation worse, not better. Atomize a story into formats for a solo reader and you have optimized the output and skipped the experience. The point of engagement was never engagement. The point is movement. Formats produce outputs. Experiences produce behaviours, staying longer, returning more often, taking the next step, and behaviours are what turn audience value into commercial value. If your content is liquid, your users must be too.
From liquid content to liquid users
Presently, the publisher funnel is anything but fluid. It is a series of walls. Anonymous readers never become known. Engaged readers stall before they register. Registered users hesitate before they subscribe. Subscribers churn before they turn loyal. Every stage leaks, because a well-formatted story still gives a user no reason to take the next step. You cannot pour a solid. An anonymous reader served a flawless personalized podcast is still anonymous.
Liquid users flow. They move through the funnel with less friction at every stage, from anonymous to engaged to registered to subscribed to loyal, because each step feels less like a toll booth and more like a natural progression. That flow is not created by better formatting. It is created by participation. This is the experience layer Dina Shatner says you cannot skip, and it is what we built Viafoura’s CommunityOS to run.
While content personalizes the reader experience, community pulls them in. When someone comments, replies, votes in a poll, joins a live Q&A, or plays a daily game, three things happen at once. They cross from anonymous to known, because participation requires identity. They leave a first-party signal that sharpens everything after it. And they form an attachment to the space, not just the story. Engagement produces a logged-in moment. The logged-in moment produces data. The data and the belonging together produce a reason to register, then subscribe, then stay.
Inside CommunityOS, this is the Frequency Loop. Participation earns a reader a reason to return, a reply, a live event, a thread heating up, delivered through a notification we own outright, with no algorithm in the middle. They come back. Habit forms. Frequency climbs. And frequency is the leading indicator of registration propensity, subscription conversion, and lifetime value. The Frequency Loop is the pump that keeps users liquid. Participation is the fuel, and it is the pivot the old funnel never had.
Where the flow leads
The endpoint of a liquid funnel is the super user, the small segment that funds most of the business. As I recently noted, the Venn diagram of super users and community members is a near perfect circle. They are largely the same people, characterised by the same habit-forming behaviours: high recency and frequency of visits, deep sessions, and the loyalty that compounds into subscription and ad revenue. Active community members retain at roughly 25% higher rates. In short, participatory community experiences are producers of super users and are LTV multipliers.
This is why the ground is shifting under the pageview. In a world where referral traffic is decaying, AI answer engines are eating the top of the funnel, and depth is replacing scale, you do not win by pouring more anonymous strangers into a leaky system. You win by keeping the readers you have flowing toward identity, belonging, and loyalty.
So follow FT Strategies’ advice: begin creating datafied information cores rather than discrete objects for direct consumption. Then go one step further. A publisher whose content flows but whose audience stays frozen at anonymous has mastered half the shift. The other half, the half that compounds, is community. Make the content flow. Then make the people flow with it, all the way to loyal, and all the way to super user.