© Illustration by Aurélie Garnier
This article was written by Ann-Kathrin Wind & Marvin Suder at Handelsblatt Media, Germany.
Key takeaways to copy & share
> Handelsblatt Media Group, Germany's leading business publisher, had a paywall conversion problem that wasn't a product problem. Its four H+ tiers were each well-positioned. The mistake was showing all of them at once, at the moment of highest reader impatience > Step one was removing the higher-priced products from the paywall entirely. It felt like hiding revenue. Conversion rose significantly instead, because the reader no longer had a package comparison to work through before checkout > The new default is a single offer: H+ Standard digital access, with a trial or a three-month commitment at 30% off the monthly price > Step two put choice back selectively. A Likelihood-to-Subscribe score decides who sees Premium, on the hypothesis that high-scoring users have both a higher willingness to pay and genuine use for the extra features > The decisive metric was never initial conversion. Premium converts from trial to paid less reliably than Standard, so a failed Premium trial doesn't just underdeliver, it replaces a Standard subscriber you would have kept. The question became which offer generates the highest sustainable revenue per segment, not which offer converts best
