As The New Yorker planned the re-launch of its paywall last summer, it also left the doors open for five months to its archive of stories dating back to 2007. This simple decision turned out to be quite effective in growing the publication’s overall subscriber base.
For the voracious fans of The New Yorker’s journalism, the decision was a dream come true. The publication had operated a paywall for many years where only 25% of new stories were available each week to subscribers. The archive had always been kept under lock and key and, as editor David R. Remnick told the New York Times last summer, “had long since outlived its conception.” But the five-month open archive experiment also had another motive: introducing potential subscribers to their quality content.
When the new, metered paywall was finally launched in November, it wasn’t long before unique views and subscription registrations drastically increased. In January alone, year-over-year unique views were up 30%, while year-over-year subscription registrations had risen an unbelievable 85%.
The paywall allows for six articles to be viewed for free, in direct contrast to when all of The New Yorker’s content was behind the wall. This means that the magazine was unable to properly promote its material, which limited the potential of new subscriber acquisition.
Insider Take
The actions taken by The New Yorker to open up its content have been validated by the large increases in unique views and subscriber registrations. This is illustrative of a major issue many publishers deal with when considering paywall implementation – namely, the benefits of open access to content versus the benefits of keeping content under complete lock and key. Of course, giving away everything for free is anathema to the subscription business model, but if potential subscribers aren’t getting at least a taste of what they will pay for, the ensuing conversions will be very low. The right balance of free content and paid content is often a hard equilibrium to come by, but it seems so far that The New Yorker has made the correct decision implementing its metered paywall.
