In June 2023, the Blick Group launched a digital subscription offering, Blick+, giving users access to more sports, services, and news on blick.ch. 

As the launch came relatively late compared to national and international counterparts, the Blick Group had the advantage of learning from the mistakes and successes of other media houses and incorporating these lessons into its own offering. 

However, Blick Group took a slightly different path on one front: an innovative paywall design called the Cliffhanger.

What is the Cliffhanger?

The Cliffhanger gives a sneak peek of the article’s main ideas — summarised in a few key points — directly on the paywall. 

The Cliffhanger has two primary objectives. It aims to make an article more appealing to the user by teasing the content in an exciting way without giving too much away while also avoiding becoming clickbait. At the same time, it encourages users who are not primarily interested in subscribing yet to click on Blick+ articles instead of avoiding them since they can still learn something about the content.

Our hypothesis is that Blick+ will thus become more interesting for this group of users as they engage with its advantages and contents.

Creating a Cliffhanger

At present, the article’s author is responsible for creating the Cliffhanger. This task is considered an art form, as it involves the delicate balance of intriguing the reader without giving too much detail. Overexposing content can negatively impact conversion rates. 

What’s also special about our paywall is that the author can determine after which paragraph in the text the paywall appears. Thus, the real art lies in integrating the cliffhanger effectively into the text to pique the user’s interest in the article.

While we have explored the possibility of employing artificial intelligence to craft cliffhangers, this approach has not proven effective yet because the quality was not satisfactory. Nonetheless, automating cliffhanger creation remains a goal for the future.

Where it came from

The Cliffhanger originated from an ideation workshop during the project phase. To test its effectiveness, we incorporated it into a non-closable registration wall displayed at the article level on blick.ch.

There, we observed that the registration conversion rates were significantly higher with the Cliffhanger than when the reg wall simply highlighted the benefits of registration. This encouraged us to adopt the approach for the paywall as well.

Does the Cliffhanger actually lead to more subscriptions? Our test results say yes!

In an A/B/C test series, we contrasted the Cliffhanger paywall with a marketing-oriented paywall, which included details on subscription advantages, and a standard paywall that lacked supplementary subscription information.

In the context of Web browsers (on both smartphones and desktops), the Cliffhanger paywall was notably successful. It notched a 7% higher conversion rate than the standard paywall and outperformed the marketing paywall, which outlined subscription benefits, by 21%. 

Our hypothesis is that users struggle to envision general subscription benefits because they are relatively abstract. When an article is teased, users have a clearer idea of what to expect from a Blick+ subscription.

We noticed no significant differences among the various paywall models for app users. This suggests that in the app environment, where users are generally more dedicated and familiar with the product, the details of the paywall’s design and messaging have a smaller influence on their subscription choices.

Contrary to our initial concerns, we didn’t observe an uptick in users subscribing to individual articles and then opting out. Thus, the paywall design did not adversely affect the retention rate. 

Overall, our tests have demonstrated that the Cliffhanger is not a cure-all, but it could be a straightforward and nonetheless highly effective tool for enhancing conversion rates.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .