Ann Poe of Advance Local and Ariel Burkett of Mather pictured at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology conference in September 2026
US local news publisher Advance Local has gone from zero to 250,000 paid digital subscribers since 2018.
Speaking on the latest Press Gazette podcast , SVP for digital consumer revenue Ann Poe explained how the group evolved from a simple premium content model to having an automated dynamic paywall which makes decisions on whether to gate content based on individual users’ data.
Advance Local is one of America’s oldest local media groups and includes print titles such as The Plain Dealer in Ohio and Staten Island Advance. It also publishes a dozen news websites in ten regional markets including Cleveland.com, OreganLive.com and NJ.com.
Until 2018 the group sold digital edition subscriptions but otherwise only monetised its websites via programmatic advertising.
The group began with a loose metered paywall, allowing readers to access 100 articles per month for free, before rolling out voluntary contributions across all websites in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Around this time Advance began working with consultants Mather and their Sophi platform , an AI-powered paywall engine which was first developed on the Globe and Mail in Canada and makes automated decisions about whether to present readers with a paywall, registration wall or monetise them through advertising.
Advance initially sought to protect advertising revenue by manually putting specific premium articles behind a paywall.
Poe said: “It’s an evolution in how the newsrooms embraced that change from humans picking content that was going to convert the most subscribers to a machine actually picking that content. Over time the newsrooms embraced the ability for the machine to pick the content.
“We then moved into a more premium model where we had both a meter and specific content that was picked before we got to user-level decisioning about two years ago. This is where we had Sophi really picking based on the user, not the content specifically, if someone were to get a registration wall or a paywall.”
Advance Local now has nine million registered website users, and has sold 100,000 day passes and given away 700,000 free trials across its paywalled sites.
Poe said: “It’s not just about a one and done, you know, ask for a payment and be done. We really want to nurture the relationship through the journey from anonymous all the way into a paying subscription, and we know that the majority of people aren’t going to ever come over to a paying subscription.
“So I would say our trials and our day passes, maybe not from a revenue standpoint, but from a subscription journey perspective, are more important than the paywall journey itself at times.”
Asked about the data analysed by Sophi to decide what offer to present readers with, VP of sales and marketing for Mather Ariel Burkett said: “We’re looking at a number of different features. So we’re looking at a user’s features, the device, the referral source, time of day, geolocation, these sorts of things.
“We’re looking at it from a user standpoint, and then we’re looking at their engagement history. So, how many topics are they reading? How often are they coming back?
“Really interestingly, we also are able to see how much friction someone’s experiencing in their journey. So if someone’s seeing a lot of paywalls, really understanding when it’s time to drop a paywall and potentially putting up a registration wall on that next page view. It is about understanding how to not only maximise revenue, but how to create a better user experience.”
Asked about the best model for publishers looking to adopt a paywall, Burkett said: “I think it’s very dangerous to lock everything down. You’re really locking down a lot of your advertising revenue.
“Also, people don’t then have an opportunity to test the content to see if they like it. A lot of people want to try before they buy. Having someone coming in for the first time, maybe you want to nurture them to become a future subscriber, and so if it’s locked down, that becomes very challenging.
“If you have young audiences coming to a site for the first time, you need to kind of nurture them and warm them up before they’re ready to pay.”
Listen to the full interview with Ann Poe and Ariel Burkett.
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