Thompson: Paywalls must dynamically guess subscription propensity across traffic sources
Nick Thompson · How to save a magazine (with The Atlantic's Nick Thompson) | Masters of Scale · Jan 15, 2026 · at 8:44
Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, outlines his mental model for designing dynamic digital paywalls.
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“The goal when you have a paywall is if someone's not going to subscribe, you want them to read the article, right? And if someone is going to subscribe, you want them to pay to read the article. And the problem is you can't know. You can't like interview every person about their subscription propensity and whether they've memorized their credit card number or whatever all the factors are. And so you have to guess. And you guess based on what the story is, based on what the referral source is, based on all the information that you have about them. And if you can set your paywall rules so that you guess Correctly more often and incorrectly less often. You're in really good shape.”
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