DC Thomson is a family-owned publisher headquartered in Dundee, founded in 1905 and best known outside Scotland for the Beano. Its two regional dailies are the titles in this story: The Courier in Dundee and the Press and Journal in Aberdeen. 

Graham McDougall is Head of Trading and Retention, responsible for pricing, packaging and offers across both titles and the wider portfolio. The company’s digital subscription launched in lockdown, grew by roughly 10,000 a year and last reported around 50,000 subscribers. One product inside that number is a digital-only Sports Pack, now £4.99 a month, built for readers who only wanted sport.

> Scottish publisher DC Thomson (The Courier in Dundee, the Press and Journal in Aberdeen) had one of its biggest content areas by engagement producing almost no subscriptions. Match reports and team news are commodity content any reader can find free within minutes

> The fix was a digital-only Sports Pack cut from content already in the full pack. Nothing new was commissioned and editorial was not asked to change anything. It sells in-article at £1 for the first month then £4.99, and around 95% of sales happen there rather than on the subscribe page

> Trial conversion and retention both beat the full pack. 15-20% of buyers upgrade, half of them within a month, and the rest stay on the cheaper pack. A reverse test settled the cannibalisation worry: offered both packs on the same sport articles, readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster

> Exclusives did the converting. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the Press and Journal sent a reporter to his home country and nobody else had the story. The sports desks dropped Saturday match reports and Friday team news for what readers could not get elsewhere

> No deep discounts anywhere. Every trial is one paid month, the price has risen from £3 to £4.99, and readers who try to cancel are offered an annual contract paid monthly rather than a percentage off. Graham McDougall, Head of Trading and Retention: "If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it's going to be a lot harder"

Sport had the audience but none of the subscriptions

Sport was one of the biggest content areas on The Courier and the Press and Journal, and readers spent a lot of time on it. Almost none of them subscribed to read it. McDougall boils this down to the fact that match reports and team news are commodity content: the clubs publish them, fan sites repeat them, and any reader can find them free within minutes.

“It was really good for engagement of subscribers, but wasn’t something that would convert users,” McDougall says.

Competition and reader feedback pushed DC Thomson to act. Football-only websites were appearing in Scotland, focused on the big Glasgow and Edinburgh clubs, with Aberdeen an obvious next stop. And viewers of Highland League Weekly, a highlights show for the north’s semi-professional league, kept saying that content was all they wanted. “We assumed that everybody would want their local news as well.”

Existing content, sold on its own

The Sports Pack is the sports section of the full digital pack. Nothing new was commissioned. “We just took what we had and tried to package it up in a way that our Potential subscribers were going to like.” Each title’s pack follows its audience: The Courier’s is football (Dundee, Dundee United, St Johnstone, Dunfermline); the Press and Journal’s adds the Highland League and shinty, a traditional Highland team sport similar to field hockey.

Sport readers buy through an in-article payment screen and rarely see the subscribe page. Around 95% of Sports Pack sales happen in-article, so the pack is often left off the subscribe page entirely; its three slots go to whatever needs volume that month.

> Another regional publisher acing subscriptions: How Irish News is growing digital from a strong print legacy

Exclusive reporting made it grow

Once the pack showed sport readers would pay, growth came from exclusives. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the P&J sent a reporter to his home country to find out who he was. Nobody else had the story. “All of a sudden we started to see huge success,” McDougall says. “It started to teach the journalists what kind of content would really resonate, and what people would be willing to pay for.”

The sports desks stopped writing Saturday match reports and Friday team news, and started reporting what readers could not get elsewhere: youth players coming through, a different lens on the club. “It heroes the journalists. If they create great content, it will convert and retain subscribers.”

It retains better than the full pack, and most buyers never upgrade

Trial conversion and retention are both significantly better on the Sports Pack than on DC Thomson’s other products. Drop-off comes after months one and two, then flattens. McDougall credits the focus: a Dundee United fan goes to one page, finds everything, and follows a team with a passion that general news does not attract.

Around 15-20% of Sports Pack subscribers upgrade to the full pack, with half of them doing so in the first month. The other 80% stay. Internally, that raised the cannibalisation question. A recent reverse test answered it: DC Thomson offered both packs on the same sport articles, and readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster than those who chose the Sports Pack. “Sure, they might have gone onto the web pack, but maybe they would not have enjoyed paying for all the content they weren’t wanting to read.”

