The shop sells a wide variety of products from books, games and coffee mugs to the more exotic and expensive, such as artwork and even electric bikes. NZZ offers three models of the latter, which sell for the equivalent of between 3,600 and nearly 4,075 euros.

But back to that paywall. The 242-year-old, German-language news publisher is well regarded for their high-quality, trusted journalism, and requiring users to register became a top priority for them several years ago. For the past few years, NZZ has been running a number of tests and experiments where different readers get different subscription journeys based on their initial behaviour on the site after they've registered.

As with the experiments themselves, there have been ongoing developments internally.

For example, initially, the testing was largely done and owned by NZZ's marketing department, but expanded to include staff from editorial, from product, data and technology. Then the pandemic hit in 2020, which forced further changes.
'We had to discover our baseline again'
"In order to meaningfully move this forward, and create experiences that would positively affect our readers, we had to figure a way to work together,” NZZ’s Nashua Gallagher told participants at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in Oslo.

Gallagher is Head of Customer Journey Management at NZZ, and previously worked at the FT and The Economist.

"We focused on audience habits," she said. "We realised that it didn’t really...