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.

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 reader is trying to access.

Signalling free content

Until recently, many publishers have used icons or tags to mark premium content, informing non-subscribers that the article is premium before they visit the page and get blocked by the paywall. But there are a variety of reasons why this is potentially shooting ourselves in the foot. Lars K Jensen discussed this in an article on Audiencers back in 2023.

“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 labelled 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 C$1 minimum, the average paid was C$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 C$5 lifted the average to C$3.39 and suggesting C$6 lifted it to C$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

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In this guide, we share the various ways that publishers can segment their audience to develop a dynamic paywall model, with examples for each type of segmentation: 
> By content type: free vs premium, user needs, date of publication...
> By user profile: level of engagement, user status, location...
> By acquisition channel: Google, social media, newsletters...

Some quick definitions: 
> Audience segmentation: grouping users based on their profile or context, i.e. data that could impact their behaviour, inform us on what could convince them to subscribe or make them more or less likely to convert in that moment
> Dynamic paywall: a paywall that adapts for different audience segments. This could be in terms of the paywall design, messaging or even the journey itself (e.g. seeing a paywall or not). Note that "dynamic" doesn't necessarily equate to AI-driven. It's often rule based - i.e. a user reading a "politics" article sees a different paywall to a user reading a "sports" article.

There are 3 main buckets of audience segmentation with the goal of increasing conversion rates:

• By content type
• By user profile
• By acquisition channel

In each of these cases, the form of segmentation dictates who sees or experiences what. For instance, if we segment based on location, someone in Germany might see and experience something different than someone in the UK.

What can change based on the segment, in terms of the conversion strategy?

• The fact that the article is blocked or not
• The conversion journey (e.g. how many articles for free before the paywall, the use of a registration wall)
• The wording on the paywall
• The design (colours, image, etc.)
• The pricing and subscription offers pushed

Let’s dive into these 3 buckets of segments, with examples for each:

1. Segmenting by content type

For many publishers, this is the simplest starting point. It allows for extensive testing to discover what content converts best without risking overall traffic. It also helps to put editorial teams in control (to an extent) as the paywall strategy is based around their work instead of a user’s profile. This can be valuable when first launching a dynamic paywall to get buy-in from these teams.

This form of segmentation can take various forms:

• Content divided into free (often general news or commodity pieces) and premium (generally longer-form, investigative articles which can’t be found elsewhere)
• Format-based: e.g. articles vs games vs videos
• Topic- or tag-based: sports, politics, news, lifestyle
• User needs based: update me, give me a perspective, etc.
• Date of publication: e.g. articles published more than 30 days ago

Free vs premium

Organising content based on its value:

• Free content: keep open to maximize reach (often focused on ad revenue)
• Premium content: close to convert readers into subscribers

Some publishers are developing this a step further by adding 2 additional segments:

• Grey content: sometimes open, sometimes closed (based on editorial decision)
• Super Premium Content: with a hard paywall

This segmentation is often driven by two business goals: advertising and subscriptions. However, the articles used for advertising revenue (which aim to gain page views) can also serve the role of engaging audiences to move them through the funnel toward subscription.

A good place to start is a matrix analysis, placing articles in different buckets based on their “strengths”. A goal can then be established for each bucket, making the most of each article.

For instance, Mather suggests the following matrix:

• Mass appeal / top of the funnel: advertising revenue focus, so left open
• Premium content / bottom of the funnel: subscription focus, so behind a paywall
• Mission journalism: often left open
• Under-performers (that require further analysis)

A slightly more complex approach is illustrated by FT Strategies below, who established 4 categories based on topic popularity vs willingness to pay:

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In Fall 2025, Les Coops de l’information, a collective of six Canadian media outlets (Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Nouvelliste, Le Quotidien, La Tribune, and La Voix de l’Est) launched an innovative subscription drive named internally as the “Pay what you can project”.

Designed to coincide with the 2025 Municipal Elections, the campaign aimed to lower the barrier to local news while reinforcing the value of independent, cooperative journalism.

Results were beyond their expectations:

• 4.2% increase in subscribers
• Despite the minimum amount being $1 per month for the first three months of subscription, the average amount paid was $3.12 per month. This increased to $3.50 after increasing the suggested price

Principal Director, Audiences and Platforms, Marc Gendron shared how this strategy boosted subscriber growth and increased ARPU for those on this offer.

> Les Coops de l'information, a cooperative of six Quebec news outlets, let readers name their own price for the first three months, timed to the 2025 municipal elections. Subscribers rose 4.2% in five weeks

> 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 new subscribers had never subscribed before, which is the number that matters most for a local publisher wondering whether it has exhausted its market

> Their own caveat is worth repeating: the resulting ARPU still came in below their fixed-price promotions and well below regular rates. Get stakeholder buy-in first, and manage expectations, including your own

“Pay what you can” strategy

The core of the initiative was a flexible pricing model for the first three months of a new user’s subscription.

“We wanted to make an audacious promotion that would be too good to ignore! It shouldn’t rely solely on a heavy discount, but also on our unique value proposition at a time when it’s more relevant than ever.

Our gamble was: we know that there will be more interest towards our local politics content during the municipal campaign, so let’s surf on that wave and make sure our new promotional subscribers get the most out of their plans, that they feel that they are getting much more than what they are paying for. Instead of opening up access to our elections coverage, or setting up a fixed promotional price, we wanted to give more power and autonomy to users by letting them choose their price.”

Key components include:

• Democratic access: The campaign was rooted in the belief that a strong democracy requires exhaustive and impartial electoral coverage.
• Price autonomy: Prospective subscribers were invited to “fix the price” for their initial three-month period.
• Transparency and trust: Using the slogan “Un média qui vous ressemble, un média qui nous rassemble” (A media that looks like you, a media that brings you together) the group highlighted its status as an employee-owned cooperative.

“Our goal was to increase the total number of subscribers, between 3.5% and 4.3% of total subs. 

We mobilized everyone we could in order to achieve these targets. The new features we needed to implement, flexible pricing mechanics, everything was put on the development roadmap early in 2025. Our collaborators from Wizeline, who take care of all our platform development projects and Arc XP integration, worked tirelessly to have every feature ready for the fall campaign.

We also got the help of Drakkar Digital (renamed deRabane since), our long-lasting marketing partner, in order to create the visuals, copy and plan the delivery of all the marketing messages.

The editorial team was mobilised too, because the success of the campaign relied heavily on their capacity to deliver unique, useful and original content during that specific period.

Finally, our small digital growth team (including the IT and customer service team) operationalized the whole process.“

Feature gating: creating a product worth paying for

Of course, a promotional project is only as good as the product you’re selling! Les Coops has worked on developing strategic “feature gating” to build a subscription worth paying for, with clear value and strategic steps through registration towards subscription: 

Interactive engagement: Features like the “Question of the Day”  required users to be connected to vote and view live, constantly updated results.

Bookmarking across devices: Registered users gained access to a bookmarking feature, allowing them to save their favorite articles across web and app platforms.

Premium audio: Audio versions of articles were restricted to “All-inclusive” and “Ultimate” subscribers, serving as an upsell for basic plan holders.

Access limitations: To maintain account integrity, the platform limited simultaneous access to four devices, automatically disconnecting the oldest session when the limit was reached.

Premium content: Chroniques (articles written by columnists) and archives (articles published more than 30 days ago) have been hard paywalled as a key part of their subscription value proposition 

Marketing across site

As with any campaign, design and messaging needs to be consistent across the website and platforms, including the paywall. 

Dedicated paywalls: Les Coops d’Information built dedicated “Pay what you can” paywalls in Poool, including a live countdown to create urgency.

Subscription landing page: To ensure continuity of messaging through the user journey, dedicated subscription landing pages were also created in Poool, highlighting the value proposition, sharing subscriber testimonials and providing reasons why users should subscribe. 

Multi-channel promotion

The campaign was supported by an intensive five-week marketing blitz:

Email campaign: 72 unique emails (12 per media outlet) were delivered, each utilizing different angles and value propositions.

Targeted ads: The group targeted known non-subscribers through Google Ads, StackAdapt, and Bing Ads

In-app and newsletters: Non-subscribers were greeted with dedicated “Pay what you can” headers in free editorial newsletters and pop-up messages upon opening the mobile app.

