Earlier this week, executive editor Richard Kim announced that The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, would erect a metered paywall. Effective Monday, January 11, regular visitors to the site will have to pay for The Nation’s content.

“We’ll be using a meter system that will keep The Nation free for new readers, while also asking frequent visitors to help fund our important work,” said Kim.

Specifically, here’s what will change:

• Everyone can read six articles for free over a 30-day period.
• After the first three articles, readers will be asked to sign up for one of The Nation’s newsletters.
• After six articles in 30 days, readers will be asked to subscribe at a special introductory rate of $9.50 for six months of unlimited digital access, the equivalent of $0.37 a week.
• Print and digital subscribers will continue to get unlimited access, including access to archives dating back to 1865.

Celebrating its 150^th anniversary last summer, The Nation launched a redesigned, reengineered website. After the July 6^th relaunch, The Nation was able to make articles free for the remainder of the year, thanks to the generosity of donors, said Kim. This allowed The Nation to grow readership in November with 102% growth in unique visitors and 155% growth in page views, year over year. Part of the growth was likely due to increased news consumption following the November Paris attacks, ISIS news and the upcoming presidential election.

Kim explained why it is necessary for The Nation to put up a paywall:

“But doing journalism of this quality is expensive. In the past year, we’ve sent writers to the streets of Athens to report on the financial crisis; to the factories of Iowa to talk to working-class voters; and to the borders of Europe to document an unprecedented refugee crisis. We’ve interviewed presidential candidates, explored what’s at stake in the next election, investigated broken healthcare systems, and exposed the cruelty of the prison-industrial complex,” Kim said.

“We’re proud that we were among the first media companies to pay our interns a living wage, and that we just signed a groundbreaking contract with the union that represents our staff,” he added. “Because we only do journalism that matters, we believe our regular readers will be proud to subscribe – and to help keep The Nation accessible to new readers. Over the next few months, we’ll be keeping a close eye on how this is all working, as well as answering customer queries.”

According to an interview with John Cary, The Nation’s Digital Director, Talking New Media said the magazine’s staff built the paywall in-house with help from DiaSpark, a third-party developer. In a January 14 article on Talking New Media, Cary commented on the results of the paywall thus far:

“We have not seen any decrease in traffic – granted it has only been three days,” Cary told Talking New Media. “I’m very paranoid about that, we are really keeping a close eye on that. So far, we have not had any push back from people, the only issues have been readers who have forgotten their passwords.”

In addition, Cary reported that the magazine has seen “a huge increase in subscriptions,” since Monday.

Three days after launching the paywall, The Nation announced that it is endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders. The Nation said it has only endorsed two candidates in the Democratic primaries, first Jesse Jackson on 1988 and Barack Obama in 2008.

Insider Take:

More and more media companies are moving to the metered paywall, which bridges the gap between free and paid content. Readers get the opportunity to sample content before deciding if they want to make the commitment to purchase content from publishers like The Nation, The New York Times, Slate and others.

The Nation seems to be going about this incrementally, first with a redesign followed by the metered paywall six months later. This is an excellent way for subscription companies to test the waters to see how readership changes after a redesign. If The Nation had thrust all of the change on its readers at once, it may have experienced a decline, or at least a change, in readership.

We like that The Nation is keeping a close eye on reader stats and feedback, and is willing to make needed adjustments over the next few months. This openness is much more attractive than a “like it or else” approach they could have adopted, and it might help readers be more willing to accept the change. A reasonable pricing structure and a detailed, transparent plan for how the paywall works is also a good practice for subscription companies.

As for the presidential endorsement, the timing is ideal because of the paywall launch, and it makes sense from a marketing perspective. The Nation also used timing to its advantage when it relaunched its site last summer on the magazine’s 150^th anniversary.

The presidential race presents a similar opportunity for additional exposure to readers. The first 2016 presidential debate was held last night, so it’s logical for The Nation to go on record with its endorsement now, and it certainly couldn’t hurt its readership stats now that the metered paywall is in place. We aren’t sure how Senator Sanders will fare in the Democratic primaries, but we predict The Nation’s readers will vote “yes” for their weekly magazine, even with a metered paywall.