We have entered the Age of Experience

Audiences still seek information and fulfill particular needs. But they increasingly choose where to spend their time according to the experience surrounding that value and whether another worthwhile experience follows.

Where platforms provide a compelling sequence, attention accumulates.

Experience is more than a new way to describe “what users need.” It is a different way to organize what an outlet produces, how its products connect, and how audience value translates into revenue.

Asking “How can we improve this product?” therefore misses the sharper question: “What experience should audiences consistently associate with us, and what should lead them to the next one?”

Experience connects audience strategy with revenue

Publishers often move quickly from an audience goal to an output.

“We need to reach younger audiences” becomes “we need more vertical video.” “We need stronger habits” becomes “we need a daily newsletter.”

Those may be sensible decisions, but format alone does not explain why audiences will value the product, return, or move deeper into the publisher’s environment.

This is the logic behind the AXR framework: Audience → Experience → Revenue.

We developed AXR to connect audience strategy to revenue through the experience layer. That layer defines the audience moment, the promise, how the product fits into a routine, and the behavior it should create. Revenue can then follow through advertising, sponsorship, registration, or subscription.

For example, “a daily video briefing for younger audiences” is still mainly a format description.

A stronger definition would describe the audience moment, why the briefing is worth returning to, what should follow it, and which elements, such as the host, pace, promise, or format, must remain recognizable across the sequence, beyond this particular item.

That difference matters, because formats produce outputs. Experiences create behaviors. Repeatable behaviors (staying longer, returning more often, and moving to the next item) connect audience value to commercial value.

The most valuable experience is the next one

One strong experience is rarely enough.

Audiences do not open a social platform for one excellent post and then move elsewhere. They stay because another relevant experience is immediately available. Games create the same continuity from one level or challenge to the next.

Publishers still tend to optimize the individual item. Even when related content is offered, the connection is often topical rather than experiential. The next item may cover the same subject but feel completely different in format, pace or purpose.

In our work developing recurring video experiences, we see a passive-active pattern. After one video, many viewers prefer to remain passive and let the next one begin. But when the experience changes too sharply, they must become active again: reassess, choose, and decide whether to continue.

That decision point is often where they leave.

Continuity does not mean showing people more of the same. It means preserving enough of the experience promise while introducing new value.

Before launching a new product or format, publishers should therefore ask:

• What experience begins here?
• What is the most natural next experience?
• What must remain consistent so the next experience feels like a continuation rather than a new decision?

These questions change the unit of planning. Instead of producing one engaging item and hoping the audience finds another, the publisher begins designing the sequence itself.

The bottom line

The strategic question is no longer only which products to build, but how those products combine into a recognizable experience system.

The practical shift is to evaluate every product on two levels: the experience it creates on its own, and the role it plays in the sequence around it.

Publishers that design both levels can turn journalism into more time spent, stronger habits, and clearer paths to revenue. In the Age of Experience, the advantage will belong to outlets that make every experience valuable, recognizable and naturally connected to the next.

Inside, you’ll find data on how engagement concentrates among a small group of super users, how much richer content formats like audio, video and games boost engagement and where publishers are still struggling to measure the value their apps create.

Here are a handful of the biggest takeaways from this year’s report, useful for any publisher trying to get a deeper understanding of how their apps are performing and where to focus effort going forward.

> The Pugpig Media App Report, drawing on 440 apps and 140 publishers, finds engagement is wildly concentrated. 15% of monthly users generate 75% of all sessions, and 6% account for 75% of screen views

> Games, audio and video are the engagement multipliers. Players open the app 2.7 times more often, video watchers spend 3.3 times longer in it, and audio listeners 2.5 times longer

> Between 11% and 94% of a news publisher's subscribers open its app in a month. Yet only 26% of publishers say the app's main job is acquiring subscribers

> Publishers agree on what matters: retention, acquisition, time spent. Far fewer can measure it consistently, which makes it easy for the app's contribution to be undervalued internally

> The biggest blocker is not budget or technology. Half of publishers name product team capacity, and the strongest apps are simply the ones given sustained attention rather than clever engineering

Rich features consistently drive deeper engagement

Features like games, audio and video consistently drive deeper engagement. Users who interact with these formats, as well as those who search, save and share articles, show a clear lift in engagement compared with those who do not.

