Are you a publisher looking to get started with a subscription or paywall model? Are you considering switching to a new provider for managing your content subscriptions?
Admiral is the right subscription and paywall platform for news and media publishers. Admiral’s Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) platform is aware of the segments and challenges facing publishers particularly, including ad revenue, subscribers, consent management, registration and newsletter segments, adblocker-aware, and more.
Many point solutions are serving the greater SaaS, eCommerce, or Subscription Economy landscape, but Admiral is focused on helping media and news publishers thrive. We serve thousands of publishers, such as Rotten Tomatoes, USAToday, NYPost, CBS, and Valnet.
Admiral is a trusted partner, bringing a holistic understanding of publisher needs and the visitor journey. Admiral provides the subscription management features you need with easy implementation and industry-leading support.
12 Reasons to Choose Admiral for Paywall and Subscription Management
Jump to:
- 100% Performance Pricing
- Fast and Easy Implementation
- Highly Configurable Visitor Offers
- Versatile Paywall Options
- Multi-Site Subscription Offers
- Best-value End-to-End Subscription Management
- Sophisticated Targeting and Segmentation
- Migration of Existing Subscribers
- Dedicated Support for Publishers and End-Users
- Reporting Dashboards for Predicable Revenue
- Leverage Ad-Free Offers
- Ability to Target High-Converting Adblock Users
1. Zero Set-up or Platform Fees: 100% Performance Pricing
Admiral's revenue share model means you don't have to spin cycles calculating the ROI after paying big setup or platform fees. All recovered revenue is incremental, and publishers will not have to dedicate internal resources.
We believe aligned partnerships are the best partnerships and our 100% performance-priced paywall module aligns us both to maximize subscription conversions and revenue.
2. Fast and Easy Implementation
Admiral helps publishers get up and running with a new subscription offer in less than a week. Some competitors require development cycles, long launch time frames, and significant expenses. Put simply, no one can help you launch subscriptions faster and easier.
Admiral's implementation requires a simple web tag that can be added to your site in minutes. The web tag unlocks a user-friendly app, allowing you to navigate through features with zero coding required.
Once the Admiral tag is installed, our platform makes it point-and-click easy to set up your first paywall, establish pricing, customize offer messaging, and launch.
Admiral's dedicated launch specialists assist you with the initial setup. If you have an existing subscription plan, we can help migrate those subscribers.
Want to see Admiral's Subscription Management Software in action?
Let's talk. Request a demo today:
3. Highly Configurable Visitor Offers
Admiral offers publishers versatile features to create tailored user offers, including customized models, banners and designs that blend seamlessly with their brand and user experience.
With simple point-and-click options, you can set:
- offer type: subscription, donations, subscriber benefits
- offer messaging, and branding
- targeting and segmentation, including presets and AI automation
- visitor engagement frequency, metering, and paywall type (soft, hard, smart).
With critical options for the customer journey and UX, publishers have full control over their communication strategy.
Additionally, Admiral offers the choice of crafting custom or AI-generated message copy, paired with automated A/B testing, utilizing ChatGPT integration for swift and effective message optimization.
Publishers can leverage our in-house expertise and AI to create tailored offers that yield the highest conversion rates. Let's see how some of our publishers put custom messaging to use:
OMG BLOG promotes an ad-free experience for subscribers.
Mediaite uses straightforward messaging to inform visitors about the number of free stories they have read and the subscription price, and offers a free trial.
HistoryNet uses metering to offer a subscription and makes the reader aware that there are 25,000 great stories they may be missing out on.
Crooks and Liars pairs a holiday season greeting and with the opportunity to make a good purchase decision. With a subscription decision, the reader can both stay informed and support journalism they feel makes a difference in the world.
The goal is to optimize subscription rates by tailoring your approach to your unique audience, including specific segments of that audience. By using Admiral’s tools for metering, surgery targeting, automating A/B tests, and more, you can fine-tune your conversion rates to their highest potential.
Also read: 10 Strategies to Grow Digital Content Subscription Revenue
4. Versatile Metered and Dynamic Paywall Choices
The intelligence and flexibility of your paywall can have a dramatic effect on your revenue performance and audience adoption.
Admiral offers publishers a range of paywall types, from soft (dismissible) to hard (gated) paywalls, as well as Smart, Metered, and Dynamic paywalls, combination journeys, AI-enhanced configurations, and custom setups.
- Soft Paywall: This approach allows some content to be accessible for free, allowing visitors to assess its quality before deciding to subscribe. It's a form of a metered paywall.
- Steady-Soft Paywall: A subscription offer is presented, along with the option to dismiss the offer, with no metering component, for as long as the paywall is active.
- Hard Paywall: Under this model, visitors cannot access any content without a subscription.
- Dynamic Paywall: This option identifies specific visitor behaviors or audience segments and tailors a more relevant digital subscription offer.
- Combinations: Soft + AI, Smart + AI - Admiral provides a robust journey builder that allows publishers to combine multiple paywall types as part of a journey. Machine learning is used to trigger unique paywalls on content experiencing increased traffic in real-time or based on page popularity for the month.
- Custom Paywall Configurations: Admiral’s Customer Love team leverages its experience working with thousands of publishers to help you with custom paywall options, frequency, limits, metering, and targeting.
Metered paywall example from Admiral customer Austin Herald:
5. Streamlined Multi-Site Subscription Control
If you manage multiple domains or websites, our platform enables single sign-on for users to manage subscriptions across all your sites.
