A flexible paywall for increased growth in the publishing sector

We recently helped one of our clients create a flexible WordPress plugin to handle paywalls for digital subscriptions and various other types of gated content.

The client, Kelsey Media is a publishing house with many multi-media titles. They needed a way to put paywalls on different types of content for their brands and to connect these paywalls to their business partner who manages all purchases and subscriptions.

Requirements

Since Kelsey Media offers several different types of content from its brands, the plugin needed to be flexible enough to handle this.

It can, for example, be a regular paywall for a newspaper subscription where you have to be a subscriber to be able to read the entire content of an article. But it can also be a one-time purchase of a PDF or a freemium variant where you only need to enter an email address to be able to read the content.

The publishers also wanted to be able to choose which specific articles should end up behind a paywall. And the possibility of scheduling when a paywall is activated. An article should perhaps be available for everyone for the first 24 hours and then end up behind a paywall.

Two examples of notifications of gated content.

Secure without sharing personal information

Since Kelsey has a partner that handles all purchases and subscriptions, they also needed a simple way to manage purchases, paywalls and personal information across multiple sites and brands.

An important aspect when dealing with this type of data is of course the security and privacy of your customers.

By using an API for their payment partners to manage and control purchases, they can securely handle all purchases without sharing customer data across multiple systems and websites.

The paywall simply checks the user login against Kelsey’s partner database to see if there is an active subscription, if not you are offered to buy, and if a subscription is active the user can access the content right away.

Efficient management

With a single, flexible tool to manage all types of paywalls for multiple brands, across multiple websites, Kelsey can streamline their business and focus on providing customers with the best content on the market.