Users who play games open their app 2.7x more often than those who don’t and rack up over 29 hours of in-app time a month in top-performing apps. Video and audio show a similar pattern, with users who watch video spending 3.3x more time in-app each month and audio listeners spend 2.5x longer.

Search, save and share tell a similar story, suggesting these are genuine signals of loyalty and intent and important features for publishers to use in their apps. The report shows that these features have an outsized impact on how habitual and valuable that group becomes.

A small number of super users drive the majority of engagement

One of the clearest patterns in this year’s data is how important super users are to overall app engagement. Our report found that just 15% of monthly active users generate 75% of all sessions, whilst 6% of MAUs account for 75% of all screen views. Those numbers point to a small group of users that come back to the app more often and get through far more content once they’re there than the average reader.

This should frame how publishers think about app strategy. Growing the total user base is very important, but the data suggests that significant value comes from deepening the relationship with the most engaged readers. That means identifying the content and features that most encourage repeat use.

There’s a wide gap in how many subscribers actually use the app

Another significant factor that drives app engagement is the share of the audience with a direct subscription, which varies widely between publishers. The report finds that, for news titles, anywhere from 11% to 94% of total subscribers open the app each month. 

There’s a real opportunity here too. Many apps attract a substantial number of non-subscribers alongside their paying base, yet only 26% of survey respondents said the main role of the app is subscriber acquisition. With non-subscribed users significantly less engaged than paying users, there is clearly a lever publishers could pull to improve conversion.

The report also hints at a commercial opportunity in in-app advertising. Apps are often designed as ad-light experiences, which keeps impressions per screen low when compared to web. But high session frequency among engaged users means total impressions per user per month can still be meaningful, particularly when formats and targeting are tuned to app audiences. Treating the app as a revenue platform across both reader and advertising income is one of the clearest commercial signals in the data.

Publishers know what to measure, but not all can measure it well

When we speak to our customers about what matters most for their apps we get fairly consistent answers around subscriber retention, acquisition, time spent and engagement. However, according to this year’s survey, there is a significant challenge in the ability to measure these KPIs with any consistency.

That gap between what publishers know they should track and what they can actually measure is significant. Without clean measurement, it becomes much harder to attribute revenue to the app clearly, which in turn makes it easier for the app’s contribution to be undervalued internally.

According to the report, capacity, not money or technology, is the issue. Product team capacity is named by half of publishers as the single biggest blocker to progress, well ahead of budget constraints, stakeholder alignment or editorial capacity. 

Effort and investment separate the top performers from the rest

Perhaps the most encouraging takeaway from this year’s report is that strong app performance is less about technical sophistication and more about sustained investment. The best-performing apps are usually the ones publishers have consistently given time, resources and attention to.

That shows up across almost every metric in the benchmark data. Richer content formats, push strategy, onboarding, personalisation and content discovery all follow the same pattern. The report’s overall message is that small, sustained improvements compound, and publishers who treat their app as a genuine priority tend to see it reflected in the metrics

Next steps for publishers 

For teams looking to act on the data, the report closes with a set of practical recommendations for turning these findings into progress.

Getting more subscribers to actually use the app is the starting point, alongside investing in features that reward repeat use. Audio, video, games, search, save and sharing are clearly all associated with stronger engagement, and there’s clear room for more publishers to make better use of them.

The report also flags push notifications as an underused tool and highlights the opportunity in converting anonymous users into known readers, given how many app users still aren’t logged in or registered.

Beyond acquisition and adoption, the guidance turns to consistency and discovery. Publishing frequently, improving how users find relevant content and measuring app performance against real business outcomes are all highlighted as ways to make the app pull its weight as a genuine engagement, retention and revenue channel.

These findings show that the apps performing the strongest currently are combining richer content, sharper measurement and consistent investment to build real habits with their readers. 

For any publisher trying to work out where they stand, that’s exactly what this year’s report is designed to help with, giving you a clear picture of how your app compares and what the leading publishers are doing differently.

The 2026 Pugpig Media App Report is available to download now, published by Pugpig, the mobile app platform that powers apps for over 450 of the world’s leading media brands.

AI broke the funnel. Community rebuilds it.

The uncomfortable truth is that the open web’s traditional acquisition funnel, SEO at the top, content in the middle, monetization at the bottom, was always borrowed infrastructure. Publishers rented audience from platforms, and now those platforms are keeping the audience for themselves.

The publishers who will win the next decade are the ones who own the relationship, not rent it. And ownership doesn’t come from content alone anymore. Content is increasingly a commodity that AI can summarize, paraphrase, and serve without ever sending a click your way.

What AI cannot replicate is community. It cannot replicate the experience of debating a local election with your neighbors in a comment thread moderated by your newsroom. It cannot replicate a live Q&A with the reporter who broke the story. It cannot replicate the feeling of being recognized, replied to, and known by a brand you trust.

This is where Frequency lives.

The Frequency Loop

When publishers invest in community-building experiences like commenting, Live Q&As, topic-based chats, polls, personalized feeds, and real-time notifications, something powerful happens. Readers stop coming back for the content alone. They start coming back for the conversation.

That shift creates what I call the Frequency Loop

A reader visits for the content. They engage with the community. They get notified when someone replies, when a new live event starts, when a topic they care about is being discussed. They come back. They engage again. They register to keep participating. They subscribe to deepen the relationship. Every loop tightens the bond, increases the visit count, and unlocks more revenue per user.

The economics of this loop are not theoretical. Viafoura‘s data shows that engaged community members visit at a rate that is 6-8 times higher than fly-by users. And the downstream impact is well documented across the industry. Piano’s Subscription Performance Benchmark has found that registered users convert to paid subscriptions at roughly 45 times the rate of anonymous visitors. Frequency is what closes the gap between the two.

More frequency means more ad impressions. More frequency means higher page RPM, because engaged sessions monetize at premium rates. More frequency means a registered-user base that’s actually worth registering. More frequency means subscription offers that land, because the reader has already demonstrated, behaviourally, that they value what you do.

What the F should you actually do?

If Frequency is the metric, here’s the honest diagnostic every publisher should run:

Do you give your audience a reason to come back tomorrow that isn’t a new article? Do you have a place on your property where readers talk to each other and to your journalists? Do you notify them when their participation matters? Do you personalize what they see based on what they engage with, not just what they read? Do you treat your registered users like a community, or like a CRM list?

If the answer to most of those is no, you don’t have a Frequency problem. You have a community infrastructure problem. And in an AI era where every other lever (search traffic, social referral, content differentiation) is getting harder to pull, community infrastructure is the lever that’s getting more valuable, not less.

The bottom line

AI is going to keep getting better at answering questions. It’s not going to get better at being a community. That asymmetry is the single largest strategic opening publishers have right now, and Frequency is the metric that tells you whether you’re walking through it.

So the next time your board asks how you’re future-proofing the business against AI disruption, don’t show them a traffic chart. Show them your Frequency curve.

And if you don’t have one, well, you know what to ask yourself.

What the F are you doing?

What’s working

A new “Join the Conversation” section of The New York Times was launched earlier in 2026, creating a discussion dedicated space for Times readers and reporters.

