How Business Insider’s paywall strategy has helped increase subscriptions

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.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.