█ Context:

Paywalls are needed to safeguard quality B2B insights for knowledge-based industries. Indeed, content marketing and papers writing cost money. Readers, as well as customers, have to pay one way or another. At the same time, with a paywall and gated content, web scraping is strongly reduced.

Project initial deployment: March 2021.

The number of websites: 5 (five) corporate-wide complex websites, with approx. 2’000 daily visitors and several hundreds of web-based publications, multimedia content such as dynamic infographics, videos, podcasts, and downloadable content. Those corporate websites, while different in services offers are organized in the form of a knowledge network.

► Challenges of the free content expectation

Publishers, content creators, and companies made too many mistakes when moving online and offering free content—the fact of giving content for free created a new standard. Or, the fact that Internet technology allows publishing faster and reduced costs do not mean the content production is completely free. Although authors are publishing more and more for free is not a guarantee that readers will continue to stay loyal or pay for this content. The opposite is true: publishing less with higher quality invites readers to come back more frequently and pay for the content.

While many readers are unwilling to pay for the content they consume, people’s attitudes have changed, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The great myth is that readers wouldn’t pay for quality content. However, readers are willing and do pay for the content. Indeed, for prestigious publishers, there have always been paywalls around the content. The free content is often limited to writing for search engines and not for humans.

► Paywall strategy

Although the majority of swiss paywalls are using metered counting with a free offering, Elena Debbaut’s monetization strategy excluded the “freemium model“. It adopted a flexible, smart subscription offering identical to all the 5 (five) corporate websites. Elena Debbaut created a subscription similar to Harward Business Review for unique readings of one publication. The one publication pricing is according to the value of the content and the swiss market pricing. For readers willing to read more, the analyses of different models gave some interesting inputs. Those readers might also need advisory services, not only consuming the content. Therefore, a monthly and yearly subscription allows benefiting from senior consulting expertise.

For each reader, the subscription modelling offers a clear return on investment. The right content for the right reader at the correct pricing. This approach increased the conversion for higher and more costly yearly subscriptions.

► Technology stack

The main idea was to start with the business strategy and move backwards to the CX, the choice of technology solutions and implementation.

• First, a CRM analysis of potential buyers of the digital content. Later, the CRM within the global SI information system became a way to manage customer databases.
• The core technology access solution (paywall software) consists in developing an in-house solution by implementing a website paywall using client-side JS, with a combination of open graph markup schema, and other security checks. The implementation is based on the programming suggestions by Google at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/paywalled-content
• Payment processing and secure payment methods for the paywall access.

The paywall is active according to the types of digital content and rendered by the server for every visitor regardless of paywall status. The following list showcases the content categories we decide to protect.

1. Free content and web pages are visible to all readers but subject to geolocation.
2. Paywall section within the page content and topic, visible to readers that are not logged in as customers.
3. Paywalled content and downloads, visible only to logged-in users and search crawlers such as Google. There is a substantial limitation to other crawlers already in place with other content protection projects.

The detection of allowed crawlers is on the server side. As such, when Googlebot comes to visit the site, we don’t render marketing offers in the paywall-notice element. We generate the complete digital publication and wrap the paid content in the paywall class. The code development sends the Googlebot the page in total without that paywall notice element. All websites we implement the paywall project have a front-end paywall subscription page. To respect Google documentation, the paywalled contents are marked as per JSON-LD schema data.

JSON-LD

{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "WebPage",
    "@id": "https:\/\/foo\/page\/#webpage",
    "mainEntityOfPage": {
        "@type": "Article",
        "mainEntityOfPage": "https:\/\/bar\/article"
    },
    "isAccessibleForFree": "False",
    "hasPart": [
        {
            "@type": "WebPageElement",
            "isAccessibleForFree": "True",
            "cssSelector": ".non-paywall"
        },
        {
            "@type": "WebPageElement",
            "isAccessibleForFree": "False",
            "cssSelector": ".paywall"
        }
    ]
}

Special consideration about paywalled content. Not showing the paywall notice to Googlebot would not be considered cloaking. Cloaking is showing Googlebot something else that an average visitor to the site would not see. Take a look at the “Cloaking and Google” more explanations here (in french): https://www.e-graphics.ch/google-cloaking-camouflage-contenu/

► Business & Analytics

• Creating a pricing strategy for subscription packages.
• Creating and running marketing campaigns for promoting paid content. No discounts on social media during the first year, allowing to detect the real interest in the content and readiness to pay.
• Implementing additional sales and marketing tools to analyse the success of existing content. Also, other methods such as gifting subscriptions or paid access, discounts, and intelligent 1:1 pricing. Other marketing methods: e-mail marketing and performance marketing on customers in the existing CRM database. These additional improvements allow for enhancing future content strategy production and increased incomes.

█ Results:

Implementing the paywall strategy and programme allows the 5 (five) corporate websites. As per the general portfolio strategy, those corporate websites become a monetization platform for readers and advertisers. This approach drives more engagement, loyalty, interactions, and additional revenues.

• At the current stage of implementation and operation, the network effect is not yet visible in terms of exponential subscription increase. An estimate of 3 to 5 years within current market conditions might be necessary to cover the content production and investment costs fully.
• One year later, the costs for the content creation and initial paywall implementation are covered by an estimate of an average of 27%. However, this number is very encouraging after 18 months after the operational implementation.
• At the same time, the paywall implementation decreased the number of content theft and the time spent on pages. The latter factor might give a negative signal to SEO algorithms with Google. However, this signal becomes less significant considering Google’s newest content improvement strategy in 2022, when the high-quality content ranks higher than the time spent on the web page.

When the paywall strategy was first introduced, readers thought it was a crazy idea, especially within the Swiss market context. Today, when we look back, it is a logical strategy idea to create an interesting source of additional income.

The kind of long-form business content we regularly produce on multimedia and papers needs significant marketing funds to pay for it. In 2022, the 5 (five) corporate websites recorded their most successful year since introducing a paywall in 2021, with an increase in the number of paying readers – outnumbering other similar B2B websites in the Swiss market.

In terms of editorial content, the 5 (five) corporate websites identify which subjects performed better in purchases and brand building, allowing to focus on quality content and efficient debates with paying customers. For B2B businesses, exclusive content is the deciding factor on whether people will pay for it. There are a lot of websites with paywalls and content, but Elena Debbaut’s monetization strategy is different and innovative for the swiss market.