This is an interesting acceleration of paywalls into the mainstream:
The Post announced that it has added a suite of subscription tools to Arc, the publishing platform it began licensing to other publishers in 2016, including a registration system designed to capture audience email addresses; a paywall, which can be either hard or soft; a customer service portal that connects publishers’ customer support teams with subscribers; and a page builder that allows publishers to develop and deploy offer pages on their sites without programming or design resources.
Up until now, adding a paywall to your site involved either a custom build, or integrating some external tech. The Washington Post integrating it into Arc is going to simplify that process.
The CMS I use here — Ghost — is busy building a similar addition to its platform, too:
WIP 🤫 pic.twitter.com/Vl0XyLIvSM
— John O'Nolan (@JohnONolan) February 16, 2019
It does make me wonder how far we are off peak paywall, though. How many subscriptions will readers be prepared to carry?
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