Paywall strategy is key to growing digital subscriptions. But setting up a paywall strategy and leaving it — as readers and business models change — will not do. 

On Thursday during Module 2 of INMA’s Media Subscriptions Summit, executives from South China Morning Post and The Globe and Mail shared how their paywall models have changed through the years.

South China Morning Post

Adrian Lee, senior vice president for audience growth, credits the company’s subscription growth to changes at SCMP and the world’s interest in what’s happening in China. SCMP, a Hong Kong-based English-language media company, offers month-to-month, one- and two-year subscription options to readers.

SCMP surpassed the number of digital subscribers in Year 1 of its subscription service, compared to the number it had accumulated from its old paywall that was live for almost 10 years, Lee said. 

SCMP is particularly proud of two elements of its dynamic paywall: their velocity wall and their archive wall, Lee said: “These are examples of ways we have created dynamic subscription products based on our ability to meet and analyse in real time across functions and hypothesize around a new product.”

The velocity wall allows SCMP to leverage and monetise against viral interest in specific articles. 

“If we have a given number of pageviews within a 60 minute timeframe, we effectively hard paywall that article and editorial will have the ability to pick and choose whether there are specific sections on site which would not be captured by the velocity wall,” Lee said.

SCMP also is finding success in audience specific paywalls.

“We are trying to pull people down and optimise the conversion journey, which we know through our first-party data there are certain hoops that subscribers should be jumping through to get them closer to subscription,” Lee said. “By knowing what that ideal path is, we should start pushing people down what is a preferred path. It’s still part art, part science. Just because we have that data doesn’t mean it’s 100% foolproof.”

Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail, published throughout western and central Canada, was an early implementer of the paywall model, establishing a freemium paywall back in 1998. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of great technology to use for this and it was impacting their ad revenue, so they ended up taking the paywall down.

Flash-forward to 2012, and they put a new paywall strategy back in place, which was a combination of a hard and metered paywall, explained Gordon Edall, co-founder and chief revenue officer at Sophi, The Globe and Mail’s AI platform.

At that point, no other media house in Canada had a paywall. The Globe knew they had to continue to invest in first-rate journalism and user experience, as well as protect ad revenue.

Edall and his team started looking at what was happening on the cutting-edge of machine learning, such as in video games, and applying some of that learning to solving The Globe and Mail’s paywall problems.

To build the next-generation paywall, the team knew they had to build something different with specific features:

• A fully dynamic, real-time, personalised paywall.

• A deep-learning model that would learn from mistakes and know when to give up.

• There should be no metre count at all and no metre calendar resets.

• The paywall should work even on a user’s first encounter.

This model works so well, Edall said, that they will often ask a user for a credit card on their first visit — and get it.

“What we’re essentially doing is playing a video game of sorts. It’s spread across hundreds of thousands of users and millions of pageviews, and the game is really quite simple,” he explained. “Every day, we try to set a new high score for the publication. How you score points in the game is by looking at each and every user, and each and every user interaction, and figuring out every time someone tries to read something.”

The Summit continues Tuesdays and Thursdays through February 15. You can register here.

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