Our Hometown Blog

Our-Hometown has released another add-on enhancement to our existing Metered Paywall feature: the Source Based Paywall Meter!

The Source Based Paywall Meter allows you to set up several different sources as referrers, such as social sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Each referring source can then have its own custom Paywall Meter with unique settings applied.

This means that you can offer a different amount of Free Articles to the reader depending on how they entered your website.

For example, you could have a standard Metered Paywall configured to allow a reader 5 Free Articles before they would have to subscribe with a paid account to continue reading. Anyone who accesses the site directly would see this meter and be limited to the five free articles.

You can then set up some alternative Source Based Meters specifically for Facebook and Twitter that would allow the reader 10 Free Articles before they have to subscribe with a paid account. Users who enter the site via a link from Facebook or Twitter would instead see the alternative Meter that corresponds with their referrer, and would be governed by those Meter rules instead of the default. They would instead be able to read ten free articles.

This helps to promote engagement on your social media posts by offering some extra views to readers who follow on social media.

Additional views with Newsletter signup

Another improvement to our Metered Paywalls is the ability to offer additional views to readers who agree to provide their e-mail address and join your mailing list to receive Newsletters from your publication in the future.

Once a reader has used up all of their initial free views, they will be asked to enter their email address to unlock “X” additional views. Once they’ve done so, they can enjoy their additional free articles.

You can even use this feature in tandem with the source-based meters to automatically create specific mailing lists for each of the referrer sources. This would allow you to reach out to users who visited specifically from Facebook or Twitter and approach them with more targeted marketing.

Metered Paywalls for websites with multiple publications

Another key improvement to the Source Based Meter Paywall update is the ability to use the Metered Paywall on sites that feature multiple publications. Previously, only one universal Meter was able to be displayed, which meant a reader might only have access to 10 Free Articles spread across a handful of publications on a single site.

Now, we have the ability to use a separate Meter for each publication on a website. This means a reader could read 10 Free Articles from the publication they most enjoy, and another 10 Free Articles from each of the other publications on the site that they may be interested in.

The Source Based Meter Paywall is available to all Our-Hometown customers using Digital Subscriptions and the MemberPress plugin. However, it does require some initial setup that will need to be performed by our staff.

Please email ops@our-hometown.com if you are interested in setting up a Source Based Paywall! Our staff will assist you in getting it set up exactly how you want!

Share this Post: