Managing your paywalls
Use the Overview page in Subscription's Paywall to create, start, disable, or delete paywalls for your online content.
From this page, you can set the paywalls your customers encounter, based on the rules and rulesets you create.
Running a coherent paywall strategy requires a series of decisions about how to engage and convert a given audience. Every approach has benefits and drawbacks, and the best solution depends on the publisher's unique positioning.
Using Incognito browsers
The paywall evaluator does count page views while the user is in incognito mode, and it’s possible for the reader to hit the paywall. There is an issue if the reader exits incognito mode, the browser loses the session, and the meter will reset. This means that users can bypass the paywall by frequently entering and exiting incognito mode.
To mitigate the method of bypassing your paywall, a boolean pm property is included on the list of facts returned by p.js. This property returns TRUE when a customer is using incognito mode. When this is TRUE, you can immediately bring up a paywall for any users who enter incognito mode.
Multiple browsers
Because the reader’s consumption history is persisted in the browser’s local storage, a reader could have multiple story budgets to draw down in parallel. If your publication allows 20 pieces of content per month, the reader can consume 20 pieces of content on each browser and device before being asked to log in or pay up.
Mitigation strategies
Instead of setting a high content budget, such as 20 stories per month, consider lowering the budget substantially knowing that the average user might bump up against the paywall across multiple devices. The Washington Post’s stateless paywall launched with a budget closer to 20 and has slowly been ratcheted down to just a few articles per device. The Post does not store the user’s budget against their logged-in profile.
The Arc XP paywall also allows you to set different budgets by device class. So, you can allow 15 pieces of content on a rolling 60-day basis for mobile and tablet users and limit desktop articles to two per week.
Paywall blocking browser extensions
Similar to ad blockers, there is a small but growing number of users who leverage anti-paywall browser extensions. The Post and other publishers have faced off against developers keen to Publicize Loopholes in their porous on purpose paywalls.
Mitigation strategies
Arc clients have been successful in achieving take-downs from the Google Chrome Extension store and Reddit, among other places, with copyright infringement notices.
Dynamically-generated class and ID names in the markup of your paywall pop-ups make it much more challenging for developers to hide your suggestion that, just maybe, they should pay for the content they’re consuming.
Credentials sharing
Some subscribers are so excited about the content your team is producing that they share their username and password with friends (or the wider internet) so that they can also consume all of this great content. These authenticated users are able to bypass relevant paywall rules.
Mitigation strategies
Arc XP Subscriptions allow you to specify how many active sessions a user can have at any given time. Considering that many users will want to log in on multiple devices, allowing for a few logins is advisable. Once the reader passes this threshold, older sessions expire. The next time this older session attempts to refresh its token (up to 30 minutes later), the token is removed, and the customer is prompted to log back in. While this doesn't prevent credential sharing, it does require users to constantly log back in if they've shared the credentials widely.
This article covers some of the mitigation strategies available, but others may be more appropriate for your publication’s needs.
Prerequisites
To create a paywall, you must set rules and rulesets first. Refer to the following documentation:
As a news organization administrator, you establish a Special Season paywall to attract new subscribers. This paywall uses your predefined Premium Content ruleset, granting access to investigative articles and in-depth analyses through a limited-time offer.
You schedule it to activate automatically from July 4 to August 1, and the paywall becomes available to new or unregistered users during this period, aiming to increase customer acquisition.
Procedures
To create a paywall, complete the following:
Important
You can have only one active paywall at any given time.
Navigate to Subscriptions > Paywall > Overview. The Paywall overview page opens.
Select the site where you want to apply the paywall in the Paywalls drop-down menu. The page updates automatically and shows the Current paywall and Scheduled paywalls for that site.
Click Create paywall. The New paywall page opens.
Complete the following fields:
Paywall name - enter a unique name for your paywall.
Paywall description - enter a description for that paywall.
Start date - use the drop-down menu to select a start date for the paywall.
End date - use the drop-down menu to select an end date for the paywall.
Note
You cannot create an "always-on" paywall; however, if you want a paywall that's always running, you can set the end date far into the future.
Ruleset - select a ruleset from the drop-down menu to apply to this ruleset. To learn how to set rulesets, see Configuring rulesets.
Click Save.
The paywall appears under the Scheduled paywalls section.
To start a scheduled paywall, complete the following:
Navigate to Subscriptions > Paywall > Overview. The Paywall overview page opens.
Click the ellipsis icon
next to the paywall you want to start > Start Paywall. The Start Paywall window opens.Click Start Paywall.
The paywall appears under the Current paywall section, and its status updates to Active.
After you disable or end a paywall, your site remains without that specific paywall until you create a new one. This setting gives all your users full access to all content covered by that paywall without requiring a subscription or registration. However, other paywalls might still be active—for example, you might have a separate paywall restricting premium articles to registered users only, or different paywalls based on user device type.
To turn off a paywall, complete the following:
Navigate to Subscriptions > Paywall > Overview. The Paywall overview page opens.
Select the site where you want to disable a paywall in the Paywalls drop-down menu. The page updates automatically and shows the Current paywall and Scheduled paywalls for that site.
Click the ellipsis icon
next to the paywall you want to disable > Disable paywall.Click Disable.
The paywall status updates to Disabled.
After you disable or end a paywall, your site remains without that specific paywall until you create a new one. This setting gives all your users full access to all content covered by that paywall without requiring a subscription or registration. However, other paywalls might still be active—for example, you might have a separate paywall restricting premium articles to registered users only, or different paywalls based on user device type.
To end a paywall, complete the following:
Navigate to Subscriptions > Paywall > Overview. The Paywall overview page opens.
Select the site where you want to apply the paywall in the Paywalls for drop-down menu.
The page updates automatically and shows the Current paywall and Scheduled paywalls for that site.
Click the ellipsis icon
next to the paywall you want to disable > End Paywall. The End paywall window opens.Click Disable.
To delete a paywall, complete the following:
Navigate to Subscriptions > Paywall > Overview. The Paywall overview page opens.
Click the ellipsis icon
next to the paywall you want to delete > Delete. The Delete Scheduled Paywall window opens.Click Delete.
The system removes the paywall from the Scheduled paywalls section.
AMP Reader ID is a feature in Arc XP Subscriptions that, when enabled, helps manage customer state and regulate paywall access on specific browsers or mobile systems.
If you enable AMP Reader ID, the system can bypass Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ensuring subscribers using Safari and iOS browsers receive appropriate access to content. To learn how to implement this feature, see How to Use AMP with Arc XP Subscriptions.
To enable your AMP integration, complete the following in the Subscriptions UI:
Navigate to Subscriptions > Paywall > Overview. The Paywall overview page opens.
In the Enable AMP Reader ID, toggle on to activate the feature.