This not only simplifies the user experience but also streamlines account management for you. It also provides valuable insights into user behavior across all your sites.
In addition, offering a subscription bundle across multiple sites can enhance the perceived value to visitors, resulting in increased conversions and revenue.
Admiral’s content subscription solution offers comprehensive reporting for each of these distinct sites. This data allows you to analyze trends and replicate successful strategies on other sites.
6. Best-Value End-to-End Subscription Management
Our all-encompassing subscription management platform is purpose-built for publishers, placing your audience's needs at the forefront. You don't need to piece together a payment vendor, a CTA solution, or a separate user support team; Admiral takes care of it all.
Your visitors can effortlessly create accounts, log in, and complete transactions with ease, enhancing their overall experience on your platform.
For publishers, we offer a full suite of subscription setup, management, and analytics tools, consolidating everything in one convenient location.
Admiral’s dedicated Customer Love team stands ready to assist you in boosting conversion rates and revenue, as well as providing support for your visitors when they have billing or subscription questions.
All of these elements combine to provide you with a comprehensive view of your subscribers' lifecycle, allowing you to fine-tune your offerings accordingly.
7. Sophisticated Targeting and Segmentation
Admiral provides out-of-the-box tools to segment and target using a broad set of criteria:
- Visitor journey status: Subscriber, Adblocker, Registered, Donator
- Technical criteria: Browser, device, or geographic location
- Web flow criteria: Referrer, URL path, query parameters, or cookies
- AI-powered real-time visitor traffic surges, and page popularity
- Custom or collected first-party visitor data
All of this ensures that your users receive offers tailored to their individual tastes and customer journeys, thereby maximizing subscription revenue.
8. Migration for Existing Subscribers
If you're currently using a different platform to manage your subscriptions and paywall, we're here to facilitate a hassle-free transition.
Admiral provides a straightforward process for migrating your existing subscriber data to our platform. We offer documentation in our knowledge base and additional resources to help you onboard all your pre-existing subscribers, enabling them to manage their subscriptions on Admiral's platform.
Throughout this process, the Admiral Customer Love team will stand by your side, assisting you every step of the way as you transition and expand your subscription business.
Print Subscribers? Admiral is familiar with many publisher objectives, such as combining your print and digital subscription data to make it easy to measure growth and bundle offers.
9. Dedicated Support for Publishers and End Users
When it comes to being there for you, we refer to our customer success team as "Customer Love" because that's precisely what we stand for. We have a genuine commitment to the success of publishers and their audiences.
Our core philosophy revolves around helping publishers establish enduring relationships with their visitors, regardless of where they are in the visitor journey and subscription purchase process.
Admiral goes beyond many other industry vendors by offering first-level support for your end users. If they encounter issues with their subscription accounts, billing, renewals, checkout, and more, we work to resolve their problems and keep your visitors happy.
Hear directly from the Admiral team about what Customer Love means to us, and to our publishers:
10. Recurring Predictable Revenue
Admiral provides publishers with advanced predictive analytics to project revenue from website traffic, including LTV, APRU, MRR, ARR, and other metrics.
Admiral operates on a revenue-sharing model, which means we only profit when our publishers do. This incentivizes us to provide top-tier services and fosters trust among our publisher partners.
11. Leveraging Ad-Free Offers
Our deep understanding of adtech and adblockers makes us a perfect fit for publishers. We encourage publishers to provide ad-free options to visitors who prefer uninterrupted content consumption.
This approach fosters positive relationships, ensures visitor satisfaction by offering choices, and is an easily accessible benefit to start building your subscription revenues.
The return on investment (ROI) or average revenue per visitor (ARPV) for those willing to pay for ad-free subscriptions is notably substantial.
Let's take an example: Suppose a publisher earns $10 per 1,000 pageviews through ads. Now, consider a single visitor who returns three times per week, viewing four pages each time, resulting in a total of 36 monthly page views, generating $0.36 in ad revenue. If this visitor is willing to pay just $1 per month for an ad-free experience, you've increased revenue for that visitor by a significant 178%.
Offering ad-free options to adblock users is an even more straightforward decision. These users are either not generating any revenue at present, or if they are through an Adblock recovery solution, it's typically less than what a subscription would deliver.
12. Segmenting Blocking vs. Non-Blocking Users
Based on data collected from many digital publisher clients, it's evident that visitors who initially use ad blockers tend to convert to subscriptions at twice the rate of visitors who don't block ads. This highlights the potential of the blocking category as a valuable segment, representing a highly active and engaged audience.
For those who may be uncertain about subscription offerings, targeting the blocking segment provides an excellent testing ground. Since these users are not currently generating revenue, it offers a prime opportunity for experimentation, price testing, and evaluating the effectiveness of subscription strategies.
Final word
Admiral's subscription and paywall platform is crafted specifically for publishers, always considering your distinct connection with your visitors and ad revenue. Notably, we're among the fastest-growing subscription platforms in the US, as recognized by Inc. 5000 (two years in a row).
We implement a range of proven strategies to enhance subscription rates, foster visitor engagement, and drive greater revenue for publishers. Furthermore, our unwavering commitment ensures that our publishers receive exceptional assistance and support through our dedicated Customer Love team.
Get a closer look. Schedule a demo of Admiral’s Paywall and Subscription solution.
