Powering Subscriber Growth: The Philadelphia Inquirer’s 35% Lift through Sophi’s Dynamic Paywall Engine

By Katherine Ruane, Director of Marketing Strategy at Mather Economics

October 28th, 2024

Background

Founded in 1829, The Philadelphia Inquirer (The Inquirer) has been a cornerstone of news and information for nearly 200 years, influencing public dialogue and playing a significant role in the city’s history. Known for its award-winning journalism, including multiple Pulitzer Prizes, The Inquirer has built a strong reputation for integrity and quality. While its primary focus is on the greater Philadelphia region, the publication’s investigative work and impactful stories have resonated on a national level. As the digital media landscape evolves, The Inquirer has continually adapted to meet the demands of modern journalism, focusing on sustaining its mission through innovative content and audience monetization strategies.

Recognizing the paywall as a crucial channel for boosting digital subscriptions, The Inquirer sought to streamline and enhance its strategy. Their previous rules-based approach required significant manual intervention, particularly during unpredictable news cycles, limiting both flexibility and editorial efficiency, as well as constraining their ability to fully optimize revenue.

To overcome these challenges, The Inquirer sought an AI-powered solution aligned with their news revenue model, making Sophi the ideal partner. By implementing Sophi’s Dynamic Paywall Engine, they aimed to target the right users on the right content at the right time in their news consumption journey, automatically optimizing for growth. This would also free up their newsroom to focus on producing high-impact journalism, rather than manually identifying high-converting content.

Objectives with Sophi

The Inquirer outlined key goals for the partnership, with ongoing communication and collaboration between both teams to ensure continuous refinement of the paywall strategy:

Boost Paywall Subscriptions: Use AI to drive smarter decisions on targeting users and content for greater conversion performance.
Preserve Reader Engagement: Ensure paywall decisions don’t negatively impact page views or advertising revenue.
Optimize Stop Rates: Balance content access and conversion efficiency, even amid seasonal and unexpected audience fluctuations.
Increase Automation: Minimize manual paywall management, allowing editorial teams to focus on high-value journalism.

The Path to Success

Sophi integrated with The Inquirer’s data systems to analyze historical paywall performance and train its advanced machine learning models. The rollout was carefully managed through a phased A/B testing process, minimizing risk while building confidence in the shift to AI-driven decision-making.

During the test, The Inquirer’s traffic was split evenly within their paywall fulfillment system, Piano, allowing for a direct comparison between Sophi’s performance and the existing approach. The test adhered to key business rules, focusing on newly published content (less than 21 days old) while excluding public interest and archived content (21+ days old), both of which remained under full editorial control.

Following the initial training, Sophi’s models were deployed across the site, continuously analyzing real-time user behavior and content interactions, dynamically adjusting paywall placement to maximize revenue from each reader interaction.

Impact & Results

By leveraging Sophi, The Inquirer achieved significant subscription growth and maintained conversion efficiency, all while minimizing risk to audience engagement.

“Before we tested Sophi on Inquirer.com, we weren’t sure if their models would beat our already aggressive meter rules. While we understood their dynamic approach differed from ours, we didn’t know if there was any room left to optimize our existing paywall strategy, which was built on previous effective tests, like hardwalling all content 21+ days old. That being said, we were thrilled to observe a 13% lift in conversions across all on-site channels with Sophi after a 4-month A/B test.”

– Sarah Jarvis, Director of Subscriber Acquisition Marketing

Key performance highlights from the testing period include:

35% increase in direct paywall subscriptions: Sophi drove a 35% lift in direct paywall subscriptions compared to the control group, and a 13% lift in conversions across all channels, achieving The Inquirer’s goal of using AI to drive smarter decisions and boost subscription growth.
No risk to engagement: Sophi preserved audience engagement, with a negligible drop in pageviews, allowing subscriptions to grow without negatively impacting advertising revenue.
Smart stop rate control: Throughout the testing period, Sophi gradually increased the paywall stop rate for newly published content by 26%, meeting the Inquirer’s intended target within a 5% range.
Conversion efficiency maintained: Despite higher stop rates, conversion efficiency remained steady, ensuring optimal paywall performance without affecting the user experience.

Additionally, through Sophi, The Inquirer team was able to diversify its premium content strategy, addressing an over-reliance on paywalled articles in the Sports section and further optimizing their revenue model.

Following the successful A/B test, The Inquirer fully implemented Sophi’s paywall across all newly published content, maintaining strong results in both stop rates and conversion rates. By combining Sophi’s dynamic paywall—deployed site-wide in April 2024—with a compelling “$1 for 6 months” digital subscription offer introduced in January 2024, The Inquirer surpassed its 2024 subscriber volume target by July, despite facing industry-wide traffic declines.

Conclusion

As The Inquirer continues to navigate the evolving digital landscape, its partnership with Sophi and Mather remains essential in refining and scaling its paywall strategy. With plans to explore new paywall opportunities, such as registration walls, mobile app integration, and archive enhancements, The Inquirer is well-positioned to sustain long-term growth, ensure operational efficiency, and deliver quality journalism for years to come.