Balancing access and acquisition: How publishers can optimise registration walls

You’re halfway through an article when, suddenly, a pop-up asks you to sign in or register to continue reading. Does that sound familiar?

As our Head of Insights, George Montagu, pointed out in his newsletter, registration (getting users to create accounts) is an increasingly important component of publishers’ business models.

Check out George’s newsletter for a comprehensive breakdown, but in short, there are 4 main reasons for this:

• If you have a subscription proposition, registered users are far more likely to convert to becoming paying subscribers than your average reader
• You can reach registered users over email, giving you another way of bringing them back to your site.
• Registering creates an ID for that user, meaning it is much easier to track and understand their behaviour, particularly across devices.
• Registration gives you first-party data, which will become more important as third-party cookies deprecate.

To summarise, encouraging sign-in can have a material impact on your bottom line. Therefore, it’s not surprising that media companies are constantly experimenting with the how and when to ask for your details.

However, registration comes with trade-offs - understandably, users don’t always like having to part with their email and other forms of personal data. Encouraging users to sign in must therefore be balanced with maintaining traffic and considering user behaviour. For example, for a publisher that is heavily reliant on advertising revenue, putting up a ‘hard’ registration wall might not be the smartest idea, unless they are confident that they can monetise their audience via subscriptions instead.

You might be wondering what I meant by a ‘hard’ registration wall there - don’t worry, I’ll explain. Publishers have two main levers that they can pull that dictate how ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ their registration walls are:

• Frequency rules: What triggers the registration wall to appear and how often does it do this?
• Gate Design: How obstructive is the registration wall - does it completely block access to the article and is it mandatory (i.e. the only way to read the article is to register, the wall cannot be dismissed or circumvented)?

How these choices dictate the type of registration wall you have can be illustrated by the diagram below.

Positioning yourself on either end of this spectrum has both advantages and disadvantages. For example, choosing a ‘softer’ registration model is likely to sustain higher traffic, and therefore higher ad impressions and better content sampling. Whereas, a ‘hard’ registration model might reduce traffic but could lead to an increased conversion rate (to paid subscriptions), resulting in higher Lifetime Value (LTV).

So it sounds like one way of helping publishers decide on the right registration model is whether they are primarily ad-led or reader revenue-led. Right? 

Sort of, but it’s a little more complicated. The most successful publishers aim to combine thriving ad and subscription businesses. Another factor you therefore need to introduce into the equation is what value proposition you can provide - what can you offer the user in exchange that might compel them to create an account? Your value proposition can be broken down into three main components:

• Content: The more differentiated and high quality your content is, the more likely a user will be to register if registration is necessary to view more content.
• Features: Users might be amenable to registering if it gets them additional benefits such as newsletters, customisation, event access or the ability to comment on articles.
• Communication: The final component is simply how you communicate all of this to the reader. In some cases, if you have fiercely loyal readers, explaining how registration helps you as a publication can be motivating enough to encourage sign-in. Here we can see the Guardian taking this approach by saying how registration means they can keep their journalism free (see below).
  
  

Another example of a strong value proposition is the Independent. As part of their free registration strategy, they implemented mandatory registration (for those who were not paying subscribers) to access content in their app. In return, users get access to the content and other premium-like features, such as audio narration of articles, a personalised ‘top 5 stories’ section and access to Independent TV (Press Gazette, 2022). Within a year, they reported 2 million registered users, rising to 5 million by late 2022 (Press Gazette, 2023), providing a huge pool of users that could eventually be monetized through subscriptions.

The moral of the story here is that publishers with a strong value proposition that provides tangible benefits to readers, can afford a ‘harder’ registration model without killing their page views and the advertising revenue that depends on them. If your registration benefits are thin, it would be wise to start with a ‘softer’ registration model and monitor the impact on your traffic and subscriptions.

This brings us towards the end…

If you’ve learned anything from this article, it’s that there is no single registration model that works for all publishers. Every approach has trade-offs, but the scale of these trade-offs is still unknown.

There are, however, a couple of paths you can take that can make these decisions easier:

• Experimentation and Modelling: Running small-scale tests on your registration model can provide the assumptions and data you need to be able to model the potential impacts of registration changes.
• Dynamic Registration Models: Dynamic models account for the fact that different users display different behaviours and propensities to register and therefore serves them tailored experiences. 

At FT Strategies, we help publishers design and implement effective registration strategies that drive sustainable growth. Get in touch with our expert team to explore how we can help you turn casual readers into loyal, monetisable audiences.