• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 19, 2025

Newspapers face a paywall dilemma: Should they display only the headline of a paywall-locked article add a picture or give the store away with a lengthy teaser?  

The objective is to get readers to subscribe. Strangely, showing a picture has a negative effect,  although it is not a big one, says a new study: Converting Online News Visitors to Subscribers: Exploring the Effectiveness of Paywall Strategies Using Behavioral Data. 

Rather, the trick is to give the reader “a taste of the news article without significantly reducing the odds that they click on the ‘subscribe now’ button,” the study notes. 

Another tactic is to show both a stand-first and an intro on their paywall. Publishers should consider removing one or both of them, the study states. 

Don’t despair: The results show “a significant positive correlation between the provision of a discount and visitors finally subscribing”. Indeed, discounts increase the odds of paying for a subscription by 3.35 times, the study states. 

In the interest of full disclosure, we should warn you that these results only cover Germany and Austria, although they illustrate some general rules.

One is that there is a strong lift when free or subsidized smart devices were offered,, the odds of response improving by 3.41 times,

How much should you tell people? “In practice, it would be unlikely that a news website would choose to display only the headline of a paywall locked article,” the study notes. But it may backfire if you give them too much information. 

“As many of the news websites that we studied showed both a stand-first and an intro on their paywall locked article pages, another possible strategy would be for the publisher to remove one of them, or even both.”

The study was authored by Zhengyi Xu, Neil Thurman, Julia Berhami, Clara Strasser Ceballos and Ole Fehling