• On the article page, a featured comment modal directs readers toward the conversation window, which includes a refreshed layout and reader profile icons
• On some articles, Times reporters have shared thread-style breakdowns of their story and reporting process, adding context for readers who jump straight to the comments. These summaries, along with new inline headshots, build on the “enhanced bylines” introduced in 2023, which were aimed at highlighting journalists’ work

• Conversations are led by a direct question, followed by a comment from one of The Times’ journalists.

• The best contributions are highlighted and surfaced

This strategy helps conversations to feel valuable, and participation feels meaningful. Instead of noise, comments become an extension of the journalism.

What you should steal from The New York Times’ model

• Reframe comments as an editorial space, designed for quality over scale
• Lead the discussion with a direct question and a trusted voice
• Involve journalists directly in the conversations, ideally with a tag (think X’s blue tick), text or photo to highlight their position

Dive deeper into The New York Times’ model

• The New York Times is becoming subscription infrastructure for other publishers
• The New York Times dynamic paywall model, analyzed

2. Financial Times: loyalty isn’t built by speaking louder, it’s built by speaking with

Communities are built on trust, and for FT, this sits at the center of the brand. What’s more, it’s specifically recognized as a business driver. 58% of subscribers chose the FT specifically because they needed a reliable news source they could trust. To sustain it, they must strike a balance between trust in what they say, through quality and credibility of journalism, and trust in what they do, through the experience delivered at every touch point.

What’s working

Commenting has been a significant part of FT’s community-building efforts, especially as those who read the comments are 11x more engaged than those that don’t, and commenters themselves are 46x more engaged than those that don’t read or write comments.

• Community guidelines are easy to find and understand
• AI-powered moderation is being used to bring up the moderation baseline, re-trained off human comments, with humans still kept in the loop
• Editorially-reviewed AI-generated question encourage readers to join the conversation and be more thoughtful in their commenting

• A live Q&A feature, designed to encourage broader participation and lift conversation into the story

The team have also worked hard to cultivate “evangelical” communities, creating spaces for “authentic” and “nerdy” interactions that go beyond standard corporate communication.

The FT Alphaville section for instance has developed a core of evangelical fans by maintaining an authentic tone that appeals to readers on a personal level.

• It’s free to read
• Journalists engage directly with readers
• It doesn’t feel corporate or that the tone is being moderated
• You can meet the journalists in real life at small, unashamedly nerdy events!

These micro-communities focus on specific niches where belonging forms most naturally.

To deepen this advocacy, the FT also launched the Trusted Voices marketing pilot in 2025.

• Personal branding: By elevating individual writers and creating personal brands, the FT encourages readers to defend and promote specific journalists, which in turn reinforces their loyalty to the parent publication.
• Broadening inclusivity: Initiatives to make the FT feel less like a “gendered entity” (moving from 80% male in 2016 to 92% non-gendered perception in 2025) have been essential in making more people feel they belong, thus empowering a more diverse group of advocates.

What you should steal from FT’s model

• Move beyond engagement metrics towards trust, belonging and advocacy
• Use AI to reduce resources needed on moderation, but keep humans in the loop in the right places to build relationships with readers
• Consider building, or making use of existing, external, micro-communities that focus on specific niches – this is where belonging builds most naturally

Dive deeper into FT’s strategy

• Smarter discussions thanks to AI-generated talking points
• Building and serving communities with Ryan Y. Kellett, Financial Times and THECITY

3. Der Spiegel: from comments to conversations

The team at Der Spiegel found that whilst commenting was a huge part of their audience engagement strategy, conversations on a single topic were happening in multiple places across the site, diluting the potential value of this feature.

What’s working

The solution: a debating product inside of their website

• Qualitative research found that users associate trust and safety with these conversations when they happen under the DER SPIEGEL branding, so clear branding and a custom design ensures audiences feel confident that they’re in a safe space
• No possibility of “disliking” a comment, only liking

• They decided against real-name commenting after research that suggested users wouldn’t feel comfortable with this. They also have an account verification process, even for free members
• The feature is promoted in subscriber onboarding to increase regular usage amongst subscribers.
• And debates are integrated into editorial content and vice versa to encourage recirculation. Notice the high visibility of premium (S+) content here to promote the value of subscription.