Results 

“The final results were pretty impressive. By the end of the five weeks of promotion, our total subscriber base had increased by 4.2%, more than our targets and very close to our most optimistic forecast.

What was the most interesting though was the fact that, despite the minimum amount requested being 1$ per month for the first three months of subscription, the average amount paid was 3.12$ per month. This average increased to 3.39$ when we suggested 5$ in the price field and to 3.50$ when suggesting 6$. Each time we changed the suggested amount, we saw an increase in the number of users choosing to go with the suggested amount.

There are even some new subscribers that paid more than the regular price of a subscription!

Another really encouraging fact: 84% of these new subscribers had never subscribed before! This is probably one of the most encouraging findings of this adventure. It means that there is still room for us to grow.”

What’s next?

“This kind of campaign is a little more complicated than one with a fixed set of promotional prices. But the results we got were pretty impressive.

The fact that the user sets the initial price does add a layer of interactivity however, and it lowers the entry bar to a level where they feel comfortable. The core of the challenge remains though: to convince newly converted subscribers that our offer is worth the regular price.”

What should another publisher make sure of before testing this same project? 

“They should immediately get the buy-in from all important stakeholders as the impact on ARPU can be unpredictable. In our case, we feel that we were quite lucky to get an average ARPU of more than 3$ despite the fact that the minimum amount required was 1$. But that is still below the average ARPU we got with fixed price promotions and way below our regular numbers. Make sure that you manage everyone’s expectations. Even your own! 

That being said, as we have been galvanized by the nomination we got for this project at the INMA Global Media Awards, we will reactivate the Pay what you can promotion for two weeks in order to see if we can get similar, or even better, results this time around.”

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Spektrum der Wissenschaft, a leading German science journalism publisher, embarked on a multi-phase journey to optimize its digital subscription model, Spektrum+. Facing the challenge of engaging a broad audience with “deep, heavy, nerdy science content,” and understanding the limitations of resources, the publisher turned to a rigorous, data-driven testing strategy to build a product based on actual user behavior rather than internal assumptions (what a crazy thought, I know!).

At Audiencers’ Festival in Hamburg, Ann-Kristin Ebert, ecommerce Manager at Spektrum, shared their two phases of getting started with segmentation. 

> Spektrum der Wissenschaft, a German science publisher, tested its way into segmentation rather than assuming it. Phase one was testing everything to prove segments behave differently, phase two was testing only where it mattered

> A free trial banner moved conversions far less than a blocking wall, in every group. On the wall itself, a single offer performed worst everywhere while three offers with a highlighted "Best Offer" won

> Switching Facebook referrals from formal "Sie" to informal "Du" nearly doubled click-through. Most segments also preferred shorter copy on the offer page, except print magazine subscribers, who converted better with more detail

> The device finding mattered more than the winning variant. "Unlock article now" beat "Continue reading with Spektrum+" on desktop for both clicks and purchases, but on mobile it lifted clicks and lowered purchases

> With a small team, they work in three to four month OKR cycles and accept the limits. As ecommerce manager Ann-Kristin Ebert puts it, "we can't bake big pretzels with tiny ovens"

Phase 1: “Testing Everything” (test like Darwin was watching!)

In the initial phase, Spektrum adopted an exhaustive testing philosophy, described as “testing as if Darwin was watching”. The goal wasn’t necessarily to find a single winning variation immediately, but to build a comprehensive understanding of how different tests performed across diverse user segments.

Strategy and implementation

Spektrum focused on rapid, lightweight tests at the beginning of the purchase funnel to gain quick-win insights while minimizing cross-team dependencies. They initially targeted user groups they already knew well or could reach directly.

Key learnings from phase 1:

• Free trials: A banner promoting a free trial across all user groups had a significantly smaller impact on conversions compared to blocking walls in any usergroup. This led Spektrum to shift its focus toward testing its “hard paywall”.

• Contextual messaging (Facebook): Testing informal vs. formal language for Facebook referrals revealed that informal messaging (“Du” instead of “Sie”) nearly doubled click-through rates (CTR) for these audiences.

• Paywall design: Spektrum tested walls with one, two, and three offers across the 4 engagement groups defined in Poool’s dynamic paywall dashboard. While a single offer proved least effective across all segments, a three-offer wall with a central “Best Offer” highlight emerged as the strongest performer for the general audience.

