Types of Paywalls

There are many types of paywalls available to monetize your digital content.

What kind of paywalls ?

There are many ways to monetize your digital content and a paywall has many possibilities.

Expose your content for free

Metered Paywall

Metered paywalls are a popular choice when moving from free to paid-for content. A meter exposes a limited amount of your content to the consumer for free. You define the amount of free article a user can read before being asked to pay or subscribe. Meters can be used with other paywall compnents like registration walls, which link the metered use to a specific identity instead of using a cookie.

Meters are an effective tool in coverting customers into paying subscribers. Giving them access to the content as a limited trial, it lets the user see if they like the product. If they do, then a percentage of those will sign up and subscribe. This can be more effective than a hard paywall, where your content is unknown to the user.

Limited number of free articles per month
Cookie-less solution
Determined users can circumvent
Exposes the customer to your content
Effective conversions to paid

Gated access to all content

Hard Paywall

Hard paywalls are an effective way to gate off all or sections of your conetnt. Unlike metered paywalls, you might mix free and premium content, using the free content to showcase the quality of your product to future subscribers, whilst making premium content locked behind a paywall. The only way for a customer to access your hard paywall would be to subscribe.

Hard paywalls can also be configured to give no content away for free, but the market needs to be fully aware of what you are selling. A complete hard paywall example would be Netflix, everyone is aware of the products they sell but there is no free tier. Low cost or free trial periods are an effective combination product with a hard paywall.

Difficult to circumvent
Clear value proposition to the consumer
Can be used with low cost trial periods
Excellent for streaming or high value news
Users have to submit payment to test your product

Acquire customer details, upsell later

Registration Wall

Registration walls (Reg Walls) are an excellent way to introduce the concept of paid-for-content to your consumer base, where the content had previously been free to access. The reg wall allows you to test your consumers willingness to 'do something' in order to access your content. Typically, you would look for a fairly high reg wall compliance of around 80%+ to access your content.

By implementing a registration wall, you are testing if users will register, and also generating a list of users who are engaged with your product. This segmentation data can be used to later offer these customers access to a paid-for premium content model.

Quick to implement
High value consumer behaviour data
Future up-sell to engaged consumers
Perfect for transition from free to paid.
Does not generate revenue, yet.

Sell based on consumer behaviour

Dynamic Paywall

Customers are segmented based on their behaviour (propensity to purchase) or by rules, i.e. what country/location are you from, what device are you using, or, point of origin i.e. how did you land on this premium piece of content, from social, search, specific referrers etc. Dynamic paywalls are simple to set up and Flip-Pay has one of the most powerful and granular systems on the market.

Dynamic paywalls can also integrate with third party analytics systems that track consumer behaviour and send signals to the paywall, when, and which type of paywall to present to the customer. It can also determine the price band and product type to display to the customer in real time.

Right product in front of the consumer
Based on Geo-location and Propensity
Engage with third party tracking data
Better conversions, higher revenue
Higher management overhead