Mexico’s Milenio has done something similar but with video content, fostering deep discussions on everyday life topics (Mexican lifestyle and social topics).

What you should steal from Der Spiegel’s model

• Test new, innovative formats to maximize the value of community engagement and encourage more guided interaction
• Integrate community features into the registration and subscription funnel
• Even if the community isn’t commenting at the end of articles, link community to content to encourage recirculation and continued engagement

Dive deeper into Der Spiegel’s strategy

• Going further with interactive engagement: introducing the debating feature
• Audience Research: identifying Key Engagement Drivers at DER SPIEGEL

4. The Times: reader-led journalism

The leading publishers have created an eco-system where readers fuel journalism that then fuels reader conversations, and so on. This is exactly what they’ve established at The Times & Sunday Times in the UK.

What’s working

After seeing conversations spark from a certain topic or article in the comments section, The Times’ Reader Comment Journalists reply directly to readers or set up interviews to dive deeper into the topic, with the goal of creating reader-led articles.

“Reader-led articles give a direct voice to our readers, but it also improves our journalism! The piece on the right below came from a call-out at the bottom of an article that got an amazing response from people telling us about how they beat their diagnoses. We ran it as a story and it really humanized the journalism. The other piece came from the simple idea of asking why people were running the London marathon. It pulled very touching stories together, and you could see in the comments section how positive the reaction was. These reader-led articles often bring yet more valued conversation within the community.” – Peter Jackson, Reader Comment Editor at The Times and Sunday Times

Live Q&As with journalists are another important engagement tool to directly connect The Time’s readers and writers.

The Times works with polls and embedded carousels to elevate comments, and they also feature reader contributions in their journalism, such as “Reader’s recipe”. This has a positive impact on the brand, and highlights how The Times’ values its readers.

What you should steal from The Times’ model

• Make use of reader comments to fuel journalism
• Consider strategies that help readers feel part of your brand and connected to journalists
• Use polls, quiz’s and Q&As to establish 2-way interaction

Dive deeper into The Times’ strategy

• Developing community beyond commenting, with The Telegraph and The Times

5. Other publisher relationship-building strategies of note

• The Globe & Mail’s live Q&As with journalists, call-outs and reader-led content
• The Economist’s Substack experiment: “Off the charts” is a newsletter on Substack, designed to engage new audiences who are already on this platform
• Digital Spy’s forums

• WIRED’s subscription re-launch, which now focuses heavily on community-building, in particular with their exclusive, subscriber-only newsletters, each with a writer at the forefront

• Handelsblatt Circles: lessons on community from Chief Growth Officer Jan Kleibrink
• Village Media have launched “Spaces” their own chatting platform, for users to connect with others based on topics of interest or joining in on conversations

> Daily Maverick built a database of contactable readers and their expertise

> The Guardian US meets underrepresented communities where they are

And the article you HAVE to read if you’re moving towards community-building: Why the most valuable newsroom KPI is no longer reach but belonging

“We aim to be at the intersection of where Switzerland has an impact on global conversations,” says DeVore. “Whether it’s the pharma companies operating out of Basel, the diplomatic hub of Geneva, or the unique system of Swiss direct democracy, we look for touchpoints that resonate internationally.”

Adaptation over simple translation

One of the most striking aspects of the swissinfo.ch workflow is the move beyond literal translation. Instead, the team practices adaptation.

With small teams of roughly three people per language service, journalists must act as cultural mediators. “It’s not just translating from English to Chinese – you have to adapt for the context and the market. For example, how do you explain the Swiss Federal Council, a body that has no single president, to an audience in China? Our teams often have to invent lexicons and style guides to transmit these unique political concepts effectively.”

Deep engagement through debating

Moving away from a traditional broadcast model, swissinfo.ch has pivoted toward community building to bring these diverse audiences together. Five years ago, they launched a debate format to replace standard comment sections. 