• Text density: On the subscription offer page, most segments preferred shorter, concise text. However, a notable exception was print magazine subscribers, who converted better when presented with more detailed information.

Ann-Kristin shared that this first batch of testing proved very helpful for understanding the behavior of different segments, convincing the team that dynamicity is essential, and that they should start adapting to actual user needs, not just team assumptions.

“Evolution is a perfect way for the perfect adaptation for everyone – if you have some million years of time (spoiler: we didn’t).”

Phase 2: “Testing What Matters” (Test as if Marie Kondo could knock on your door at any time)

Recognizing that they lacked the “million years” required for total evolutionary adaptation, Spektrum moved into a more focused phase: “testing what matters”. This phase prioritized high-impact user groups rather than every possible variation for every segment.

Priority segments

Spektrum identified four key segments for prioritized testing:

• Biggest Group: currently “Volatiles” on mobile devices.
• Most Overall Conversions: currently “Volatiles” on desktop devices.
• Best Converting Group: currently newsletter subscribers.
• “Hidden Gems”: High-potential audiences, a segment that’s hard to identify. Ann-Kristin described this as like playing poker! At the moment, they think these audiences are those receiving mailings already

Device-based segmentation

A critical finding in Phase 2 was the difference in behavior between desktop and mobile users. While an “Unlock article now” prompt outperformed “Continue reading with Spektrum+” on desktop (raising both CTR and purchase rates), the same prompt on mobile increased CTR but dropped the purchase rate. It wasn’t so much the variations that were important here, but simply the proof that mobile and desktop users need to be treated differently. 

Operational framework and final lessons

To maintain this rigorous testing loop with a relatively small team, Spektrum implemented several organizational priorities:

1. Alignment through OKRs and RACI: They used three-to-four-month Objective and Key Results (OKR) cycles to define focus and RACI matrices to establish clear accountability for who is responsible, consulted, or informed for every task.
2. Data visualization: Spektrum emphasizes that seeing user segments visualized (e.g., in donut charts) makes it impossible to ignore the importance of the largest and highest-value groups.

3. Pragmatism over perfectionism: The team adopted “Zen mode,” accepting that “we can’t bake big pretzels with tiny ovens”. They focused on what could be accomplished immediately rather than future ideals.

Spektrum concludes that there is no “final version” of their product, only the next iteration, as user behavior and opportunities constantly evolve.

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This article summarizes the session presented by Maxime Moné (CEO of Poool) and Virginie Clève (founder of Largow, a consulting agency) at the Audiencers Festival Paris on September 16, 2025. Together, they explored the question of “SEO & Paywalls: how can you combine audience and subscriptions in the age of AI?”

This presentation summarized in 5 points: 

- Choosing the paywall type (super hard/hard/soft) should be a strategic decision, not a technical one: each option has a different impact on visibility, content protection, and subscription conversion.

- Anticipate AI: allowing Google to read your content also means opening the door to ChatGPT or Perplexity; blocking Google risks a drop in SEO.

- Secure markup, and calibrate text before the paywall to prevent content leakage and find the balance between SEO (≥ 800 characters) and conversion.

- Adopt a hybrid blocking model: adjust the level of openness according to the value, lifespan, and type of content, rather than a single rule.

- Don't confuse protection with growth: blocking AI protects your content, but only a strong brand and a clear offering will create subscribers.

A lively presentation, Maxime and Virginie gave a candid overview of the current situation. SEO, paywalls, and now artificial intelligence are intertwined in a complex balancing act, where every decision influences visibility, conversion, and content protection.

1) Three types of paywalls… from an SEO perspective

Virginie pointed out that in SEO, paywalls fall into three main categories:

• Super hard: Google is treated as a non-subscriber, with no access to paid content. Examples: Les Échos, L’Équipe.
• Hard: Google is considered a subscriber, so it can crawl all content (e.g., Ouest-France and Le Canard Enchaîné).
• Soft: the majority of the market (~80% of sites)—paid content is visually hidden but remains present in the code, accessible to robots… and to any resourceful user.