A smaller product at a rising price

The Sports Pack launched at £3 for three months, about half the price of the full pack, purely to find out whether sport readers would pay anything. They did, so the question became what a credible price looked like. Over the last year, DC Thomson has switched from chasing volume to growing revenue. Every trial is now one paid month, and the Sports Pack costs £4.99 after a £1 first month. When the main pack’s trial was cut, the cheap pack’s trial was cut with it.

Win-backs exist in the cancel flow, but there is no 90%-off deal for anyone who phones and asks; on a £4.99 pack it would be pennies. Instead, subscribers who try to cancel are offered an annual subscription paid monthly: a lower monthly price in return for a twelve-month commitment. McDougall says it makes far more money than a large percentage discount.

“If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it’s going to be a lot harder. We’ve got to get people to see that the product is worth something.”

DC Thomson is now looking at the same idea by geography: packs for Aberdeen or the Moray coast, built on data about what people read. “We’ve got to be really careful that we don’t offer another pack at £4.99 when people could be paying £9.99 for the content and getting more.”

What this means for you

Find the section that gets the most engagement and the fewest subscriptions, then try selling it on its own. DC Thomson didn’t need new content, nor an app and editorial mandate. The product succeeded with existing articles, a simple payment screen and a lower price. How far that travels depends on what you publish.

• Regional and local publishers: Football is the obvious choice where a club has a real fan base, but build the pack around what your readers actually follow: the P&J’s includes shinty, a sport rarely covered elsewhere. Sell it in-article, keep the trial identical to the main pack, and run the reverse test before anyone asks about cannibalisation.
• Nationals: a sport-only pack competes with dedicated sports subscriptions. The transferable part is the method: pick an under-monetised segment (a section, a region, a day pass), test it against the full product on the same pages and judge it on retention as well as conversion.
• Magazine and specialist publishers: your product is already a niche, so slicing it thinner is risky. Take the pricing rules instead: one trial length across products, a term commitment in the cancel flow rather than a percentage off, and retention tracked for every offer cohort.
• Single titles and small teams: if no section is big enough for its own pack, the cheapest thing to copy is an annual contract paid monthly.

McDougall’s warning is to ask first what problem the pack solves and which readers it is for. DC Thomson had readers asking for it and reporting nobody else had, and the pack needs both.

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From a “Free to read” section on The New York Times, to “Pay what you can” campaigns in Canada, we’ve brought together a collection of case studies published on Audiencers to share the latest strategies being tested by publishers around the world to increase conversion rates to subscriptions.

Paywall and subscription tests publishers ran in 2026, collected by Audiencers:

> Stop advertising what's locked, start advertising what's free. The New York Times and The Verge both run "free to read" sections on the homepage, reversing years of premium tagging. The logic: conversion should happen on the article itself, not be pre-empted by a warning icon that ends the journey early

> Sell access in smaller units. The Washington Post's day passes, week passes and pay-per-article found an untapped market, with 42% of flexible access buyers brand-new anonymous users. Over 180 days, up to 8% of week-pass buyers, 4% of day-pass buyers and 3% of pay-per-article buyers became full subscribers

> Let readers set the price, then anchor it. Quebec's Les Coops de l'information took an average of $3.12 a month against a $1 minimum for the first three months. The suggested figure in the field did the work: $5 lifted the average to $3.39, $6 lifted it to $3.50. 84% of acquisitions had never subscribed before

> Sell less, not more. SFGATE kept its entire site free and sold a separate paid app alongside it. Les Echos' "La Sélection" is 9 to 15 articles a day chosen from a daily output of 120 to 150, at an early bird €9.90 a month

> Don't ask on day one. Figma asks six onboarding questions before showing pricing, and The New York Times tested a homepage whose only button top right said "log in". Each step gets a single goal, and early on that goal isn't the sale

Personalising paywall text around the reader’s interests

Dynamic paywalls, that adapt to a reader’s profile or context, are becoming increasingly more common as an effective way of increasing conversion rates. One such dynamic element that publishers seem to be testing this year is the use of personalised text based on the reader’s interest or the current article being read.

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Jess Burney is the Managing Director of Customer Marketing and Subscriptions at Immediate, the publisher behind Good Food, Radio Times and Nutracheck. She runs a team of 50 and has spent five years pivoting from a print subscription business to a digital one. Immediate now has more than 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital-only, and a mission to reach 3 million by 2030. The majority of the remaining 1.8 million are expected to come from the US, from products not yet launched and from bundling.

