Paywall
A paywall restricts access to online content until the reader pays or subscribes.
Publishers use paywalls to turn readers into recurring revenue; the main types are hard, metered, freemium and registration walls.
Why it matters for publishers
Advertising alone rarely funds quality journalism any more: CPMs are volatile, third-party cookies are disappearing and platform referral traffic keeps shrinking. A paywall converts the attention you already have into recurring revenue you control, and it turns anonymous traffic into a first-party audience you can email, segment and retain.
How publishers use it in practice
- Choose the model before the technology: hard, metered, freemium or registration walls all suit different content mixes and audience sizes.
- Keep search engines happy by serving the full article to Googlebot and declaring paywalled sections with isAccessibleForFree structured data.
- Wall the content people cannot get elsewhere — analysis, data, exclusives — and leave commodity news free to keep discovery working.
- Instrument the wall from day one: stop rate, conversion rate by article and cancellations in the first 30 days tell you more than raw pageviews.
Worked example
A specialist B2B title with 60,000 monthly readers converting 1% at £12 a month earns roughly £7,200 MRR — usually more than the display advertising on the same traffic.
Frequently asked questions about paywall
- Will a paywall hurt my SEO?
- Not if it is implemented correctly. Google supports paywalled content through Flexible Sampling: serve the full article to the crawler and mark the restricted portion with schema.org isAccessibleForFree and hasPart. Hiding different content from Google than from readers without that markup is cloaking and will hurt you.
- How much of my content should be free?
- Most publishers start by walling 20–40% of output — the pieces with the clearest exclusive value — and review monthly. Too little walled content and nobody subscribes; too much and you lose the top of the funnel that feeds subscriptions.
- Do I need a developer to add a paywall?
- No. Modern paywall platforms connect to WordPress and most CMSs with a plugin and API keys, and handle checkout, entitlements and billing for you.