How The Information converts readers into subscribers

Mollie Leavitt of The Atlantic interviewed Dan Krenitsyn, director of growth at tech news site The Information, about how it converts readers into subscribers.

Here is an excerpt:

How do you show potential subscribers that your content is worth paying for if they can’t access it due to the hard paywall?

We just redesigned our locked out article page — that will be the page that you hit if you’re not a paying subscriber and you’re coming to the site for the first time. What you’ll see is content that’s gated with an email wall, and we allow you to read an article for free by entering your email. After that happens, we try and personalize the journey for you. Let’s say you come in through in an autonomous vehicle story or a crypto story, the next article you get from us will feature similar content or a cross-section of our top stories in that vertical. We’re trying to make sure that we’re personalizing our communications and aligning them with what our audience is interested in, instead of doing the old-fashioned batch & blast model and treating all traffic the same.

I started off in the finance world, and then I worked on a lot of products that were more ad-backed, so it’s been a transition for me, working on something that actually isn’t supported by ad revenue at all. The Information is focused on subscriber revenue, which in my opinion is a much more sound business model in this day and age of media.

Read more here.