© Illustration by Jean-François Desserre
SFGATE has been a free site for its entire existence. Rather than bolt a paywall onto that, the team built something separate: a paid app called Friends of SFGATE, designed with lasting reader relationships in mind. We spoke with Grant Marek, Editor-in-Chief of SFGATE, and Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer across Hearst Newspapers, about the thinking behind it, four weeks after launch.
Key takeaways to copy & share
> SFGATE didn't add a paywall to its free site. It built a separate paid app instead, so the free web experience that built its audience stays untouched > The name "Friends of SFGATE" beat "subscription" and "membership" in testing specifically because it read as warmer than a transaction but less formal than a cause people feel obligated to fund > Nearly 90% of readers who took the 7-day free trial converted to paying Friends, an exceptionally high trial-to-paid rate relative to widely accepted industry benchmarks, though it's still early days > The North Star metric shifted from total visits to repeat visits: can a reader who showed up once be brought back a second and third time, not just once by anyone > The launch required real org change, not just a new app: a first-ever Community Engagement Program Manager role, a second video hire, and an existing editor with app experience redirected to lead app programming
Most publishers solve the reader-revenue question by drawing a line through their content. Some of it is free to access, some of it is paywalled. SFGATE deliberately didn’t do that. The web stays entirely free, exactly as it’s always been. What’s new sits next to it, a separate, paid app.
Why not just add a paywall
