Per Buers experiences working with various news organizations when implementing paid content strategies.

2. Paywalls
What works and what doesn’t
!
10 some best practices according to our experience

3. Per Buer
CTO
Varnish Software
(Freemium / Premium business model)

4. Original Heidelberg

5. Original Heidelberg

6. Business logic

7. Background
• We launched our first paywall 2 year ago
• 12 projects so far

8. We’re moving to a paywall

9. Paywall concepts
• Freemium / premium paywalls
• Identity based- and anonymous metered
paywalls
• Referrer-based access
• Micropayments

10. Lots of moving parts!

11. Project scope
• Paywalls involve:
• Backend, frontend, ops, business, editorial,
marketing, customer support ++
• Proper project management is very
important

12. Access control

13. Access Control
• Technically challenging
• Lots of different approaches
• Client (SaaS), CDN, Appserver, Edge

14. Scalability &
Performance
• Scaling a website is harder with a paywall
• Identity based metering makes is even
harder as database interactions happen at
every page-view

15. Dev
Ops

16. Access control rules
• Remember: Access control rules need
• To be implemented
• To be communicated to the readership
• Keep it simple if possible
• People don’t pay for things they don’t
understand

17. Testing

18. Testing paywalls
• Tests now need to cover the paywall
• You need to test the whole paywall,
covering VCL, CDN or Javascript based
paywalls
• More complexity - higher costs

19. Payment

20. Payment is easy
:-)

21. Subscription
management
• Some newspapers have existing
subscription management software that
handle digital
• Those who do not might face a more
complex project

22. Typical paywall project
• 9 months long, 3-12 month range
• Business side typically uses 3-4 months to make
up their mind :-)
• Our implementation costs are in the €7-25K
range and typically spans 2-4 weeks.
• New, creative models add time and cost
• (Norwegian newspaper tend to be very
competent)

23. Summing up
1. Complex projects
2. SaaS paywalls might not cut it (bias)
3. Consider scalability (bias)
4. Access control & security is hard
5. This might be the time for devops
6. Testing becomes harder
7. Statistics is different
8. Payment is easy
9. Subscription management

24. Photo credits
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Clock mechanics, http://www.flickr.com/photos/45810363@N04/4835327934/in/photostream/
Devops, http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/8634021085/
Padlock, http://www.flickr.com/photos/faithmonsoon/234237378/
Munch, The Scream.
The rest are bought of Shutterstock