Instead of readers commenting in their own language, often sharing information that didn’t really serve anyone’s needs (not to mention the necessity to moderate heavily), journalists now pose specific, theme-based questions seated in a theme currently being explored. 

To solve the problem of linguistic silos, they implemented auto-translation within threads, usually using Deepl but not only. The best tool/LLM is chosen per language depending on the feedback of the editors. This allows a reader in Brazil to engage in a conversation with a reader in Russia, both viewing the thread in their native language.

This focus on dialogue has led to long-running, nuanced discussions on high-stakes topics like Swiss neutrality, which DeVore notes has seen consistent engagement for over a year following the invasion of Ukraine.

“On some topics, we get really interesting, nuanced, and sometimes surprising threads going, for instance on things like Swiss neutrality. Of course, it’s a hallmark of Switzerland; people think of that quite quickly alongside cheese and chocolate and army knives when they think of the country, but what does it really mean in practice? Especially after the Ukraine war started. And this thread has had hundreds and hundreds, an evergreen comment section that’s been going for a year or more.”

Products for niche needs

SWI swissinfo.ch also develops bespoke products for specific audience segments. Of course, part of their niche is the Swiss connection, but at the same time they’re trying to fill gaps in people’s media needs in markets where accessibility isn’t exactly a given, or where content might be behind paywalls.

• The SWI Plus App: Tailored for the Swiss diaspora (over 800,000 citizens living abroad), allowing them to personalize their news feed across multiple languages

• The Russian Edition: Recognizing that their website is partially blocked in Russia, the team has leaned into video-based platforms like YouTube, producing long-form, one-on-one interviews (up to an hour) to provide in-depth context to Russian speakers
• ‘Truth or Tale’: A short-form video series focused on myth-busting common misconceptions about Switzerland, designed for social media discovery

Trust in the age of AI

As a publicly funded media outlet, trust is the currency swissinfo.ch relies on. DeVore highlights their involvement with a recent research cohort piloted by the US-based nonprofit  Trusting News, which helped them understand audience needs around AI transparency and develop “disclaimers” regarding the use of AI.

“We are a niche media with an international footprint, which makes it even more important to show people at a glance that we are trustworthy.” While the organization uses AI for translation assistance and other tasks to manage resource limitations, they maintain a strict “human-in-the-loop” policy to ensure cultural accuracy and editorial integrity.

> If you’re working on a similar strategy, you’ll also be interested in hearing about the business logic behind Le Monde in English

And the other side of the coin is just as important: the DMR also showed a strong correlation between traffic on paid articles and the share of users who simply leave the site when hitting a paywall. The more you frustrate, the more people bounce. That’s not just a missed conversion. That’s a direct hit on engagement, on page views, ad revenue, and your ability to build any relationship with that user.

In the same year, Mather Economics published a study (part of a GNI LatAm Subscriptions Lab report) looking at paywall hits per user. Subscription probability follows a bell curve: up with each hit, peaks, then back down. Same conclusion, different data.

Then in 2022, the New York Times shared what brought all of this together (Audiencers analyzed it here). When they launched their paywall in 2011, the meter limit was the same for everyone: a fixed number of free articles, a regwall, some more articles, and finally a paywall.

Over the years, they developed the Dynamic Meter, a machine learning model that sets personalized meter limits per user.

The core insight: the model optimizes for two metrics simultaneously, engagement and conversion. And these two metrics have an inherent trade-off. More paywalls → more subscriptions, but less readership. They proved this with randomized control trials: as the meter limit goes up, engagement increases but conversion drops.

With a fixed approach, you’re forced to choose. Maximize engagement, or maximize conversion. Not both. There’s always a window of lost revenue that a single rule can’t capture. The Dynamic Meter expands that window by personalizing: more frustration for high-propensity users, more openness for low-propensity users.

