The metered app paywall served publishers well for a decade. But treating every reader the same, whether they've visited once or open the app every morning, may be leaving conversion on the table.
Apps capture rich audience signals, potentially helping paywalls appear at the right moment.
For a long time, apps have relied on a familiar set of paywall models. Some use a meter, giving readers a limited number of free articles before asking them to subscribe. Others operate a hard paywall, where everything sits behind a subscription, while some use a freemium model, where premium content is reserved for paying users and the rest remains open.
These models have evolved over time, but the underlying logic has stayed largely the same — every user goes through broadly the same conversion journey.
That approach made sense when digital subscriptions were still growing and the website was the main conversion focus. But as traffic softens and growth gets harder to find, publishers are starting to see apps as a more important conversion channel. The question is how paywalls can respond to individual reader behavior, rather than treating every reader the same.
The core shift dynamic paywalls represent is a move away from thinking about audiences in broad terms and toward understanding users based on their specific needs and behaviors.
Instead of simply counting the number of articles viewed, publishers can focus on identifying an individual reader's motivations and likelihood to convert at a specific moment in time.
A loyal daily reader who has consumed a small amount of content for months has a very different conversion profile from a first-time anonymous visitor who immediately reads half a dozen articles. A metered wall would treat them identically. A dynamic wall would not.
Publishers that have implemented dynamic paywalls on their websites have reported strong results. The Financial Times has used AI-driven paywall logic to determine when to prompt readers to subscribe and which offers to show them, leading to a 290% rise in conversion among audience segments exposed to the system, alongside an increase in lifetime value. The Globe and Mail, using Sophi's dynamic paywall engine, reported a 51% increase in subscriptions compared with its previous paywall, as well as a fivefold rise in paywall-attributable revenue. Elsewhere, Forbes has launched its own AI-driven dynamic paywall as part of its effort to build a stronger subscription business in a post-search environment.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 found that across 20 wealthier countries, only around 18% of people pay for online news. Audience acquisition is becoming harder, and publishers are under growing pressure to extract more value from the audiences they already reach. This is where apps can become increasingly valuable.
Although apps and websites can support similar paywall experiences, apps offer some clear advantages. Compared with the web, they typically offer richer first-party data, clearer signals of loyalty and habit, and a more direct relationship with users over time.
Web audiences tend to be less engaged, which makes the signals available to dynamic paywalls more difficult to scale. Low shares of logged-in users and the erosion of third-party cookies limit how precisely audiences can be targeted. On a first visit, the paywall often has to rely heavily on referral data, and websites usually have lower return rates than apps, meaning conversion profiles are harder to build.
In apps, the opportunity is broader. Pugpig apps have up to 40 sessions per user per month across all cohorts, making it possible to build much richer user profiles based on factors such as the content they read, their location, the time of day they visit and the features they use. Apps also make it easier to ask users to sign in earlier in the journey, enabling offline matching of engagement and customer data. The key difference is that app audiences are typically less transient than web audiences, so a greater share of users generates the signals needed for more intelligent profiling.
Publishers we've spoken to are not generally looking to build entirely new paywall systems for their apps. In many cases, they want their app experiences to work more closely with the subscription infrastructure they already use elsewhere, combining data from multiple sources to build a fuller picture of reader behavior and allowing existing decision engines to inform when and how a paywall appears.
That thinking has shaped the work we've done at Pugpig. Rather than treating the app as a closed environment with its own fixed paywall logic, we've focused on enabling apps to pass identity and engagement signals to external decisioning systems, which can then return an instruction based on rules or models defined by the publisher. In practice, that means the app can either allow reading to continue uninterrupted or present a paywall, depending on the context. You can read more about Pugpig dynamic paywalls here.
Dynamic paywalls can be powerful revenue tools, but publishers will need to manage the risks carefully as they bring them into app environments.
They can add technical and organizational complexity and can subtly distort both product and editorial decisions. Because dynamic systems tend to optimize for subscription conversion, they can push more users into paid experiences and away from open articles, reducing free pageviews and ad impressions and intensifying the tension between reader revenue and advertising.
There is also an editorial risk. A University of Michigan study from last year found that when regional U.S. newspapers adopt digital paywalls, they tend to reduce local news coverage on average. Publishers may also need to balance access to critical information with reader revenue, as we spoke about in 2024.
For audiences, dynamic paywalls can restrict access, create frustration and deepen information inequality at a time when trust in news is already fragile. Pew Research found that although most Americans encounter paywalls, very few choose to pay immediately — 53% look elsewhere and 32% give up altogether. In apps, where the barrier to entry is higher, the cost of that friction can be even greater. It can also push readers toward free alternatives that may be less reliable or less rigorously edited, reinforcing a two-tier information environment in which higher-quality journalism is more accessible to those most willing or able to pay. On a day-to-day UX level, dynamic paywalls can feel punitive and arbitrary, risking brand goodwill and reinforcing the perception that publishers prioritize monetization over serving readers.
Publishers can mitigate these risks by taking a test-and-learn approach:
Dynamic paywalls clearly have potential in app environments, but only if they are implemented with the same care publishers apply to editorial judgment itself. The challenge is to convert more readers in a way that does not weaken trust, limit access to public-interest journalism or create unnecessary friction for local audiences.
Used carefully, they can help publishers build reader revenue and bridge the technology gap between the app and the website, making apps a stronger part of the next phase of subscription strategy, where conversion is shaped by behavior, context and value rather than a one-size-fits-all meter.
If you'd like to talk about dynamic paywalls or how your app could support your wider subscription strategy, get in touch with james.kember@pugpig.com.
