How Business Insider’s AI-based paywall strategy increased conversions by 75%

Artificial intelligence is showing up in nearly all areas of the media business, from advertising sales to editorial. And now it’s being put to the test in publishers’ subscription strategies, with the hope that the technology is better at identifying the articles that are most likely to convert audiences into paid readers.

This is the thesis that Business Insider’s chief subscriptions officer Katie Friedman had when she joined the company last year: A smart paywall that uses machine learning can increase conversion rates and, ultimately, boost the total revenue yielded from online audiences. During her on-stage session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, this week, Friedman shared how her team worked with a vendor to build a smart paywall and talked about the tests they conducted that led them to the decision to roll it out to 100% of their audience in May.

Business Insider’s previous paywall strategy was an editorially-driven free/premium, or “freemium,” model in which only the articles written by a specific subset of journalists on the edit team (those tasked with writing solely subscriber content) were paywalled. This left a significant amount of other content on the publisher’s site that would never prompt readers to pay to access it.

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