> UK publisher Immediate (Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra) has over 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital, against a company target of 3 million by 2030

> Print subscribers were never migrated. Immediate built and bought digital products for people who had never bought a magazine: the Good Food app is at just under 200,000 from a 2022 standing start, Nutracheck at 580,000 since its 2023 acquisition

> Paywalled articles only sell if the content is genuinely must-read, and evergreen lifestyle content isn't. Good Food charges for utility instead: cook mode, planning tools, and app takeovers exclusive to subscribers

> There's no single Immediate paywall. Stickiness, response rates and build costs differ by brand, so each gets its own model, and Immediate only builds where it leads the category

> A separate commercial team holds the budget and funds products against fixed thresholds: 40-55% trial-to-paid conversion, 65-80% at the next renewal, monthly retention above 90%, and 3:1 lifetime value to acquisition cost within two years

Print was working. That was the constraint.

Immediate publishes Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra and around 50 other brands, and by the early 2020s its print business was thriving. Magazines still sold well, and lockdown had been good to them, with a steep uptick in demand for copies by post. Instead of needing to rescue subscribers from a collapsing format, as many other publishers did, Immediate’s existing subscriber base was profitable, loyal, and not going anywhere fast. As Burney put it, print is still a robust format, and one the brand needed to continue to commit to. But growth is in digital, a development necessary to achieve their 3 million subscriber target. 

What’s more, the bet was that the expertise from years of building subscription expertise in print – pricing, renewals, retention, and direct marketing to a known customer file – would carry into digital even though the format would not.

New products for audiences that print never reached

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At the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille (3 June 2026), Le Monde’s Chief Digital Officer Lou Grasser sat down with YouTube’s VP for EMEA, Pedro Pina, for a fireside chat moderated by Marion Ranchet (Streaming Made Easy). The session, “Transforming Journalism on YouTube,” looked at how a reference newspaper is going video-first without becoming a TV channel. Le Monde now does 4 million video views a day. Here is what they shared.

> Le Monde does 4 million video views a day against 6 million site visits. Followers are only 25% of that traffic, so YouTube works as a discovery engine rather than a loyalty channel

> Views grew 25% in 2025, driven by long formats. The deliberate choice was to invest in the newsroom and in staff journalists on camera, not a standalone TV channel or external creators

> YouTube reports 15 billion news views a year, and its revenue share leaves publishers with more than half of what they monetise on the platform

> YouTube is building paywall integration with publishers' own subscription systems, with Le Monde as a pilot partner. Today there is no way to gate video on the platform at all

> YouTube's advice: be personality-driven and direct to camera, don't copy-paste a TV format, and hire someone with real channel-management experience to train the in-house team

Why Le Monde invests in YouTube

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As search, social and AI continue to reshape discovery, publishers are looking for more reliable ways to connect with readers directly. Apps are playing an increasingly important role in strengthening owned channels and supporting subscriber relationships.

The Pugpig 2026 Media App Report offers a clear picture of what’s working, what isn’t and what the top-performing apps have in common. Combining analytics from more than 440 apps with survey responses from 140 publishers, it’s our most data-rich edition yet. 

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SFGATE has been a free site for its entire existence. Rather than bolt a paywall onto that, the team built something separate: a paid app called Friends of SFGATE, designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. We spoke with Grant Marek, Editor-in-Chief of SFGATE, and Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer across Hearst Newspapers, about the thinking behind it, four weeks after launch.

> SFGATE didn't add a paywall to its free site. It built a separate paid app instead, so the free web experience that built its audience stays untouched

> The name "Friends of SFGATE" beat "subscription" and "membership" in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund

> Nearly 90% of readers who took the 7-day free trial converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it's still early days

> The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time, not just once by anyone

> The launch required real org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming

Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. The web stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been. What’s new sits next to it, a separate, paid app.

Why not just add a paywall

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Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, explains why the 233-year-old title launched with a single umbrella subscription rather than tiers, how Culture Club became a central retention bet, and why the hardest part of the build has been saying no.

> The Observer launched its first-ever digital subscription in November 2025 at £16 a month or £144 a year, with a single umbrella tier covering print, digital, audio and Culture Club benefits from spring this year.
> Culture Club, a set of arts and culture perks worth more than £800, is given to every subscriber instead of being held back for a premium tier.
> Early data shows subscribers who engage with multiple parts of the product, from Nigel Slater's recipes to the puzzles to podcasts, are significantly less likely to cancel.
> The Salt Path investigation and its podcast and documentary afterlife have been the single biggest growth catalyst since launch.

