After years of testing, The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader » Nieman Journalism Lab

Might be simpler to attract more subscribers if it stopped being a Murdoch propaganda channel; in the meantime, I can read paywalled WSJ content via Facebook on my iPad, searching by article title (perhaps that's part of the WSJ's magical machine learning model)

"Non-subscribed visitors to WSJ.com now each receive a propensity score based on more than 60 signals, such as whether the reader is visiting for the first time, the operating system they’re using, the device they’re reading on, what they chose to click on, and their location (plus a whole host of other demographic info it infers from that location). Using machine learning to inform a more flexible paywall takes away guesswork around how many stories, or what kinds of stories, to let readers read for free, and whether readers will respond to hitting paywall by paying for access or simply leaving. (The Journal didn’t share additional details about the score, such as the exact range of numbers it could be. I asked what my personal score was; no luck there, since the scores are anonymized.)"

After years of testing, The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader » Nieman Journalism Lab