Problem: in most newsrooms, this choice is not made by marketing management but by developers or SEO specialists, despite this being a highly strategic decision. “We can no longer treat the type of paywall as a technical parameter,” insists Virginie.

2) Why AI is changing everything

Before the advent of generative AI, a bypassable paywall was no big deal: crafty users were in the minority and subscriber growth continued. Today, it’s a different story. AI such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI can query Google via SERP API and reconstruct all or part of the paid content, without compensation for publishers.

The result: if you consider Google as a subscriber (hard or soft paywall), you are indirectly leaving your content open to AI. But if you close the door completely (super hard), you penalize your SEO. This is an unprecedented dilemma that requires careful consideration and discussion among teams.

Another new development: since August 28, 2025, Google has officially recommended that soft paywalls no longer be used. The search engine wants to avoid indexing paid content by mistake, particularly due to new AI features such as AI Overviews and Gemini. In short: a clear line must now be drawn between free and paid content.

3) Hidden SEO risks in your pages

Structured markup: in the NewsArticle or ArticleBody format, you should never insert the entire paid text in plain text. Otherwise, any AI tool or scraper can extract it and republish it elsewhere.

The same problem applies to machine translations: Google Translate can host media pages that are translated and laid out identically, but without tracking or advertising. This is simply a case of value capture.

The text before the paywall: Google considers that below 800 characters, a page is “thin content,” and below 1,200 characters, it is of average quality. On the other hand, the more you give, the less you convert. Each media outlet must therefore find its balance between SEO and conversion—ideally through A/B testing.

4) Hybridization, the future standard for paywalls

However, the solution is not to close everything off. Max and Virginie advocate a hybrid blocking strategy: adjusting the level of protection according to the value and lifespan of the content. For example, temporarily opening a news article, then closing it once its peak visibility has passed. Some publishers, such as Ouest-France, are already experimenting with engines capable of automatically arbitrating between free and paid content.

At the same time, other avenues are emerging: technical solutions such as Cloudflare or Akamai (access control, pay-per-crawl), or collective approaches (via GESTE, the Alliance, or joint legal action). But they all rely on one principle: this issue must be addressed across the board—product, SEO, subscriptions, and tech all around the same table.

5) Blocking is not enough to convert

Maxime Moné reminded us: “Users don’t subscribe just to access content. They subscribe for a brand, an experience, a promise.” Work on paywalls and AI is vital for the sovereignty and value of the media, but it will never replace editorial content, trust, and product quality.

The post Paywalls & SEO in the AI era appeared first on Audiencers.

Max Moné is co-founder and CEO at Poool, the dynamic journey builder to boost subscription conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

This article is the second in a 6-part series where Max shares what he learned from studying 100 subscription business models across 15+ industries. If you haven't read the first one yet, start here. 

Why we’re focusing on media for this one

In most subscription businesses, the rules for accessing the paid offer are simple. You subscribe to a box, you get the box. You hit a usage limit on Claude, you’re asked to upgrade. You want to get access to Calm for guided meditation? You get 1 week, then have to pay. Each model has its logic, but it’s tied directly to the product.

In media, it’s different.

Media online was historically free (almost always). Then publishers moved to paid models, and products got more complex: apps, newsletters, podcasts, games, bundling, community. Because of this, an enormous variety of access models emerged.

So we decided to go deep into media alone in today’s episode. Because the question “what’s free and what’s paid” is one of the most consequential product decisions in our industry.

And there’s no right or wrong answer. The right model depends on your organization, your editorial DNA, your content, your business model… It’s specific to each media, each newsroom, each audience.

The goal here isn’t to tell you what to do. It’s to show you the range of what exists, so you can figure out where the opportunities are for your unique context.

The engagement-frustration trade-off

The data on this has been clear for a while now.

In 2021, we published the Digital Media Review (DMR – a research initiative with Google and Le Geste – a french association for publishers) at Poool. One data point stood out: the relationship between the share of traffic exposed to paid content and conversion. The correlation is clear: the more you expose, the more you convert. But only up to a threshold. Past that, conversion plateaus or falls. Frustration alone is not a sufficient reason to subscribe.

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

The post What’s free, what’s paid, and why it’s really an engagement trade-off: episode 2 appeared first on Audiencers.