None of this is new. DMR: 2021. Mather Economics: 2021. NYT: 2022. We’ve known this for years. And yet, the vast majority of publishers still use a uniform paywall for all users.

If you don’t personalize, you’re forced to make a choice between engagement and frustration. And that choice won’t be the right one for all users. That’s why more and more sophistication has developed. And the jump from “manual” to “1-2-1” isn’t binary. There’s a whole spectrum in between.

The 6 levels of paywall sophistication

Being at level 1 doesn’t mean you’re behind. But it means there are probably missed opportunities. The question is whether these missed opportunities are big enough to justify the resources needed to reach the next step.

• Level 1: Fully manual

Free and paid decided by hand, article by article. An Atlas & Audiencers’ study confirmed this is still the norm: the decision is based on the article’s perceived value. Breaking news free, analysis behind the wall (to simplify it to its core).

• Level 2: Manual + automated rules. Paid content still decided manually, but rules modify access based on additional criteria.

Foreign Policy shared their approach on The Audiencers. They segment by publish date (under 7 days: hard-walled; older: standard meter), but also by cohort. Users with high search intent and churned subscribers are hard-walled (high subscription propensity). Social referrals see a registration wall with a free page view (low subscription propensity, but conversion on registration is 100x higher than on subscription). That registration data became their strongest conversion driver. No AI needed. Just smart segmentation.

• Level 3: Manual with override.

The base decision is manual, but the system can override contextually: closing a free article for a high-propensity user, opening a premium one for a segment you want to engage. A first step toward personalization without losing editorial control.

• Level 4: Manual + a third automated category.

Free and premium decided manually, but a “grey zone” is managed automatically based on user profile, device, or source. Ideal for publishers in transition between fully manual and more automation, while still giving the editorial team a great deal of control (yes, the business side gets some autonomy, but only on categories validated with editorial).

• Level 5: Fully automated for conversion and engagement.

The system decides everything: whether to show a wall, which type, what meter limit, per user. The engagement/frustration trade-off managed dynamically.

Business Insider does this with AI: reading habits, traffic source, content genre propensity. The algorithm decides: paywall, registration wall, or nothing.

The NYT does it with the Dynamic Meter (as we talked about earlier). It learns from first-party engagement data (no demographic or psychographic features), adjusts per user, and continuously runs randomized trials to improve. This is the model that expanded the opportunity window we described above (source).

• Level 6: Fully automated for conversion, engagement, AND advertising.

The decision also integrates ad revenue. Fortune’s CCO at the time, Selma Stern, explained that if a user’s subscription probability is too low (first-time visit, smartphone, social media), the paywall opens and the page view is monetized through ads. The goal is to maximize total user value, wherever it comes from (which I personally think is an amazing model for short term profitability – because yes, sometimes long-term profitability might require less revenue in the short-term).

What you can take away from this (and test tomorrow)

Figure out which level you’re at. If all your users see the same paywall regardless of behavior, source, or profile: what are you missing?

Try one rule-based variation before thinking about AI. Foreign Policy’s 100x stat didn’t require machine learning. It required a hypothesis and a way to test it.

Start by looking at your bounce rate on paywalled content. If a significant share of users leave the site when they hit your paywall, that’s revenue you’re losing twice: no subscription AND no engagement. The DMR, Mather Economics, and NYT data all showed the same thing: a uniform paywall always forces a trade-off. Even a simple first step (like showing a registration wall instead of a paywall to low-propensity users) can start closing that gap. That’s what Poool makes it easy to test.

See you next week for Article 3, where we leave media and look at how the best subscription businesses across all industries think about conversion.

PS: This article was about the decision logic (who sees a paywall, and when). We didn’t cover the blocking method: how the paywall is technically implemented, front-end or server-side, and what that means for content protection, AI scraping, and SEO. That’s a separate topic, and we covered it here: “Paywalls & SEO“. All 6 levels above work with all blocking methods.