Connect London

Build Bold: Reinventing Revenue and Owning the Audience in a Post-AI-Hype Era.

June 10, 2026 | London
Invitation-only executive forum for senior media leaders

Arc XP Connect London is an invitation-only executive forum for senior media leaders focused on a critical challenge: building stronger, more resilient revenue as audience growth slows and market pressure rises.

The day brings together leaders from across media for practical insight, peer discussion, and high-value networking. The program includes customer case studies, featured sessions from The Washington Post, moderated roundtables, and a closing reception. There will be plenty of time to network with your peers.

Topics include subscription growth, dynamic paywalls, first-party data, editorial efficiency, and advertising monetization.

Featured Washington Post speakers include Sara Goo, Anjali Iyer, Venkat Varalu, and Jason Tollestrom.

Designed for executives leading growth, revenue, subscriptions, advertising, and transformation, Connect London offers a focused setting to learn from peers and explore practical strategies for sustainable monetization.

Networking reception

Following the day’s sessions, attendees will join a reception with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres for continued conversation and relationship-building in a more informal setting.

Registration is now closed.

*Note: If you are traveling to the UK, you might need an electronic travel authorization (ETA) or a visa. To learn more about your requirements, we advise you to check https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa.

8:30 - 8:50 AM

Welcome & Introductions

Format: Executive welcome from Arc XP + agenda walkthrough

Guests will arrive and have the chance to mingle over coffee, pastries, and light brunch options.

8:50 - 9:30 AM

A new playbook for the post-traffic era ft. Lisa MacLeod, Director at FT Strategies

Theme: Grow revenue & monetization - how to secure independent revenue.

Speaker: Lisa MacLeod, FT Strategies

For years, the media industry chased the traffic wave, hoping scale would answer our prayers.

Today, the bubble has burst, volumes are plummeting and reality has set in. The future belongs to media companies that build independent, self-sustaining revenue ecosystems.

This session tackles the hard, internal structural changes required to build high-value, monetisable audience relationships. How do we turn the focus inward - leveraging first-party data, dynamic paywalls, audiene engagement and operational efficiency to build a media business built to last.

9:30 - 10:00 AM

What we learned when we asked our readers to choose their price ft. Marc Gendron, Editor at Le Soleil

Format: Customer presentation - ft. Marc Gendron, Le Soleil

How do you plan a price increase while simultaneously accelerating subscriber growth? At Les Coops de l'information, the answer was counterintuitive: let readers choose what they pay. This session explores how a time-bound "Pay What You Can" campaign — combining new product features, tightened content access, and a messaging strategy rooted in the organization's employee-owned cooperative identity — delivered results beyond expectations. Marc Gendron, Principal Director, Audiences and Platforms, will walk through the project's architecture, the behavioural insights from flexible pricing (including how a simple suggested price lifted average revenue), and what this experiment revealed about the untapped willingness of readers to support local journalism.

10:00 - 10:30 AM Break

10:30 - 11:00 AM

Featured Session w/ Sara Goo, President at The Washington Post Creators Org

Sara Goo, WaPo Creators Org - Meeting a new generation of subscribers through live, engaging content with eventual ad revenue.

11:00 - 11:30 AM

Feature Session: The Power of Partnership: Building the Ecosystem Behind Sky 2030

As the pace of change across media, technology, and consumer behavior continues to accelerate, no organization can innovate alone. In this session, Sky will explore the growing role of strategic alliances in driving business transformation, unlocking new capabilities, and creating value for customers, partners, and audiences alike.

Discover how Sky's growing network of strategic alliances is accelerating innovation, enabling new opportunities, and helping shape the company's vision for 2030 and beyond.

Speakers:

Stuart Duncan, Sr. Director of Broadcast and Media - Arc XP

Andy Thomson, Executive Director, Business Operations - Sky News Group

11:30 - 12:00 PM

Featured Session: Expanding Beyond Subscriptions: Unlocking the Next Horizon of Revenue w/ Anjali Iyer, Global Head of Subscriptions at The Washington Post

Format: Featured session: Anjali Iyer, Global Head of Subscriptions - WaPo’s approach to building independent revenue with dynamic paywalls / Flexible Access.

12:00 - 1:15 PM Lunch

1:15 - 1:45 PM

Panel Session: From Traffic to Trust: Using apps to build loyal audiences in the age of AI

In the panel, Jonny Kaldor, CEO of Pugpig will be joined by The Independent and The Spectator and Unherd. Together they’ll unpack the key findings from the 2026 Media App Report and discuss how publishers can optimize their apps to deepen their relationships with their readers and gain the sorts of insights into their audiences that the tech platforms will never deliver.

Speakers:

Jonny Kaldor, Co-Founder & CEO - Pugpig

Sebastian Giraud, CEO CoEditor & COO Old Queen Street Media

Mariana Bettio, Head of Product - The Independent

1:45 - 2:15 PM

Featured session w/ Venkatesh Varalu, VP of Data & Analytics at The Washington Post

Format: Featured session - Venkatesh Varalu, Data & Analytics at The Washington Post will discuss strategies to leverage first-party data, improve editorial efficiency and newsroom analytics.

2:15 - 2:45 PM

Featured Session w/Jason Tollestrup, Head of Monetization and Rev. Ops at The Washington Post

Format: Featured Session - Jason Tollestrup, Head of Monetization and Rev. Ops at The Washington Post will discuss key programmatic ad strategies to manage ad revenue and ad monetization strategy.

2:45 - 3:00 PM Break

3:00 - 4:30 PM

Roundtable Discussions

Format: Breakout sessions

Topic Suggestions for breakout sessions:

Breakout 1: Building revenue resilience as audience volume declines
Breakout 2: Monetizing audience relationships, subscribers, and engaged users more effectively. (discuss practical levers like subscribers, registered users, loyalty, bundling, and premium experiences)
Breakout 3: Rethinking the organization to support sustainable monetization. (Revenue strategy usually fails without changes to teams, incentives, KPIs, and operating model.)

4:30 - 5:00 PM

Report-out: key takeaways from the breakouts

Format: Brief report-outs from each room