Lindsay Ederheimer is Director, Consumer Revenue at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

> Games are a top-three category for engaged minutes at The New Yorker, averaging 25 minutes per user on crossword pages. Over half of players arrive directly, making the section unusually insulated from algorithm shifts

> Puzzles had been free since 2018. Rather than wall them outright, the team built a windowed hardgate: the last seven days free, everything older behind the paywall

> The window is a dial rather than a decision. It can tighten to three days or open to fourteen, and players still get five crosswords a week, so the paywall arrived without a shock

> Archive players self-select. Anyone hunting a puzzle from more than a week ago is already showing higher propensity to subscribe, which is why that is where the wall sits

> Games have their own paywall rules, separate from articles. People behave differently playing than reading, and it lets the team test games paywall copy without disturbing the site meter

I was humbled on a recent Sunday afternoon by a phone notification informing me of my weekly screentime report. I’m not brave enough to share what my total time was (that will stay between me and Apple), but it was yet another reminder of how often I’m glued to my phone. On the bright side, I can at least defend the minutes I spent in the New Yorker app playing our newest daily word game, Shuffalo. 

That moment got me thinking about what actually feels worth the time I spend on my phone, and why games have become such an important part of what we do at The New Yorker.

Digital games are becoming ubiquitous for publishers and users alike. Everyone from The New York Times to LinkedIn have invested in games as a way to grow, engage, and retain audiences. 

And while games are having a moment across the industry, this isn’t about following a trend. Here at The New Yorker, puzzles are an extension of the magazine’s ethos, offering readers a thoughtful, lightly challenging pastime that rewards curiosity. On the heels of Shuffalo’s launch in early November, our consumer team recently revamped our entire paywall strategy for our puzzles and games offerings. Here’s how we did it.

The big picture & sizing the opportunity 

The New Yorker first introduced crossword puzzles online in 2018. By the time the mini crossword launched in 2024, we were publishing 5 puzzles a week of varying difficulties on the website and in the app. We made small paywall rule adjustments over the years, but until this most recent strategy overhaul, all puzzles were free to play.

Beyond crosswords, two other games existed in our suite. Laugh Lines is a weekly cartoon history game, prompting users to guess when iconic cartoons from our hundred-year-old archive were originally published. Name Drop is a timed trivia game where players guess notable figures. Most recently, both of these games were free to play on the website, and hard-paywalled in the app.

A few key metrics let us know that our puzzles & games suite were key engagement drivers and ripe with opportunity for growth:

• The games section consistently ranks in the top three categories for engaged minutes across the site.
  
• The average time spent per user on crossword puzzle pages sits at twenty-five minutes.
  
• The games section drives hundreds of thousands of players each month, with well over half of the audience coming to us directly, rather than through Search or Referral traffic. This also signals that puzzles are uniquely insulated from news cycle shifts and off-platform algorithm changes.

The data was clear: Even getting 1% of our free puzzle-playing audience to convert to a subscriber had great revenue potential. However, it’s also clear there’s a loyal audience of puzzle players who may be turned off by an abrupt hard paywall. Balancing subscription growth and user engagement was a key consideration in our strategy. 

Users behave differently while playing a game versus reading an article. Our journalism is at the heart of what we do at The New Yorker–and while our goal is to offer a premium games experience for readers, they require a different sampling approach. As such, separating our paywall rules for our games versus the rest of the site content was a vital part of our strategy. Having a games-specific paywall campaign also grants us the liberty to test different paywall copy without interrupting our regular meter treatment on the rest of the site.

Aligning on a strategy and path forward

The key project owners across Editorial, Aud Dev, and Consumer Marketing established a core strategy to bring to other cross-functional stakeholders. Beyond separating our regular site paywall from our games paywall, the concept of a windowed hardgate felt like a natural first step. A windowed hardgate meant that users could play the most recent 7 days of puzzles for free, with older puzzles fully behind a paywall.

This approach works well for a few reasons:

• It’s a way to “soft launch” a paywall without frustrating loyal users. It also enables us to get an initial read on engagement metrics as we consider other conversion levers. For example, the “7-day” gating rule could be opened or tightened to say, 3 days or 14 days, if we want to test more options down the road.
  
