ANOTHER BRICK IN THE (PAY) WALL

In 2018, Times leadership recognized a big problem—tons of anonymous users were reading the site and giving us nothing in return. So we were tasked with re-envisioning how the paywall worked, from concept to implementation.

We ended up creating an experience that would give anon users a free article before we asked for their email in exchange to keep reading. Once we got that email, we asked their interests in the newsletter flow. We weren’t just trying to invade their inbox, we were trying to get them to regularly read content in the Times that they were interested in. This was an inflection point for acquiring subscribers at The Times.

My strategy was informed from both quantitative and qualitative research—and you can see it below.

Since its launch, this journey has helped grow The Times’ subscriber base from 4 million in 2018 to 6 million in 2021 — and set the model later adopted by the company as a whole.