About BasketNews
BasketNews is a premier media outlet dedicated to high-quality basketball journalism. Founded in Lithuania in 2005, the business expanded into the global market in 2021 with the launch of BasketNews.com. Today, it has grown beyond a traditional news site into a broader creator ecosystem, operating four YouTube channels and producing six podcasts for a global audience of basketball fans.
BasketNews began its membership journey on Patreon in 2019. While the platform worked well in the early stages, the company’s continued growth created the need for a more tailored subscription model built around its own platform and audience experience.
Read the full case study here
The problem
As BasketNews scaled, Patreon became increasingly restrictive. As a third-party platform, it limited the team’s ability to fully own and shape the subscriber journey within its own ecosystem. BasketNews needed a native solution that would support its own paywall infrastructure and give it greater control over the user experience.
At the same time, Patreon’s user costs were beginning to affect margins. For a growing subscription business, this made efficiency and flexibility more important. BasketNews needed a payment partner that could support its custom platform, offer a more transparent fee structure, and remove friction from scaling.
The solution
“Moving to our own paywall was a big step forward for BasketNews, and payabl. helped make that possible with payabl. checkout. It gave us the flexibility to scale faster, experiment with new payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, and keep the focus on growing our audience and content.”
Jonas Miklovas, Editor, BasketNews
After building its internal paywall infrastructure, BasketNews partnered with payabl. to implement payabl. checkout to power recurring payments across its subscription offering. This included card acquiring for subscriptions, as well as new payment methods: Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal.
payabl. stood out for its ability to handle subscription-based payments, competitive pricing, transparent fee structure, and overall value for a scaling media business.
The team also benefited from a responsive and collaborative partnership, with ongoing communication helping fine-tune the system and adapt it to BasketNews’ technical requirements.
With payabl. in place, BasketNews was able to support a native paywall experience on its own platform, while also creating the flexibility to integrate new products and experiment with different payment options as the business evolved.
The results
3 x growth
Since partnering with payabl., the Basketnews subscriber base has grown three times.
“Partnering with payabl. means we can stop worrying about payment hurdles and focus on scaling. As our subscription business grew, having a flexible payment partner that could manage recurring payments became essential to building the experience we wanted on our own platform.”
Jonas Miklovas, Editor, BasketNews
The partnership has also helped BasketNews reduce transaction costs, optimise billing cycles to improve churn, and create greater financial efficiency across its membership model. That efficiency has enabled the business to reinvest more into content while scaling faster and responding more quickly to new ideas and opportunities.
By removing payment hurdles and supporting a more flexible subscription setup, payabl. checkout has given BasketNews the agility it needs to keep innovating in a fast-moving media environment.