• Based on our publishing schedule, users can still play up to 5 crosswords (3 full, 2 minis) in a week’s time, ensuring users can still sample our puzzles. Plus, loyal users who are playing “archive” puzzles (any puzzle published more than 7 days ago) are at a higher propensity to subscribe anyway.
  
• By leaving many of our games free to play in the app, we can incentivize app downloads for users who may not be ready to subscribe just yet. Getting a user to take the action of downloading our app and creating an account is a tall order in the first place. The more users who at least download the app and build a daily habit of playing are more likely to subscribe down the road.
  
• Keeping our full archive of puzzles as a subscriber-only benefit makes our digital value proposition even stronger, and adds to all the great benefits of being a subscriber. At The New Yorker, we want to give our subscribers a premium experience, which includes giving them access to all games in our archive. 

Measuring success and planning for the future

There are plenty of ways to measure success here. In an ideal world, engagement stays steady (or better yet, improves, at least among active subscribers) and we see a sizable lift in subscriptions from our puzzles. Here are the core KPIs we’re tracking beyond pure subscription growth: 

Conversion rate on games-specific pages (compared to our standard site conversion rate), individual puzzles (i.e. crosswords vs Name Drop), and on our hardgated games (any archive puzzles), where we expect to see the most lift.

Paywall hit rate, especially on our hardgated archive games. Considering we didn’t consistently have a paywall on crosswords, we know the percentage of users who hit the paywall will rise significantly. Tracking paywall hit rate over time will signal user interest in playing older puzzles.

Engagement through time spent and average minutes played. Our goal is to mitigate dips in engagement as much as possible.

Repeat visitation on site and in-app, broken out by subscribers and non-subscribers. 

Ultimately, our priority every day is to offer our readers a premium experience worth paying for. As our paywall approach evolves and our suite of games expands, we hope that every minute our readers spend with The New Yorker earns its place in that weekly screen-time report.

The post The power of puzzles: How The New Yorker approached a games paywall appeared first on Audiencers.

Heiko Scherer is CEO at tschop and champion of a community- and audience-first' approach to digital media.

When it comes to paywalls, Heiko find that most teams focus on optimisation whilst missing the real question: what system are you asking users to join? 

The wall doesn’t create value, it reflects whether it was there to begin with.

For over a decade, the paywall has been the most visible signal of value in digital publishing. It’s where revenue meets retention, where UX meets editorial judgment and where the funnel becomes measurable. Teams debate how high it should be, how wide, when to trigger it and what language best converts.

The post What your paywall says about your product (and why it matters) appeared first on Audiencers.

A paywall blocks users and asks or requires them to pay for subscription in order to access content. And with digital reader revenue strategies on the rise across the globe, paywalls are popping up across publisher’s websites in all shapes and sizes.

Here are 160+ paywall benchmark examples to inspire your own paywalling efforts!

*Note: these have been collected since October 2022 and are continuously added to, meaning the paywall you see here may not be live on the publisher’s website right now. The oldest examples are at the top.

Paywall best practices to takeaway:

Consider a soft conversion strategy, such as registration, to increase engagement prior to fully blocking the reader

Ensure users have the chance to discover the value of your premium content

Communicate a strong value proposition

Include brand colors, selecting a single color to represent subscription across site

In a freemium model, consider labelling premium content to reduce frustration

Integrate other funnel steps into the paywall (such as the offers, payment or data collection) to reduce clicks and potential friction points

Work on optimizing paywall visibility rate, aiming to balance frustration and engagement (we found 80% to be optimal, but A/B testing is recommended to find the best visibility for your publication)

Make subscription easy, such as by offering account creation through Facebook/Google or payment through PayPal or Apple

If you’ve already collected key data points (such as name or content interests) make use of it to personalize the paywall and experience. For instance, you could build a subscription offer suited to content consumption habits, or adapt the value proposition to their profile

The post 160+ paywall examples to inspire your subscription strategy appeared first on Audiencers.

Adapting the paywall to a reader’s context, and particularly to the editorial topic they’re interested in, has enabled the women’s magazine ELLE to boost conversion rates. We spoke to Sophie Thierry-Clébant, Premium Manager, who tells us all about the project.

