Arc XP Paywall: Reducing Paywall Avoidance
Running a coherent paywall strategy requires a series of decisions about how to engage and convert a given audience. Every approach has benefits and drawbacks and the best solution depends on the unique positioning of the publisher.
Many publishers are balancing the desire for scale (and the resulting advertising opportunities) with a desire to grow their reader revenue business. With this approach, publishers are keen to constrain access for their most engaged audience members while not scaring away consumers at the top of the funnel who haven’t established a strong relationship with the brand.
Other publishers operate in smaller more niche markets with fewer substitutions available. In this scenario, pursuing a tighter paywall across the board is often a sound approach. This guide provides our recommended mitigation strategies to reduce users and bots getting around your paywall.
Incognito
The paywall evaluator does count page views while the user is in incognito mode and it’s possible for the reader to hit the paywall. There an issue if the reader exits incognito mode, the browser loses the session and the meter will reset. This means that users can bypass the paywall by frequently entering and exiting the incognito mode.
To mitigate method of bypassing your paywall, a boolean pm property is included on the list of facts returned by p.js. This property returns TRUE when a user is detected to be using incognito mode. When this is TRUE you can immediately bring up a paywall for any users that enter incognito mode.
Multiple browsers
Because the reader’s consumption history is persisted in the browser’s local storage, a reader could have multiple story budgets to draw down in parallel. If your publication allows 20 pieces of content per month, the reader can consume 20 pieces of content on each browser and device before being asked to log in or pay up.
Mitigation strategies
Instead of setting a high content budget, such as 20 stories per month, consider lowering the budget substantially knowing that the average user might bump up against the paywall across multiple devices. The Washington Post’s stateless paywall launched with a budget closer to 20 and has slowly been ratcheted down to just a few articles per device. The Post does not store the user’s budget against their logged-in profile.
The Arc XP paywall also allows you to set different budgets by device class. So, you can allow 15 pieces of content on a rolling 60-day basis for mobile and tablet users and limit desktop articles to two per week.
Paywall blocking browser extensions
Similar to ad blockers, there is a small but growing number of users who leverage anti-paywall browser extensions. The Post and other publishers have faced off against developers keen to Publicize Loopholes in their porous on purpose paywalls.
Mitigation strategies
Arc clients have been successful in achieving takedowns from the Google Chrome Extension store and Reddit, among other places, with copyright infringement notices.
Dynamically-Generated Class And ID Names In The Markup of your paywall pop-ups make it much more challenging for developers to hide your suggestion that, just maybe, they should pay for the content they’re consuming.
Credentials sharing
Some subscribers are so excited about the content your team is producing that they share their username and password with friends (or the wider internet) so that they can also consume all of this great content. These authenticated users are able to bypass relevant paywall rules.
Mitigation strategies
Arc XP Subscription allow you to specify how many active sessions a user can have at any given time. Considering that many users will want to log in on multiple devices, allowing for a few logins is advisable. Once the reader passes this threshold, older sessions will be expired. The next time this older session attempts to refresh it’s token (up to 30 minutes later), the token will be removed the user prompted to log back in. While this doesn’t prevent credential sharing, it does require users to constantly log back in if they’ve shared the credentials widely.
This article covers some of the available mitigation strategies, but there are other available depending on your publication’s needs. Consult with your Account Manager for additional guidance.
In the coming months, the team will continue to expand and harden the paywall to give publishers an even more flexible approach to targeting and converting readers. Please submit any feature suggestions you have to the Ideas Portal for prompt review.