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How dynamic paywalls reinvented content marketing

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In 1997 when journalism was under siege, the Wall Street Journal was one of the first publications to retreat behind a paywall. Uncomfortable with surrendering ground the paper delivered an ultimatum – read it here, or read it nowhere. They were joined by The Times, The Financial Times and a few other publications. Alas, fortune did not favour the brave…

Readers were unfamiliar with the idea and, faced with such brinksmanship, simply opted to read elsewhere. The Times lost 90% of its readership within a year. The destination game was being comprehensively won by Facebook, Twitter and Google. Resistance seemed futile.

Readers who had once been taken for granted now needed to be convinced, and this was true for both broadsheets and magazines, in fact it was soon true for all content marketing including video and audio as well. With this mission in mind, WSJ began testing out different temptation tactics to improve the customer journey. The paper made it possible for members, subscribers and journal staffers to share articles un-hindered by a pay wall; so anything shared from your favourite journalist’s twitter feed was free to access. Twenty four hour guest passes for non subscribers would pop up on particular articles. Full access for a day or two was granted so long as you you gave up your e mail address. What did the WSJ gain? First party data. What you like, how long you read for, and where to contact you…

Meanwhile ad-revenue was beginning to stagnate. Advertisers naturally saw less incentive to advertise on pages of Cosmopolitan, either digitally or in print, when most people were reading the magazine’s articles via Facebook and Twitter. This meant that brands with a least some kind of pay wall protected, loyal clientele at least had a baseline of revenue. The idea of a mixed monetisation strategy began to emerge – a little from subscription, a little from print, a lot from advertising.

Then came 2016 and the year of misinformation. Suddenly Facebook seemed suspicious. There was no editor, there was no organisation, it was a wild west of lies and sensation. Google and Facebook were ethic-free data monsters who were now frequently being called before congress. Readers scampered back toward reputable destinations. The New York Times resurged, the Guardian returned to profit. Trust was restored. Meanwhile, as the game began to shift, the WSJ’s pay wall was learning more and more.

Jump forward to 2020 and the Wall Street Journal is sitting pretty. Patience has paid off. These intelligent pay walls give readers what they want, while reinforcing the reputation of the brand. As you engage with WSJ’s pay wall you’re given a propensity score, effectively a quantified valuation of your likelihood to subscribe. If you’re at the top end you hit a hard pay wall, if they think you’re still a long way off committing, you’re allowed a little for free. The pay wall quantifies the CLV and makes an offer dependent on that. In this way, as the pay wall learns, it also guarantees that no eager reader goes unsubscribed. There’s a considerable amount of churn reduction, and a much more reliable income stream is established that doesn’t rely on changeable digital advertising. In 2015 the FT moved to a dynamic pay wall and as early as 2016 was taking more money from subscriptions than advertising and three quarters of readers were digital.

The pay wall feeds an addiction for the things you can’t live without (e.g.sports commentary, or financial news) and uses this as a gateway drug for the annual subscription. This analogy of addiction isn’t ours by the way – in the words of Financial Times CEO John Ridding the question has always been ‘how do you build a habit?’.

Why publishers are focusing on the customer journey

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Our presence on the internet is measured in footprints. These footprints take the ephemeral impact of our net-worthy selves and make them solid. Cast your mind back to the early carbon footprint questionnaires that converted your polluting output into massy kilos of guilt – the invisible was made tangible, blissful ignorance was forever changed into depressing culpability.

Since then ghostly impressions of where we’ve been and what we’ve done have become more and more popular. As first party data monitoring has improved, individual specialisation has increased, and the customer journey is tracked beginning to end. The impression has become more of a fingerprint than a footprint these days, as our tastes have become more specific.

In fact we now get prudishly insulted when the algorithm gets it wrong – Why, dear god, am I being shown adverts for that! What could possibly have made you think I’d vote for them? What have I done? What have I bought? How did they know?

A world of offence and etiquette has emerged from the primeval grunts of our first marketing footprints. We are insulted when judged to be ’that’ kind of consumer, or hit with blunt demands for payment, or when our conscience is squeezed. We are gratified with ads that seem to know us, delighted by cool companies who feel we’re ‘one of them’, and deeply disturbed by ads that seem to know us all too well. Deep down we want to be stroked, managed and cared for. Sensitivity is the name of the game.

Until now, the accepted wisdom on subscriptions has not responded to any of this subtlety. Instead, pay walls have come across as crude, transactional dates. The hard paywall wants to go all in on the first drink or there’s really no point carrying on. The soft paywall will give you a little for free, but by the third date you need to get serious, and then there’s the ‘freemium’ paywall that just keeps putting out in the hope you have a conscience.

This kind of thinking is redundant in the future life of subscription services. A reader relationship strategy is about good faith engagement, individual satisfaction and Customer Lifetime Value. The customer journey is key, and any company that disregards how personally we feel about our internet selves, risks offending and alienating audiences. A one-size-fits-all policy is several years out of date.

The redundancy of old pay wall thinking is apparent when you consider how people engage emotionally with journalism. An accurate report from Anfield is half way between fandom and a civil right. We feel represented by columnists and comedians as much as by politicians. So while pressure and urgency might work for Black Friday sales at PC World, they are totally inadequate tactics for encouraging subscriptions to The Economist.

Dynamic pay walls are re-organising the customer journey, and responding intelligently to different readers. The Wall Street Journal’s intelligent paywall caters for 60 different variables including frequency, depth of read, favoured devices, preferred content types and a whole lot else. These metrics allow you to calculate the CLV accurately and offer subscriptions at the right time. You can start the conversation on sport, move on to world affairs, and jump into bed much further down the line.

Research conducted by NZZ, a Swiss publication with a similarly smart pay wall, shows that personalised greetings on subscription offers increases conversion by a whopping 25%. They’ve also discovered pushing subscriptions during the commute is pointless, and annual offers are much more attractive than monthly ones. This kind of detail in first party data gives you multiple customer journeys and therefore provides churn reduction on a massive scale.

The proof? Earlier this year the New Yorker moved behind a dynamic pay wall and took 167,000 digital-only subscribers with it. The New York Times added 223,000 in the first quarter of 2019 and the German newspaper Zeit recorded a 123% growth last year. According to Reuters more than half of publishers identified subscriptions as their primary revenue focus for next year. If this turns out to be true the customer journey will be all that matters.

Our footprints are everywhere, and publishers have to thread the needle between a subtle marketing relationship that respects our privacy while tickling our taste buds. In years gone by this might have seemed like molly-coddling, but in this new ‘internet of manners’, etiquette is a mark of respect.