It was reported this week by The Information that Reuters would become one of the last free news services to implement a paywall. “The current plan… envisions putting all articles coming from specific coverage areas—such as energy, sustainability and its opinion content Breaking Views—behind a paywall by next February,” the site wrote.
Then today Folio: reported that Skift, the B2B media company serving the travel industry, just launched a digital paywall called “Skift Pro,” an annual product priced at $365 per year or $595 for two years.
A report came out last year from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard and Lenfest Institute titled, How Today’s News Publishers Can Use Data, Best Practices, and Test-And-Learn Tactics to Build Better Pay-Meters.
(Matt Skibinski from the Lenfest Institute will be delivering a webinar for us on July 23 titled Understanding Editorial Economics and Turning Content Producers into Revenue Generators. Register here.)
A key takeaway from the report is to craft a better welcome message. It says that 30% “of onsite digital subscriptions originate from ‘welcome’ messages that provide an introduction to new readers and ‘warn’ messages that serve as reminders as the reader approaches the meter limit.” In fact, I just received a welcome message from Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information. It’s well-written and it’s long—SIPA marketers would be proud.
Here are more of the report’s key findings:
Stop more readers to force conversion. The report urges having a high stop rate—that is the percentage of all digital users who are ‘stopped’ by a subscription prompt, a paywall or a meter limit. It is calculated by the number of users stopped by a meter or paywall in a given month over the number of unique visitors during that period. Organizations that are stopping more people have stronger digital businesses.
Test multiple strategies to determine the most effective marketing messages. “Browser overlays and customized warnings have proven effective, particularly those that underscore meter limits for individual users and offer customized options for unique subscriptions based on the reader’s profile and viewing history.” It added that there are no “hard and fast” rules for paywalls. “Instead, ‘intelligent access’ evaluates data continuously to create different access control rules for different behaviors.”
Lower your meter limit. A majority of publishers set their meter limits at 5 articles per month or lower. This number has gone steadily down since 2012. Some publishers used to set the paywall as high as 25 articles a month. “As publishers have experimented, and readers have become accustomed to digital subscriptions, meter limits have tended to decline among the publishers studied and within the industry at large.” Also, readers can often circumvent by using different browsers.
Increase reader opportunities to encounter the meter. Is the meter simply the articles a reader clicks on, or are there more factors involved? You might lower the meter rate for more editorially-intensive content. Their limit might be increased if they do other things with you. For those with an ad blocker, a subscription message might be customized to invite the reader to subscribe or turn your ad blocker off to continue to read content before the average meter stop.
Refresh as much as possible. “Effective publishers tend to help create ‘habit of news’ among readers” and content that readers want to refresh and read regularly. “The most engaged subscribers expect daily and often hourly materials… While wire stories help a publisher furnish regular content, wires tended to leave an audience impression of low quality of content. Publishers should prioritize customized, frequent coverage that address a community’s particular needs, concerns and interests.”
Quicken your load times. “Page load times represent the largest difference between successful publishers in the top percentile and 50th percentile of publishers studied, with a median load times of 5.76 seconds.” Avoid advertising overload—probably easier in 2020—use real estate to drive readers to subscription options, and encourage content discovery through customized recommendations and infinite scrolls.
Be clear and make it easy. “The most effective stop messages include a single clear call to action, offer attractive introductory trial rates and include buttons that make clear the location(s) to click to advance the offer. Others include content-specific messages that link to the specific articles or sections the readers are pursuing.”
Again, you can see the whole report here.
