Use artificial intelligence to optimize your paywall

When advertising revenue gets disappointing, publishers often wonder if they can charge for access to their content, and the most common way they do that is with a paywall.

Paywalls raise a lot of interesting questions, and as a consequence, there are a lot of different strategies.

One strategy is to show a little of every article, but require people to register or subscribe to see the full article.

How much of an article do you show? Sometimes that decision is driven by Google. You have to show enough to get the article indexed for the right keywords so people can find it.

Another strategy is to allow some number of free views before presenting the registration wall or the paywall.

How many articles should that be? And how do you decide?

It’s very likely that the optimal number of free views before presenting the paywall varies based on how people find your content. It might also vary by how frequently they come to your site. For example, a person who comes once a week on Sunday to get the crossword puzzle is a different sort of prospect than the visitor who wants to read all your articles about a particular topic.

Yet another strategy is to make some articles free to all, and put premium content behind the paywall.

And there are other variations on these themes.

The problem publishers face is that creating one rule for all these different types of users won’t optimize your paywall as well as creating different rules for different types of visitors.

Maybe the people who come from LinkedIn are most likely to convert after three views while the people who come from a Google search are hardly likely to subscribe at all.

But who has the time for all that analysis, and how would you test it?

That’s where your friendly neighborhood AI comes in.

Rather than sitting around a conference table, debating whether to show 2 or 3 pages before you present the offer, let AI figure it out.

There’s still some work to do. For example, you’re going to have to tell the AI what kinds of things to look for, and you might want to bone up on different types of paywall strategies to decide what options the AI can test.

But this method seems so much better to me than trying to find the one rule to catch everybody. (I wanted to do a play on Tolkien there, but it wasn’t working.)