Lessons:
> A single, transparent subscription can beat early tiering when you are reintroducing a brand to its audience.
> Retention comes from breadth of engagement across a product, not from any one flagship story.
> Old brand equity can bridge readers into new daily habits, but only if the product is built to earn that habit.

When Jack Riley joined The Observer in 2025, he inherited separate journalistic businesses rather than one. Tortoise Media built digital infrastructure for audio, events and membership, but not the volume or breadth of content a newspaper needs.

The Observer brought a newsroom with genuine authority and a 233-year history, but none of the digital scaffolding that sits around it. “We really had to design a lot of stuff almost from scratch in order to bring it to life,” Riley says.

The consolidation happened in two waves. The first was making sure the Sunday paper kept getting out of a newly combined newsroom. The second was an open-access sampling site throughout the summer, used to build registration and newsletter lists ahead of a proper launch. What followed was an intense six months of building and prototyping: new iOS and Android apps for phone and tablet, a full website redesign, brand refresh and the subscription infrastructure underneath it, including analytics, paywall logic, access controls and integrations with both the Guardian’s print systems and Tortoise’s existing membership base.

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At the Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth at The Guardian, broke down what actually motivates readers to give money to a publication with no paywall.

The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, anyone can read it, whether they pay or not. So the 1.4 million people who choose to give money anyway aren't paying for access, they're paying for something else entirely

> Ownership is the product: The organisation's value proposition comes down to three words - global, independent, free. Owned by the Scott Trust, their sole purpose is to ensure The Guardian can keep publishing. It's this that's sold to readers

> One email, built entirely around that pitch, generated $2 million. When The Washington Post and LA Times pulled their 2024 election endorsements, The Guardian sent readers a simple message - we published ours, and always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to

> But it's the method that's worth noting rather than the moment: The Guardian surveys readers right after they give, with the goal of understanding the why. The top answers include protecting the free press, editorial independence, or the journalism itself

> These surfaced motivations don't just become a slide that's presented once to the team, they're used to build every single message that asks for support. They keep telling the story, deliberately and repeatedly

The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall. Anyone can read it, regardless of ability to pay. So every dollar it raises from readers is, in Harkin’s words, an elective transaction: nobody is required to give anything to keep reading. That constraint is exactly what makes The Guardian’s reader revenue data useful to anyone running a subscription business, paywalled or not, because it isolates motivation from access. People aren’t paying to get in the door. They’re paying for something else entirely.

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At its stand at VivaTech, on Tuesday 17 June 2026, Les Echos devoted a session to a question every publisher knows: “What is the answer to French readers’ information fatigue?”. On the agenda: the data-backed diagnosis from Jean-Baptiste Leroux (OpinionWay), the brand’s values presented by Célia Pénavaire (journalist and digital editor-in-chief at Les Echos), then the product answer led by Yasmine Maslouhi, Director of subscription activities and revenue at Les Echos: a new offer called « La Sélection ».

> According to OpinionWay, the average French person consumes about 6 media families a day, 20% already use a generative AI to get informed, but a majority say they feel overwhelmed, even fatigued, by the news

> Faced with information fatigue, unlimited access is not the answer. Les Echos is instead making the opposite bet, that of selection

> "La Sélection" consists of between 9 and 15 articles a day, chosen from a daily output of 120 to 150 pieces, following a reader-needs grid (inform, reflect, get inspired, develop, unwind) and a strict quota discipline

> Three platforms (a dedicated tab in the app, a section on the site, a daily newsletter), a weekly long read on Saturdays, and 5 shareable articles a month. Early bird price sits at €9.90 a month

The diagnosis: more information, but a consumption that comes at a high psychological cost

Jean-Baptiste Leroux (OpinionWay) set the scene. Information fatigue, also called information overload, is a concept born among American sociologists in the 1970s, taken up in Europe and reworked by Edgar Morin around the idea of an “information cloud”, the body of information delivered each day by the basket of media we consume. The average French person consumes around 6 media families a day (television, radio, press, social media, podcasts, and now AI). A live test in the room: roughly 20% of French people use a generative AI such as ChatGPT to get informed about the news.

