In our 2013 Online Subscription Benchmark Report, we saw that the industry benchmark for free to paid subscribers for most subscription sites was between 1-3%. New data from Press+ shows that metered paywalls are getting an even lower conversion rate.An article on the Newspaper Association of America website reports that Press+ has established industry benchmarks for metered paywalls based on its 450+ clients. For most news sites using Press+, 3%-4% of site visitors hit the paywall; high-performing site are able to get 5%-10% of unique visitors to hit the paywall. But of those that hit the paywall, an average of 0.5% convert to paying subscribers; high-performers can get 1%-2% to convert.That means that if the average site has 10,000 unique visits in a month, 300-400 visitors are hitting the paywall and 1.5 to 2 people are converting! High performers are able to get 20 people of every 10,000 unique visitors to convert. To compare that to our Benchmark statistic of 1%-3% for free-to-paid, high-performing metered sites are getting an overall 0.2% conversion rate of free visitor to paying subscriber.Thus, metered paywalls remain a decent option for high-volume sites with traffic in the millions, but a poor option for more niche-specific publications. (One could argue that they’re not even that great an option for high-volume sites, but because news sites have to compete with more free content than any other niche, I still support their use for general news sites.) Sites that are targeting a smaller overall audience should adopt a freemium model that divides free and paid access by type of content, not number of visits.