> ELLE.fr built seven section-specific paywalls alongside one generic version. Each keeps the same structure and changes three things: the tagline, the strip of images, and the first subscriber benefit listed

> The trigger was that promotional paywalls work but cannot run all year. Contextual versions give the non-promotional periods something to say, tied to what the reader is already reading

> Tested 50-50 against the generic wall, three sections gained around 50% in conversion and others around 10%. Two matched or slightly underperformed, and those teasers are being rewritten

> Across the last quarter of 2024 the conversion rate from the paywall rose 20% overall. Readers arriving from a themed newsletter also meet a paywall matched to that newsletter

> Implementation was template work, not engineering: one design duplicated seven times in Poool's journey builder. A mobile-first audience and a legal duty to list every benefit on the wall set the constraints

Where did you get the idea of contextual paywalls from?

When we launched the premium offer on ELLE, we obviously looked for the paywall model that would work best:

• In terms of visuals, images and colors
• In terms of how to present the offer

We often offer strong promotions, which we adapt to current events or seasons (sales, vacations, Mother’s Day, etc.):

These paywalls work very well, but you can’t run promotions all the time!

We needed to liven up the non-promotional periods by developing a more harmonious and coherent creative concept, linking print and digital. We also wanted to adapt our paywall to the profile of our female readers based on their browsing behavior, to ensure we met their expectations. Thus the idea of contextual paywalls was born!

What were your constraints in this project?

We have a predominantly mobile audience, so the paywall needs to be short, easy to read and understand quickly.

Our other constraint is a legal one: we have to show all subscription benefits in the paywall directly (since they’re not listed on the next registration page).

What was the outcome of this thought process?

We therefore thought about a fixed composition of paywalls that could be adapted to the reading context and the section the reader is in, via:

• A targeted tagline
• A frieze of visuals that are relevant to the topic
• As well as an adapted benefit, highlighting the editorial pieces most appreciated by subscribers in that specific section

We have now developed:

• 1 generic paywall, deployed on the site’s smaller sections

• 7 paywalls for various editorial topics:
  • Society (“Société”)
  • Fashion (“Mode”)
  • Psychology-relationships (“Psycho-sexo”)
  • Beauty (“Beauté”)
  • Design (“Déco”)
  • Cooking (“ELLE à table”)
  • Well-being / Fitness (“Forme / bien-être”)

> How the fashion magazine ELLE is using a dynamic paywall and continuous optimization to improve conversion rates

How did this work technically?

We’ve been using Poool’s journey builder for several years now, so it was very easy for us to put these ideas into practice. All we had to do was upload the subject tags into Poool, before building an adapted scenario for each rubric.

In the Appearances section, we created the generic template, duplicated it 7 times, adapted it to each context by modifying the tagline, the visual frieze and the first subscriber benefit, and integrated each into the relevant scenario.

Did you launch on 100% of your audience straight away?

On the 7 major sections concerned, we A/B tested the generic paywall vs. the contextual paywall 50-50, to analyze the impact on conversions. We also tracked click-through rates, but our main KPI remains the conversion rate.

What are the results of these dynamic paywalls?

Custom paywalls clearly outperformed generic paywalls. Specifically, 3 sections showed a leap in conversion rate of +50% on average on contextual paywalls versus the generic paywall.

Other sections trended towards a +10% conversion rate, and only 2 sections performed either similarly to or slightly below the generic paywall. In the last 2 cases, we believe that the teasers were not optimal and are currently reworking them, before continuing the A/B tests to validate our hypothesis.

Overall, in the last quarter of 2024, the conversion rate to subscription using the paywall source rose by +20%!

Have you put any other dynamic strategies in place that adapt to a reader’s context?

Yes, absolutely. It’s something we’ve had for a few years now, but readers of certain newsletters have seen paywalls adapted to the theme of their newsletter:

The lesson to anyone reading:

In conclusion, contextualizing paywalls according to reader preferences and needs is proving to be a particularly effective and profitable way of optimizing our KPIs.

By placing the reader at the heart of our strategies, we can send the right message, at the right time to maximize the impact of our actions. It’s a great example of how to increase conversions when you’re under pressure with little time on your hands!

The post Contextual paywalls on ELLE.fr increase conversion rates by 20% appeared first on Audiencers.