One-fifth of participants of the INMA Subscriber Acquisition Master Class reported using a hybrid or dynamic paywall, with more than one-third planning to adopt them soon.

The recent master class was attended by 158 news professionals from 41 countries. 

While traditional models still dominate — 35% attendees used freemium and 27% used metres — the online survey revealed the largest ever share of hybrid or dynamic paywalls at 22%.

This 22% figure is confirmed in a larger sample of 252 news brands benchmarking with INMA, and it has quadrupled since 2020, per my estimates.

Shift to personalisation

Additionally, 38% master class attendees said they were currently switching to a hybrid or a dynamic model or plan to do it in the near future, signalling a shift in how news organisations approach targeting their offers.

This pivot reflects publishers’ maturity, a new ambition to personalise reader experiences in response to changing audience behaviours and economic pressures, advances in data analytics, and democratisation of paywall technologies by vendors.

At the INMA Media Subscription Summit in New York in February, personalisation was a top priority for 284 attendees.

Challenges for dynamic paywalls

For years, dynamic paywalls were a bit like driverless cars — everybody talked about them, but only few had seen them. 

• Many vendors promised fully autonomous systems, but they often meant different levels of automation and flexibility in setting rules around what offers to show to whom and when. 

• Segmenting users by propensity to buy was proven to lead to higher conversion rates than crude methods, but the low share of logged-in users and cookie depreciation limited the overall impact on sales.

• While heavy readers kick-started subscription programmes, they could not sustain the growth. As brands matured, they increasingly converted light and new readers, harder to segment by engagement. 

As a result, over the years, some INMA members reported their disappointment. Most stuck to simpler, traditional models like hard or freemium walls, as they showed offers to all readers regardless of how much was known about them.

The rise of registration walls

The first big shift came after privacy laws pushed tech companies to depreciate third-party cookies, and publishers scrambled to register users and build their first-party data chests for advertising purposes.

Some companies like Amedia in Norway or The New York Times achieved remarkable success registering and logging in most users. More persistent and consistent data about individual behaviours improved the precision of targeting ads and … subscription offers. 

For example, since 2019, while every first article one reads on the Times’ Web site is free, the second is behind a registration wall. This allows the in-house dynamic paywall to assign further amounts of free content individually.

The challenge is that, per INMA Benchmarks, the median news brand worldwide saw only 8% of its monthly users being registered in 3Q 2024.

The rise of AI

The second big shift came after advances in AI helped publishers to improve targeting paywalls contextually — and not only behaviourally.

At this year’s master class, Puneet Kukreja of Times Internet in India described how generative AI models from OpenAI allowed it to classify content robustly, cheaply, and at scale. 

Predictions about converting content supplemented a more traditional behavioural model and allowed targeting 70% of monthly users who were new to the site or anonymous. They would simply see an offer based on the characteristics of the article rather than the user.

Times Internet aspires to match the right user with the right article, at the right price, and at the right time. AI algorithms improve their predictions based on performance of the past matches.

In a very competitive market with thousands of free alternative news sources, the dynamic paywall allowed The Economic Times to double average subscription price while improving the conversion rate by more than 15%.

Times Internet developed their dynamic paywall in-house, and Kukreja said he regrets this route 20% of time — for example, when his seven people-strong team discovers another bug or a new employee needs to learn a complicated and undocumented system. 

He is however “happy,” he said, “80% of the time” when the paywall integrates well with the rest of the in-house tech stack (like a CMS or a CDP) or when they plug another brand like Times of India and play without increased cost.

Democratisation of dynamic paywalls

Most publishers don’t have ambitions or resources to build dynamic paywalls themselves, and they outsource. 

The Globe and Mail in Canada productised a similar dual paywall as Sophi AI. After selling the technology and its team to Mather, a consultancy in the United States, it is now offered to publishers around the world as a decision layer to be integrated with whatever paywall system they use.

The vendors — such as BlueConic, Chargebee, Mather, Piano, or Zuora — effectively democratise access to dynamic paywalls, and this third phenomenon likely explains the recent rise in adoption.

At the master class, Darya Ushakova of The Philadelphia Inquirer shared detailed performance data of their implementation of Mather’s dual paywall engine — it drove a 35% lift in direct paywall subscriptions compared to a control group. 

Together with other tactics such as a new pricing scheme (US$1 for six months), or hard-walling archives, the Inquirer’s dynamic paywall contributed to a 62% increase in average monthly starts and 2.35x increase in the total number of digital subscriptions in three years.

The sunset of one-size-fits-all paywalls

The spike in dynamic paywall adoption — from niche technology to mainstream — marks the rising maturity and sophistication in digital subscriptions.

Publishers see dynamic paywalls finally work, so many are moving beyond the binary choice of “free vs. paid” to more nuanced, AI-driven approaches that balance user willingness to pay, revenue optimization, and market realities.

Interested in personalisation? Hear from Harvard Business School’s David Edelman, author of “Personalised: Customer strategy in the age of AI” and our keynote speaker at the free online INMA Subscriptions Town Hall on December 4.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

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