Wired Sees Subscription Bump Despite Lifting Its Paywall on Covid-19 Content

In mid-March, Wired joined fellow Condé Nast titles The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous other newspapers and magazines, in opening up free access to its coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, moving that content outside of the metered paywall that otherwise limits non-subscribers to four free articles each month. A few weeks later, the shift is predictably driving significant increases in digital traffic (unique visitors to Wired.com were up 73% in March, compared to an average month, Condé Nast says, citing data from Google Analytics and Parse.ly). Less predictably, Wired says it's seeing a boost to its subscription business, as well. "We’ve seen more than a significant uptick in the total number of subscriptions we’re generating right now," Wired site director Scott Rosenfield tells Folio:. "Granted, traffic is up significantly as well, but we’re well ahead of the goal we had set. It’s a significant increase in subscriber growth from before the pandemic." Condé Nast declined to share specifics on the number of new subscriptions, but a spokeswoman noted that contributor Steven Levy's March 19 interview with epidemiologist Larry Brilliant—the second most-read story in Wired's online history—also drove the most new subscriptions of any individual article since the brand first implemented its paywall in February 2018, despite being freely accessible to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Altogether, unique visitors to Wired.com have doubled the site's... Continue reading at 'Folio Magazine'

[ Folio Magazine | 2020-04-09 17:20:07 UTC ]
News tagged with: #coronavirus update #email newsletter #long run #digital subscription

Wired Sees Subscription Bump Despite Lifting Its Paywall on Covid-19 Content

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