[🚨New Paper🚨] Published today in Management Science @INFORMS with @dhillon_p on "Digital Paywall Design."
We collaborated with the @nytimes to analyze a natural experiment on how "digital paywall design" impacts publishers' subscription rates and revenues. 1/
We collaborated with the @nytimes to analyze a natural experiment on how "digital paywall design" impacts publishers' subscription rates and revenues. 1/
The study tracked the browsing behavior of 177M unique visitors who accumulated over 777M page views, from which we constructed a 30M person quasi-experimental panel over the 7-month study. 2/
We used a quasi-experiment to track how changes to the @nytimes paywall design affected content consumption, subscriptions and revenues. 3/
The quasi-experiment changed the number of free articles available to users and the sections of the paper to which users had free access. 4/
The model-free evidence shows clear increases in content consumption during the "high quantity," "high diversity (many available sections)" period and clear decreases in consumption when that period ends. 5/
The data also show clear increases in subscriptions caused by the paywall design choices... 6/
More sophisticated statistical analysis of the quasi-experimental data show the paywall changes suppressed total content demand by 9.9%, reducing ad revenue, but increased subscriptions by 31%, increasing subscription revenue, yielding net revenue gains of over $230,000. 7/
We hope our findings spark a conversation on "optimal paywall design" and help managers optimize digital paywalls to maximize readership, revenue, and profit... We believe this conversation is essential to saving the newspapers we love and trust in the digital age. 8/