The first virtue of this cloud is that it informs people better than 20 years ago, even as the world is seen as increasingly complex. But the trade-off is heavy: the feeling of always seeing the same information, the sense, at the end of the day, of not having learned much, and a majority of French people who say they feel overwhelmed, even fatigued, by the news. For some of them, the news is even seen as depressing.

It is not the information itself that is depressing, it is the way it is prioritised and treated. If you only put forward hot, anxiety-inducing news, with a sensationalist treatment, you create anxiety.

Jean-Baptiste Leroux, OpinionWay

His metaphor: the ocean. Immediacy-driven media stay at the surface, on the foam of the waves. Media that take you down to the depths teach you something, but that is more demanding. All of this in a climate of distrust, fuelled by the sense that fake news is multiplying and the impression that media favour the clash of egos and ideas over explanation and analysis. In response, French people build their own strategies: cross-checking sources, talking about the news with those close to them (83% see the news as a topic to discuss with the people around them), taking back control to choose their information rather than endure it, favouring media that help them understand, easing the pressure by slowing down their consumption, and finally accepting that quality information has value and must be paid for. Total avoidance, for its part, concerns only 10 to 15% of French people.

Les Echos’ answer: four editorial pillars and an assumed responsibility

Yasmine Maslouhi first noted that journalists feel this fatigue too, and that it is wrong to believe only anxiety-inducing content works: inspiring and useful content, success stories or profiles of business leaders, work just as well. The group’s answer rests on four editorial pillars. Two belong to the title’s historic DNA, more than a hundred years old: reliability (systematic verification of every piece of information, across all platforms, drawing on a newsroom of experts) and impartiality (analysing the facts without taking sides, decoding the economy and the life of companies). Two are more recent: inspiration (solutions journalism, which does not just note a problem but shows who is solving it) and useful information, for professional as well as personal life (handling a toxic manager, for example).

It is essential for us to give people back a taste for the news, and a taste for reading. We want to live in a society where people read, where everyone can give themselves at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading. It is also a societal stake: to take an informed part in public life, people need to rediscover a taste for information.

Yasmine Maslouhi, Director of subscription activities and revenue, Les Echos

Two needs, two answers: unlimited on one side, selection on the other

The most interesting strategic point for publishers lies in a deliberately segmented view of needs. On one side, readers who use Les Echos daily to work, to prepare business plans or pitches. For them, the answer remains unlimited access to the documentation and to 35 years of archives, complemented by a new AI assistant designed to boost their daily productivity. On the other, those looking for a trusted daily intellectual companion. For that need, Les Echos’ position is clear: unlimited access is not the answer.

Unlimited access has been used a lot as a promise by telecoms and by media. Today, with this information fatigue, we believe a different promise is needed. We have chosen almost the opposite promise: selection.

Yasmine Maslouhi, Les Echos

“La Sélection”: three criteria, three values, one editorial discipline

“La Sélection” rests on three core criteria. Balance first: the goal is no longer breaking news at all costs (others do breaking news better than Les Echos), but information that is useful for understanding the world and taking a step back. Calm next: plural voices and op-eds, but grounded in evidence-based, balanced arguments. Impartiality finally, the title’s historic value.

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At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, Shirin Shity, Senior Marketing Manager at Project Syndicate, shared how transitioning from an aggressive friction model to an open, communication-first strategy revitalised user engagement and subscription conversion. 

> Project Syndicate passed 200,000 registered accounts while engagement stayed flat because the wall fired straight after a reader's first article. People arriving from LinkedIn or social left before discovering what the site was for

> The second leak was their most engaged readers. Newsletter subscribers kept hitting unpredictable hard walls with no indication of how many free articles remained or when the allowance reset, which broke exactly the habit the team was trying to build

> Working with FT Strategies & Poool, they concluded more friction wasn't the answer and loosened the wall instead. Readers now get three free reads every 30 days, up from two, with the terms stated openly across multiple touchpoints rather than discovered by hitting a wall

> The mechanism is the interesting part: on the second and third article, readers have to click "Continue Reading" to spend a credit. Making the allowance something you actively spend, rather than something silently consumed, turns it into something worth having

> Over a four-week trial, registered users converting to paid rose 52%, click-through across registration and paywalls went from 7% to 9%, subscription prompt success from 11% to 14%, and RFV scores lifted 22%. Monthly sessions for logged-in accounts climbed from 1.9 to 2.5

By treating the registration layer as a value journey rather than a restrictive barrier, the publication grew their logged user base, increased the number of registered users converting into paid subscribers by 52% and saw a 22% uplift in overall RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) scores. 

