Media News

How Business Insider’s paywall strategy has helped increase subscriptions

September 26, 2024

Posted by Chris Roush

Kayleigh Barber of Digiday writes about how Business Insider’s artificial-intelligence paywall strategy has increased subscriptions.

Barber writes, “The new smart paywall instead determines the content that individual users are most likely to pay to access based on their previous reading habits, which platform they come to the website from and the propensity that each genre of content has for converting readers. Using those insights and Google Analytics data, the AI’s algorithm decides whether users meet a paywall, registration wall or nothing upon entering the website.

“By the end of the testing period, which spanned December to April, Friedman said that 60% of new conversions happened on ‘non-premium’ stories, meaning stories that never would have been paywalled in the previous model.

“‘Essentially, those are the stories that we never asked anyone to pay for before, and now they’re driving more than half of our conversions,’ said Friedman.”

Read more here.

Subscribe to TBN

Receive updates about new stories in the industry daily or weekly.

Subscribe to TBN

Receive updates about new stories in the industry.