Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter takes more than one way to build paywall

Bonnier Group’s newspaper Dagens Nyheter in Sweden started thinking seriously about its paid content strategy in 2015. Now, the daily has a hybrid of three different paywalls: The first, a meter where readers can access three articles a week, accounts for 10 percent of the title’s conversion to subscribers. The second, a premium model where two or three daily lifestyle articles are for subscribers, converts 30 percent of prospects. The third, introduced in early 2017, is more dynamic: Articles that reach a certain amount of traffic in the first three to four hours go behind the paywall.

According to the publisher, this accounts for 60 percent of its conversion rate, on average 50 articles per week hit these criteria. Dagens Nyheter has 165,000 digital subscribers and 163,000 print, with digital paying members overtaking print for the first time in May this year. Also, revenue from digital subscriptions has recently overtaken revenue from digital ads, which used to account for the majority of overall digital revenue. The title is currently converting around 2,000 subscribers a week and has grown 40 percent year over year.