HED Above The Rest: The One Thing Paywall Articles Should Have To Attract Subscribers

If you’re reading this on the Magazine Manager blog, it’s because of my choice to create content that you can click on and consume without the hurdle of a paywall. It’s a choice afforded by the nature of what and why I publish, and a choice that I understand not all publishers have the luxury of making. 

If paywalls weren’t effective in keeping content exclusive to an intended audience — while also, one hopes, helping build that audience-base — then no one would construct them.

Which makes last month’s study about paywall effectiveness all the more fascinating.

From Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich — the same institution that showed us late last year that journalist-crafted articles were preferred to AI-automated article — comes a new study intended to “investigate correlations between showing various ‘teaser’ elements on paywalled articles,” the association of subscription offers, and whether visitors seeing these actually start the process of subscribing.

As numerous publications said in summing up the study, less does appear to be more. In fact, in looking at the strategies used by local German and Austrian newspapers, the study seems to imply anything more than a headline is giving away too much.

“With all other independent variables being constant,” the study says of below-the-HED offerings, “displaying a stand-first (“deck” in US-English) on the paywall locked article page significantly decreases the odds of visitors clicking the ‘subscribe now’ button, by 86.3%.”

Titled “Converting Online News Visitors To Subscribers: Exploring The Effectiveness of Paywall Strategies Using Behavioural Data,” the study highlighted the importance of studying actual behavior to help “avoid the discrepancies between self-reported data and actual user behaviour that have been identified in previous studies.” That’s how it found that displaying the intro reduced the odds of clicking ‘Subscribe” by 72.2%, showing an image decreased the odds by 34.7%, and showing a blurred preview of text decreased the odds by 26.3%.

“Stand-firsts typically contain ‘the most important facts and ideas’ in the article,” the study says, “and the intro, as the beginning of the article, will often also contain important information as articles often follow the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure. As a result, visitors may obtain enough information from a well-formulated stand-first and/or intro to feel that they have been sufficiently informed, and therefore feel no need to read further, let alone pay to do so.”

As for what actually helps increase the odds of subscribing, the study found that discounts were the most effective technique, upping those odds by more than 3 times. The other offers that the study explored, including ePapers, trials, base subscription price, and more, were “mostly not associated with the decision to subscribe.”

“Reducing the information density of teaser elements on paywalled articles and offering discounts may help newspapers increase their online subscriber numbers,” the study says.