Context: balancing global reach with direct subscriptions

For over 30 years, Project Syndicate has operated as a syndication network, distributing high-level commentary from leading global thinkers as widely as possible. Its primary business model involves charging media outlets in developed countries to subsidize the dissemination of op-eds to more than 520 outlets across 158 countries.

Direct consumer digital subscriptions represent a newer engine of growth. However, traditional subscription paywalls naturally pull against their historic key metric, reach. This tension is where registration sits perfectly: it acts as a bridge, allowing for intentional content sampling while pulling anonymous readers into a known ecosystem.

The evolution of the reg wall

Project Syndicate launched its initial website in 2012 as a fully open platform. The site has since evolved through several operational iterations:

• 2017: Introduced the first native paywall with a single subscription offer.
• 2020–2022: Moved to a dynamic paywall approach and introduced multi-tiered subscription packages.
• 2023: Conducted A/B testing comparing a 1-read vs. 2-read allowance. This led to a standard model where readers received 1 free article, then had to register to receive 1 additional free article every 30 days.
• 2025–2026: Migrated to a new, flexible paywall architecture (powered by Poool) to run rapid onsite user experiments. Prior to this upgrade, backend limitations meant simple copy or design changes took weeks or months to implement through remote developers.

The metrics that made the case for a change

Data collected in early 2025 revealed a structural mismatch between user acquisition and long-term retention. While Project Syndicate excelled at building an initial database of registered users, surpassing 200,000 total accounts, active engagement post-registration was remarkably low.

An audit of user segments highlighted two main leakage points:

1. The fly-by loop

Because the old registration wall appeared immediately after a visitor’s first article, light readers coming from external platforms (such as LinkedIn or social media) simply left. The wall blocked them before they could discover the site’s wider value, resulting in zero captured emails and an average of just 0.8 article page views per user.

2. The newsletter wall

Even highly engaged newsletter subscribers regularly hit unpredictable hard walls without any indication of how many free articles they had remaining or when their monthly allowance would reset. This arbitrary friction disrupted habit formation and caused valuable readers to abandon the platform entirely.

The experiment: communication over friction

Collaborating with FT Strategies, the marketing team realised that increasing wall friction was not the answer. Instead, expanding content sampling while providing transparent progress indicators would give readers a clearer path to building a subscription habit.

The team launched a soft-to-hard paywall journey based on three pillars:

1. Transparent onboarding: The site clearly states the exact terms of the offer up front across multiple touchpoints: three free reads every 30 days.
2. Explicit personalisation benefits: The registration wall highlights functional perks, showing readers they can follow specific topics, track favorite authors, and save pieces to a personalised reading list.

3. An active unlock mechanism: Instead of immediately showing a full article, the platform introduces a stepped widget on the second and third pieces. Readers must intentionally click a “Continue Reading” button to spend one of their available credits, encouraging them to treat their monthly allowance as something of value. Once the third credit is spent, a hard paywall prompts a direct subscription offer.

Strategic impact and performance signals

The soft-to-hard communication strategy yielded immediate results over a four-week trial period, proving that looser constraints could drive higher economic value:

• Higher direct subscriptions: The business saw a 52% increase in registered users converting into paid subscribers compared to the previous model.
• Stronger onsite conversion rates: The combined click-through rate across both registration and paywalls jumped from 7% to 9%, while subscription prompt success rates rose from 11% to 14%.
• Deeper reader habits: Registered users saw a 22% uplift in overall RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) scores. Average monthly sessions for authenticated accounts climbed from 1.9 to 2.5, demonstrating steady habit formation.

Core takeaways

Shirin summarised the lessons from Project Syndicate’s migration into three operating principles for digital publishers:

• Registration volume is a vanity metric without engagement: Amassing hundreds of thousands of registered emails is meaningless unless you build an active onboarding experience that keeps readers engaged during the critical first 30 to 90 days
• Understand your audience: Publishers must build flexible data infrastructures to track how their unique audience sample content, how often they return, and what roadblocks cause them to churn
• Fail fast: Cultivating an internal environment where teams feel safe running iterative product experiments, and knowing when to sunset unsuccessful tests, is essential to keeping pace with fast-changing user behaviour

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