By: Katherine Ruane, Director of Strategic Marketing
Background
Alma Media, one of Finland’s leading media groups, has built its reputation on editorial excellence and sustainable business growth. Its flagship business daily, Kauppalehti, is a trusted source of independent financial reporting nationwide.
To strengthen its digital strategy and stay ahead of shifting reader behaviors, Alma sought to convert more readers, expand its base of known users, and bring real-time intelligence into decision-making.
Partnering with Mather, the publisher implemented Sophi’s Dynamic Paywall Engine on Kauppalehti — embedding AI into workflows to reduce manual effort, optimize performance, and free teams to focus on their core mission of delivering journalism.
Objectives with Sophi
- Accelerate digital subscription growth by shifting from static paywall rules to dynamic, real-time decisioning that evaluates each reader’s likelihood to convert and selects the optimal path to maximize results.
- Strengthen audience intelligence and engagement by optimizing regwall strategy to expand the base of known users, fueling Alma’s first-party data efforts and creating new opportunities for personalization and revenue growth.
- Unlock long-tail value by evolving archive policies to balance engagement and subscription opportunities across the content lifecycle.
- Realize early performance gains through a streamlined onboarding process that minimizes disruption to existing workflows.
The Path to Success
Sophi’s Dynamic Paywall Engine was designed to serve both editorial and business leaders, honoring newsroom guidelines while driving commercial results. From the start, Alma and Mather worked together to establish which rules should be automated to reduce manual effort and which should be left to Sophi’s real-time intelligence to optimize. This balance gave newsroom leaders confidence that editorial standards were protected while allowing commercial teams to maximize growth opportunities.
Alma also viewed the paywall as part of a broader audience strategy. Beyond driving conversions, Sophi’s decisioning helped expand the base of known users through regwall optimization — strengthening Alma’s first-party data and creating new opportunities for personalization. At the same time, Alma evolved archive policies that once hard-walled older content, striking a better balance between long-tail engagement and subscription opportunities. Together, these shifts unlocked more value from both users and content, turning the paywall into a lever for holistic growth.
To minimize risk, Alma introduced Sophi through a phased A/B testing rollout, expanding gradually as results were validated. Supported by ongoing QA and monitoring, this disciplined approach gave the team confidence to scale and positioned dynamic paywalling as a cornerstone of its growth strategy moving forward.
Impact & Results
From the outset, Alma set clear success metrics: keep paywall and regwall stop rates aligned within 10%, achieve at least a 10% lift in direct paywall subscriptions, and deliver a 20% lift in registrations. In the latest reporting period, the rollout exceeded those targets on every measure, with results showing:
- 50% increase in paywall subscription rate — friction was carefully managed, with intercept rates staying within 2–5% of target while smarter decisioning made the system far more efficient.
- 37% lift in direct subscriptions — efficiency gains translated directly into subscription growth, fueling a strong overall boost in total subscriptions.
- Reach maintained — article page views and ad revenue held steady even as subscription performance increased.
- 153% growth in registrations — a surge in sign-ups expanded Alma’s pool of known users, strengthening its first-party data strategy.
Conclusion
By implementing Sophi’s Dynamic Paywall Engine with Mather’s strategic support, Alma Media transformed Kauppalehti’s paywall into a driver of sustainable growth. Clear goals, phased testing, and organizational alignment ensured that AI-driven decisioning boosted subscriptions while protecting reach and editorial integrity.
Now, Alma is building on this foundation by enhancing Sophi’s models with its rich first-party data to deepen propensity logic — advancing personalization, strengthening paywall performance, and continuing to balance revenue growth with its journalistic mission.
