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:

It does make me wonder how far we are off peak paywall, though. How many subscriptions will readers be prepared to carry?