Paywall in digital newspapers

Pay to view

Hello! What's going on?

Now that the first election of April is over and we are facing the second one in May... it is a good opportunity to reflect on how your media metrics have been doing and what type of content has been the most visited. If you are clear about what type of content or author has had a better performance, perhaps you should consider the possibility of closing them and charging for their consumption by readers who are willing to do so because of their affinity with your editorial line and engagement with your project.

As long as Google or Facebook take the lion's share of advertising revenues, it will be difficult for digital media to stop showing increasingly annoying and intrusive ads. The programmatic advertising monetization model is changing and has led large players such as Vocento, Godó, Prisa and Unidad Editorial to decide to charge for some of their content in their reference media to minimize the drop in revenue from the sale of newspapers or magazines. In the coming months we will see how some of these media will apply their pay wall strategies.

We also have to take into account that the vast majority of readers access content via mobile, where advertising causes even more rejection and becomes more intrusive and opt to leave the medium and go to look for content elsewhere that does not penalize them with ads every time they scroll through the screen of their mobile devices. All this added to the radicalism imposed by AdBlockers with advertising, make metrics and CTR plummet with respect to the number of impressions of an ad.

That is why readers really have to be very involved with a project to be willing to pay to consume certain types of closed content. If you provide value with some prestigious firms, contents in modern and new formats together with informative proposals, surely you have an audience willing to pay to read them. Readers are increasingly aware that the Internet is a free medium for the circulation and acquisition of content, but this right to freedom of information does not imply that everything has to be free.

It is a time of change and the habits of Internet users have to change as well, even so there are many doubts between the different strategies to apply in each media and the most appropriate media to apply a paywall. In the next months we will see the strategies of each media and we will see the success of each one of them, in any case it will be exciting to study the strategies and the reaction of the market.

How a paywall works

The system is based on closing a series of contents that, after payment of a subscription fee, are released to the reader. If the closure is total, we will call it a "hard paywall" which does not allow access to any of the contents. On the other hand, there is the "soft paywall" that gives access to a part of the contents or allows you to consult a few contents before requiring payment.

It's essential to invest in the knowledge and behavior of the readers of your media and their interactions in order to know their preferences and be able to offer "a la carte" paid content that really suits their interests. You need to have an exhaustive control of qualitative metrics and tools that allow you to analyze this data, maximize the value of your subscribers and reach a balance where it is clear to you that it can continue to be free and that it deserves to be paid.

Large digital newspapers such as El Español have long been working with closed content as a complementary source of advertising revenue and have thousands of subscribers. It is only a matter of a few months before other players such as El País, ABC, El Mundo, La Vanguardia... also implement their paywalls.

This new reality is here to stay even though it is not free of doubts and uncertainties.

Does SEO affect gated content?

You must keep in mind that implementing a paywall is not a simple task and must be left in the hands of professionals. If it is not done properly, it can be a problem and it has to be done in a technically careful way to allow Google robots to continue indexing all your content, whether it is closed or paid content. That the snippets shown to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) remain attractive and suggestive to be clicked by users, so that you do not lose CTR (Click-Through-Rate), that is, the proportion of clicks that a news item receives in relation to the number of times it has been shown as a search result. All this added together are key factors so that your content does not lose relevance or positions in the first pages of results and featured news carousels.

Payment wall technology requires technical expertise in different areas: SEO, payment gateways, order tracking and management, subscriber control and tracking... therefore its implementation and proper functioning cannot be improvised. If your publishing project needs to improve its revenue and conversions, do not hesitate to contact us and we will find a customized paywall solution that fits your needs.

At BAB, we are implementing our paywall in Comitium, our CMS for media. The new version of Comitium that we are currently developing is scheduled to be released during the month of July including a paywall management solution.

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And to finish, did you know that ...

In the next post we'll talk about how the big platforms working on voice-enabled digital content distribution continue to rise and are aligned with the massive growth in popularity of voice-enabled smart services. We'll talk about it all...