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.
Personalising paywall text around the reader’s interests
Dynamic paywalls, that adapt to a readers 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 personlised text based on the reader’s interest or the current article being read.
South China Morning Post include a block highlighting “All the stories you like”. Germany’s FAZ share the current top premium articles. Whilst The Cut adapts the title text based on the article the reading is trying to access.
Signalling free content
“What you are trying to do is to put the conversion (from free user to paying subscriber) into the user journey as soon as possible. Because that’s what you want… By having a nice “beware, premium content ahead” icon (or, should we say warning), you are short circuiting that thought process and user journey. Conversions need to happen based on the article on your website, not how you market it in a newsletter or on the homepage.”
It’s perhaps one of the reasons why we’ve seen increasingly more publishers trying the opposite, i.e. signalling when content is free to access.
The New York Times and The Verge for instance have been testing this for a while now, dedicating a whole section of their homepage to “free to read” content.
The Independent in the UK also has a tag on a newsletter promotion, highlighting the 1 month free.
Subscription without blocking content
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.
This means that the web traffic and engagement on-site is preserved whilst the brand also monetises their most engaged, loyal readers through an additional product.
> Read the full story of SFGATE’s subscription launch
Subscriptions focused on community and relationship-building
In an age of content abundance, where generic content becomes easier to produce, the advantage shifts to what is harder to replicate: original journalism, trusted relationships and communities that give audiences a reason to return. It’s what FT Strategies has labeled as the Community Era, and it’s exactly what many publishers are moving towards with subscription products built for lasting relationships.
The Economist launched Play, a $15/month audio and video-only tier that sits inside the existing Economist app. It sits alongside a second, deeper relationship-building product: The Economist Insider, a premium video series featuring the editor-in-chief and senior journalists interviewing figures like Christine Lagarde and Mark Carney. A year after launch, 75% of subscribers have engaged with Insider at least once, and churn drops further the more deeply someone engages with it, holding even through a recent price increase.
Together, Play and Insider represent two ends of the same strategy: Play is built to start a relationship with a reader who isn’t ready to commit to the full product yet, Insider is built to deepen the relationship with a subscriber who already has.
WIRED also relaunched their subscription offer in Summer 2025, priced at $48 a year (roughly $4/month) with a focus on connecting “our humans to all of you humans.” (Katie Drummond, WIRED):
- A five-newsletter subscriber suite. Two entirely new verticals launched alongside three previously free, popular newsletters moved fully behind the paywall. All five are written conversationally by senior correspondents and built to work as standalone “inbox reads,” not link round-ups, which is what makes them habit-forming rather than skimmable.
- Structured, cadenced livestream AMAs, running at least twice a month, with a staff moderator and two senior beat reporters per session. The tight panel format, rather than sporadic ad-hoc video, self-selects WIRED’s most loyal readers and puts them in direct, live conversation with the reporters covering their beat.
- Expanded commenting, rolled out across a much wider set of articles than before, specifically to turn passive readers into visible, active participants in the conversation around a story.
- Subscriber-exclusive narrated articles, giving the subscription a genuine audio dimension rather than treating audio as an afterthought.
Alternative ways to bridge the gap to subscription
Anjali Iyer, Global Head of Subscriptions at The Washington Post, delivered a session at the Audiencers’ Festival in London focused on how news organisations must adapt to modern consumer habits by expanding beyond rigid subscription structures.
Anjali shared how data exposes a massive gap between the willingness to pay and the willingness to commit. Modern readers, particularly younger cohorts, operate in a fragmented digital landscape shaped by streaming services, search loops, and social algorithms. They demand short-term choices and are often willing to pay a premium price for temporary access over a recurring subscription package.
The Washington Post’s solution is flexible access models. By testing micropayments (weekly and pay passes, as well as pay-per-article with an in-paywall mobile payment module), they’re uncovering an untapped market: 42% of flexible access buyers are brand-new, anonymous users outside the existing ecosystem.
Interestingly, this also serves as a nurturing mechanism for long-term subscriber growth. Over a 180-day period, up to 8% of week-pass buyers, 4% of day pass buyers, and 3% of pay-per-article buyers eventually became full subscribers.
> Read the full story from The Washington Post
A handful of publishers are also testing “pay what you can” subscription models.
For instance, Canada’s Les Coops de l’information, a cooperative of six Quebec news outlets, let readers name their own price for the first three months.
Against a $1 minimum, the average paid was $3.12 a month, and some new subscribers chose more than the regular subscription price. The suggested figure in the price field did the work – suggesting $5 lifted the average to $3.39 and suggesting $6 lifted it to $3.50, with more people simply taking the suggestion each time
84% of the acquisitions were from readers who had never subscribed before, which is the number that matters most for a local publisher wondering whether it has exhausted its market.
> Read more about Les Coops’ pay what you can campaign
Selection over unlimited access
Faced with information fatigue, unlimited access as a subscription product is not always 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.
> Full article on Les Echos’ “La Sélection” here
Not trying to sell on day 1
When benchmarking 100 subscription businesses, including the NYT, Figma, Miro, Calm and Masterclass, we noticed that conversion almost never happens in one step. It happens through micro-conversions, each with its own objective. And more importantly, even conversion itself seems secondary. The real priority for those companies is to create value for their user as a first goal. To build engagement. To make the product feel indispensable before asking for money.
The critical principle behind this model: each step has one single goal.
Figma: $12.5B company.
Homepage: “Get started for free.”
Then the onboarding starts: What’s your name? How do you plan to use Figma? What do you do for work? Where do you work? Have you used Figma before? What do you want to make first?
Six questions before you see anything about pricing. And when the plan page finally appears, it includes a free Starter option, so even the pricing step isn’t a hard sell.
The New York Times even tested this earlier in the year. The only action button in the top right corner (on the left) says “LOG IN”, because at this stage, the goal is registration, not subscription.
Countdowns
Whether on the paywall, subscription offer page or in the registration onboarding journey, publishers are using countdowns to create urgency and encourage conversion. It’s a small change but one that’s proven to convert.
> Find 100+ paywall benchmarks here
