A flexible paywall to boost growth in the publishing sector

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

The client, Kelsey Media is a publisher with many multimedia titles. They needed a way to put paywalls on different types of content for their brands and to connect those paywalls to their business partner that handles all purchases and subscriptions.

Requirement setting

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

For example, it could be a regular paywall for a magazine subscription where you have to be a subscriber to read the full content of an article. But it could also be a one-off purchase of a PDF or a freemium variant where you only need to provide an email address to access the content.

Publishers also wanted to be able to choose which specific articles would go behind a paywall, and the possibility to schedule when a paywall is activated. An article might be available to everyone for the first 24 hours and then go behind a paywall.

Two examples of notifications for content locked behind a paywall.

Safe without sharing personal information

Since Kelsey has a partner that handles all purchases and subscriptions, they also needed an easy 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 against their payment partner 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 and if a subscription is active, the user can access the content directly. If there isn’t an active subscription, the visitor is offered to get one quickly and easily.

Efficient management

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